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#5737·Vincent Brunsch, 14 days ago·AI-assistedI 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.
… without awareness that one is dreaming.
I can be unaware that I’m dreaming but still be aware of the dream itself. Just like I can be unaware that someone’s utterances are lies but still aware of their utterances. The word ‘aware’ has more to do with knowledge here than with consciousness.