Consciousness and Dreaming Mind: Mapping the Uncharted Territory of Thinking in Dreams

The dream world represents an alternate state of consciousness occurring during sleeping. Investigations of features existing in the dreaming state of consciousness can offer fascinating insights into individuals’ nocturnal mental lives along with the scientific contradictions. The readers have an opportunity for an inside look into the inspirations that lead one researcher to address the contradictions in dream research and the development of the ideas that served as undergirding the subsequent research of nocturnal subjective experiences reported in dream narratives. Alongside, the reader can see how scientific discoveries are made. In this book, the author traces research into one of the most scientifically denied features of dreaming consciousness – the thinking abilities of non-lucid dreamers. Contrary to explanations provided by cognitive neuroscientists, notably that deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex indicates that non-lucid dreamers are incapable of self-generated thought (including executive skills and metacognitive monitoring), the phenomenological findings presented here reveal the wide range of dreamers’ sophisticated thought processes. Granted, these thought processes come to existence if and when dreamers find themselves in specific condition during which they realize that they might want to attempt to change their current experience. Despite attempts to integrate phenomenological and neuroimaging findings focused on non-lucid dreamers’ dreaming state of consciousness, these efforts will remain incomplete if researchers do not recognize the existence of dreamers’ self-generated thought processes. In the absence of this recognition, prospects for new discoveries will have only limited potential because the predominant deficiency viewpoint clearly guides many current research efforts. Yet, the non-lucid dreamers can become engaged in their dreams as active agents and, in a developmental manner, might continue to use their executive skills. Hence, the premises, explanations, and predictions suggesting the existence of deactivated executive function need to be re-examined. In this book entitled Consciousness and Dreaming Mind: Mapping the Uncharted Territory of Thinking in Dreams, the author offers evidence including taxonomy of executive function processes and findings about volition and metacognitive monitoring in non-lucid dreaming state of consciousness. To facilitate a change in the scientific paradigm, these phenomenological findings are paramount. The author also asserts a much-needed shift in hopes that it might lead researchers and theorists to acknowledge non-lucid dreamers’ capacity, in specific condition, to engage in self-generated thinking.