False Awakenings and True Slumbers

Who could have imagined Eugene Aserinsky's discovery in 1953? While the destitute University of Chicago graduate student observed his eight-year-old son's sleep pattern, he detected a remarkably "jerky," paradoxical-seeming movement of the eyes, later called rapid eye movement (REM). Like divining rods, Aserinsky utilized the electrooculogram (EOG) and then electroencephalograph (EEG) to decode REM's uniquely mysterious and hitherto night-shrouded processes. And who could dream up the stream of research on consciousness catalyzed by such a discovery? 

In just 30 years, by the early 1980s, we cut to LaBerge, a Stanford scientist working from his sleep lab, making another discovery. From within the sleeping subject's lucid dream state, clearly encoded messages are conveyed to the researcher. Following a pre-determined protocol, the lucid dreamer demonstrates intentionality by making deliberate horizontal eye movements observable to the wakeful researcher. First, we knocked on the door—then the knock was returned. The dreamer, still within the dream space, was seemingly conscious - a space within a space. Consciousness, enfolded within itself, was now communicating from its inner sanctum to the extrinsic world participant. 

Where is consciousness in all of this? Is the outer world of waking consciousness the same as the inner, private one, both awake and asleep? Is one dependent on the other? Is this paradox of conscious-unconsciousness anything but a delusion? 

Although it has been discovered that dreaming may also occur in NREM, lucid dreaming strictly occurs during REM. Jeff Warren's Head Trip is a captivating account of the culture and research of lucid dreaming. Cultivating lucid dreaming requires questioning one's basic assumptions regarding consciousness. Generating lucidity while in the dream state requires asking, "Am I dreaming?" LaBerge advises his students to ask the same question regularly when awake. This fortifies and habituates the mind to the dialectic inquiry process - crucial when under the intoxicating influence of one's dream world. A synchrony of inquiry from within the dream and parallel wake state is required.

LaBerge states that the schemas and cognitive models utilized to construct self-identity and the world around us play out in our dream life, except without the sensory inputs of the system, as these are minimal during sleep. In waking life, our "bottom-up processes," the data inputs from our sensory, interoceptive, and proprioceptive faculties, send messages "up" to the thalamus, the brain's sensory processing station, to inform and, in effect, boundary cognition. The neocortex receiving such inputs acts in a feedback loop by editing, coalescing, computing, and generating the cognitive modeling of ourselves and our world. In a "top-down" manner, it informs embodiment and directs behaviors. Since sensory data is nominal in sleep, the mind is less boundaried and wanders in a cognitively malleable world, merging into hybrid ideas, fantasies, and concepts, often becoming or projecting a phantasmagoria. Therefore, testing our fixed assumptions by day in asking, "Am I dreaming?" is a way of instilling a sense of psychological porosity and priming the mind for lucid dreaming. 

To complicate things further, occasionally, a dreamer will experience a false awakening. How can something be an awakening and false? Hence the contortions of consciousness. Common for lucid dreamers, Warren describes his own false awakening, where he seemingly woke up in his dream, walked around his bedroom, and observed his partner sleeping. The brain created a compelling, "seamless" cognitive representation of his waking reality. Cognitive dream representations are so convincing that lucid dreamers have concocted dream tests to determine the ontological status of their experience. David Chalmers' qualia, subjective tone, or felt sense of experience, is not a guiding marker in the case of false awakening. Could my dream cognitions, their attractive verisimilitude of a wakeful-dimension-participant Socrates, be projecting the reality of my writing to you? Are you, dear reader, dream-reading this? 

Christof Koch, who heralded the advent of consciousness studies along with Francis Crick in their 1992 Scientific American article, doubles down almost 20 years later on his thesis that consciousness results from neuronal coalitions. In his 2010 article, "Dream States: A Peak into Consciousness," Koch points out that brain disorder research illustrates that no single brain region is responsible for dreaming. For Koch, synaptic activity, the networks assembled, and their computational outputs result in consciousness. Our brain receives data and reads musical notation like musicians to an orchestra who, in their assemblage, play the Mozart of Consciousness. Koch says, "Thus dreaming supports the old brain in a vat idea." For Koch and the school of internal phenomenologists, a school of neurophilosophy, the brain alone generates consciousness. Consciousness is neither a fundamental substrate nor co-constructed by the individual through interpersonal relationships and the environment. The brain-consciousness from its vat home can simulate all. 

If a brain in a vat, or its equivalent dream-vat, is constructing a reality, where does it receive the material and data to conceive that simulated reality? And how is that data imbued with its distinctive subjective style (qualia)? Indeed, this must point to the requirement of embodied brain experience. 

In the fantastically ordinary neurophilosophical universe where brains are born in vats and remain in their vats, wouldn't lucid dreaming and passive dreaming, and waking and sleeping, merge into an interminable dimensionless void?