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#5690·Dennis Hackethal, 6 days agoWe have different degrees of awareness during different dreams, I agree. But we’re aware of them. With higher critical ability, we plausibly get lucid dreaming – lower instead means passive observation.
It’s like watching a movie. I have no control over what happens in the movie, still I’m consciously aware of it. I could instead play a video game, where I do have some control over what happens, and which arguably requires more of a critical attitude. I don’t see how this refutes my stance.
I don’t think the movie/video-game analogy captures what I find interesting about dreaming here, because it seems to put phenomenal awareness, meta-awareness and control on a single scale of “critical ability”.
These capacities can dissociate: In an ordinary non-lucid dream there can already be vivid phenomenal experience without awareness that one is dreaming. Lucidity adds that meta-awareness, but does not necessarily add control (lucid dreams can themselves occur with or without substantial control over what happens).
So rather than a simple progression from passive/uncritical to active/critical, dreaming seems to give us different combinations of phenomenal experience, meta-awareness and control.
That is precisely why I think it provides some evidence that phenomenal experience is not tightly bound to the other capacities.