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Psychological and Philosophical Views of Dreaming

In certain stages of sleep, dreams occur involuntarily in the mind and consist of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations. With humans spending around two hours of dreaming each night, each dream is known to last for five to twenty minutes, but may also last longer.

REM

Rapid eye movement (REM) is the sleeping stage where most dreams occur. REM occurs for 90 minutes after falling asleep when an individual’s eyes move rapidly in various directions without sending visual information to the brain. In this stage, the brain is more active, therefore having vivid dreams. These are scientific methods that help us determine when dreams take place, but it doesn’t help us differentiate the brain’s activity between hallucinations and dreaming.

Historically, it was believed that human dreams have served as a means for people in the pre-classical era as well as some non-literate populations in modern times to reveal truths gleaned during sleep from gods or other external entities.

Views

Psychology & Neuroscientists

In psychology, dreaming is not conscious and regarded as a state of altered consciousness. Psychologists categorize consciousness as the ability to be aware of things externally. According to Darwin, dreams must fulfill some biological requirement, be beneficial to natural selection, or never negatively impact fitness.When individuals dream, they’re more aware of their internal world, dealing with sensory, perceptual, and emotional experiences. Therefore, dreams are not part of the everyday life that one would experience outside of sleep. Using these differences between internal and external sensation, psychologists stated, “the psyche has a diurnal side which we call consciousness, so it has a nocturnal side: the unconscious psychic activity which we apprehend as dreamlike fantasy [are] fragments of involuntary psychic activity just conscious enough to be reproducible in the waking state”. This proclaims that dreaming and consciousness are different because of internal and external experiences and sensations.

Firestein writes, “Imagine being awarded a prize for what you don’t know: Here’s some money for what you don’t know. Everyone else in the world is getting paid for what they know–or claim to know. But scientists get rewarded for their ignorance”. Advancements in neuroscience and dream research make it difficult to differentiate between hallucinations and dreaming, but is determined by psychologists that consciousness and dreaming can be put on a continuum. Even through difficulty, it’s an active research of scientists continuously searching. Institutions have been supportive of analyzing dreams, and grant proposals have supported research. Over the past 15 years, there have been over 50 grant awards and published studies related to dreams and eight types of research linking dreams with consciousness. Dream research will be difficult to study from a second perspective. Psychologists don’t have direct access and tools to access the dreams since it takes place in another’s mind, someone who cannot communicate with the psychologist until they wake and risk forgetting their dream.

Philosophers

To philosophers, dreaming and waking are similar. Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist, focused on dream studies with direction towards interpreting them, not with an explanation as to why humans dream. He wrote that dreams "serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up. Dreams are the GUARDIANS of sleep and not its disturbers."

Another neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher, Antti Revonsuo, theorizes that “dreaming is an unusually rare example of ‘pure’ consciousness, being as it is devoid of ongoing perceptual input”, implying that dreaming is an example of hallucinations since it’s not influenced by other perceptions, but on an individual’s encountered conscious experiences. He includes, when dreaming there are attributions encouraging that dreaming is a form of consciousness–perceptual experiences, seeing color, and feeling pain–stating,“dreams are too well constructed of physiological processes”. Many other philosophers agree that dreams are hallucinations. They claim that dreams are not part of unconsciousness but are categorized as waking perception because they “seemingly put us in contact with mind-independent objects, yet no such object is actually being perceived”.

Daniel C. Dennet, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and writer developed a theory called the cassette theory. Stated, there are two processes; one is responsible for the composition of dream narratives during sleep and another is responsible for recalling the dream awakening. Researchers cannot test this theory to determine if dreams are experiences or hallucinations because there is no shift in brain activity when it occurs. It has been difficult to differentiate between dreams and hallucinations because one who hallucinated may not be able to figure out what is and isn’t real for several minutes, posing a risk of inaccuracy.