How Can the Protoconsciousness Hypothesis Contribute to Philosophical Theories of Consciousness and the Self?

In his William James lectures on Dream Consciousness, Allan Hobson provides a rich and multi-faceted introduction to state-of-the-art findings from sleep and dream research, as well as an overview of his own wide-ranging contributions to this field. It is no exaggeration to say that his work has shaped contemporary theories of sleep and dreaming like no other. But he has done even more: by showing how his work on dreaming fits into broader theories of consciousness (Hobson et al. 2000) and psychotic wake states (Hobson 1999), he has repeatedly emphasized its implications for the theoretical understanding of consciousness itself. His long-standing willingness to connect the fields of sleep a…

On the importance of 19th century dream research: Progress in dream research between Aristotle’s work on dreaming and the discovery of REM sleep

Minding the dream self: Perspectives from the analysis of self-experience in dreams

AbstractCan ancient art of memory (AAOM) principles explain the function of dreaming? The analysis of self-experience in dreams suggests that the answer is no: The phenomenal dream self lacks certain dimensions that are crucial for the efficacy of AAOM in wakefulness. However, the comparison between dreams and AAOM may be fruitful by suggesting new perspectives for the study of lucid dreaming as well an altered perspective on the efficacy of AAOM itself.

Measuring consciousness in dreams: the lucidity and consciousness in dreams scale.

In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its neural correlates during sleep. However, the precise differences between lucid and non-lucid dreams remain poorly understood. The construction of the Lucidity and Consciousness in Dreams scale (LuCiD) was based on theoretical considerations and empirical observations. Exploratory factor analysis of the da…

How to integrate dreaming into a general theory of consciousness—A critical review of existing positions and suggestions for future research

In this paper, we address the different ways in which dream research can contribute to interdisciplinary consciousness research. As a second global state of consciousness aside from wakefulness, dreaming is an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness. However, programmatic suggestions for integrating dreaming into broader theories of consciousness, for instance by regarding dreams as a model system of standard or pathological wake states, have not yielded straightforward results. We review existing proposals for using dreaming as a model system, taking into account concerns about the concept of modeling and the adequacy and practical feasibility of dreaming as a mod…