Dream Experience - Phenomenology meets Cognitive Neuroscience

Sammanfattning: This treatise examines what I call the ‘traditional view’ on the phenomenology of dreaming. According to this view, dreams are experienced in more or less the same way as waking reality – that is, our experience of “being-in-the-dream” is very much like our experience of “being-in-the-world”. The traditional view will be examined from three different standpoints: phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience. It will be shown that the traditional view generates a number of problems. These problems have to do with dream delusion (the fact that the dreamer typically does not seem to have any insight into the fact that he is dreaming), dream narration (the fact that dream experience often seems narratively ordered, conveying a unitary “world” consisting of meaningful objects), dream agency (the fact that the dreamer seems to be able to interact with the illusory objects in his dream), and dream symbolism (the fact that dreams sometimes seem to have a “deeper”, symbolic meaning). A large portion of this treatise will be devoted to the solution of these problems in the form of speculative accounts based on theory and data coming from cognitive science and neuroscience.