Sleep and Consciousness
Lucid Dreaming: The Maximum Self-reflectiveness?
Most of the way we experience consciousness in sleep is in the form of dreams. And most of the dreams that we recall come from REM sleep. This time of sleep has been called paradoxical because as noted we're paralyzed yet our physiology is so juiced. We're in this alternative reality in every way, shape and form. But there are many forms of dreams which societies have identified over the years. As my topic is consciousness in sleep I will now turn to one of these intensified REM forms called lucid dreams.
This hyper-REM phenomenon is significantly more of whatever REM is. Lucid dreaming is when you know you're dreaming while you're dreaming. You're sound asleep and dreaming believing that the dream is reality when for a variety of reasons you recognize it is a dream and that you are in fact asleep. Typically people react initially with a sense of wonder and fun. They quickly realize that they can do in a dream all these things they could not do while awake. However this initial excitement also often wakes them up. Because you get so excited you can't stay asleep. There are limits to being conscious while you're unconscious.
There are various ways to conceptualize lucid dreaming. One is in terms of the relative self-reflectiveness that the attainment of such a state of consciousness might imply. Canadians Alan Moffitt and colleagues developed a scale measuring self-reflectiveness based on the therapeutic work of Ernest Rossi. In it they consider degrees of self-reflectiveness in dreams. The classic position has been that in most dreams we are fairly unself-reflective or critical of our dream surroundings/events/characters. For instance, I recall one of my students telling me that he knows he's dreaming a lot. I asked, "how do you figure that out?" He replied, "Well, I know if I'm in an airport in a dream and my car is there and it's blue, and I know my car's not blue. I know my car's purple. Ergo, it must be a dream. " I recall thinking to myself, if that was me in the dream and there was a purple car instead of a blue one, I'd think "oh well, something must have changed and I now have a purple car". I'd just drift along accepting whatever came my way. In contrast this student is very critical in his attitude in waking and that translates into dreaming thus he is often able to identify that he is dreaming. That degree of reflectiveness, or critical attitude, is actually quite rare.
At the lowest level this self-reflectiveness scale begins with "The dreamer is not in the dream". Researchers have found that this is one of the first experiences of dreaming that children have. It takes quite a while until they begin to move to the next stage of thinking abilities when they can begin to construct the self enough to have a self in the dream. One day when I was telling my seven year old boy my dream he looked at me with an irritated expression. I asked him, "What's wrong?" He said, "How come you get to be in your dreams, and I don't?" I remember thinking that was a fairly sophisticated observation. Without explaining that he has cognitive limitations, I assured him that eventually he would be there and of course he is now fully in his dreams. Although occasionally young children are in their dreams as active characters more often than not they are watching, or they have a sense of it happening out there somewhere. A self in ones dream is a developmental benchmark.
The midway point on the scale is when the dreamer becomes completely involved in the dream. This is where many of us remain, completely absorbed in the dream so much so that if it is a nightmare we are so relieved when we finally awaken. Eventually we have some experience of some kind of reflective activity like thinking about an idea. So in the dream we might mutter to our dream selves, "This isn't quite right." Particularly as we utilize the highest form of logical thought called, formal operations. The reality is that only about half the time do we actually end up doing thinking at this higher level even when awake!
At one of the higher levels on this scale the dreamer has multiple levels of awareness simultaneously participating and observing. This would be a dream where you're watching yourself doing something and you're in it and out of it at the same time. But it still feels real. Another example would be a false awakening dream. In it you dream that you wake up, and then you really wake up and realize that you dreamt you woke up. Did you ever do that two or three times in a row? You know you dream you wake up, and then you dream you wake.. and then, and then, and then....after all "waking up" can get scary? I recall doing it once four times in a row, and I was getting pretty scared thinking, "what's real and what's not?" Another example of the slipperiness of reality that these dream experiences can subject us to is the dream where you were so sure it was real that you comment on it as though it were real to a friend. They look at you like you're crazy and only then do you realize in embarrassment that "I dreamt it!"
These things get very slippery. What's dreaming and what's not dreaming? What's real and what's not real? It can get quite confusing. A colleague of mine has a great slide that he uses in his presentations of a huge toilet with a little person standing there looking at it! It illustrates the dream where you are telling yourself, "it's OK, you're awake you can pee!" when another part of you replies, "No. You're asleep. Don't go!" Did you ever lose that argument?
At the highest level of Moffitt and colleagues scale the dreamer consciously reflects on the fact that he or she is dreaming. This is the lucid dream. It is the experience of, "Hey, wait a minute, this is a dream. That's why there's a tin can growing out of that guy's head or that's why I can fly like superman!" Although for these dream researchers that is the highest level of self-reflectiveness, I'm going to argue it's the basement of the potential of consciousness in sleep. And in fact, the potential of consciousness in the twenty-four hour cycle.