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Philosophy Compass 8/11 (2013): 1041–1053, 10.1111/phc3.12082
Self-Representation and Perspectives in Dreams
Melanie Rosen and John Sutton*
Macquarie University
Abstract
Integrative and naturalistic philosophy of mind can both learn from and contribute to the contempo-
rary cognitive sciences of dreaming. Two related phenomena concerning self-representation in dreams
demonstrate the need to bring disparate fields together. In most dreams, the protagonist or dream self
who experiences and actively participates in dream events is or represents the dreamer: but in an
intriguing minority of cases, self-representation in dreams is displaced, disrupted, or even absent.
Working from dream reports in established databanks, we examine two key forms of polymorphism
of self-representation: dreams (or dream episodes) in which I take an external visuospatial perspective
on myself, and those in which I take someone else’s perspective on events. In remembering my past
experiences or imagining future or possible experiences when awake, I sometimes see myself from
an external or ‘observer’perspective. By relating the issue of perspective in dreams to established
research traditions in the study of memory and imagery, and noting the flexibility of perspective in
dreams, we identify new lines of enquiry. In other dreams, the dreamer does not appear to figure at
all, and the first person perspective on dream events is occupied by someone else, some other person
or character. We call these puzzling cases ‘vicarious dreams’and assess some potential ways to make
sense of them. Questions about self-representation and perspectives in dreams are intriguing in their
own right and pose empirical and conceptual problems about the nature of self-representation with
implications beyond the case of dreaming.
1. Introduction
What can we learn about the self by considering dreams? Our experiences during sleep, or
our more occasional recollections and reports of those experiences, offer us significant insight
into the operations of the mind in general. Philosophers continue to worry subtly at the
metaphysical and epistemological problems addressed by Descartes’dream argument
(Valberg 2007), and even whether dreams really are experiences during sleep at all (Malcolm
1959; Dennett 1976; Child 2007). But the new sciences of dreaming, in the wake of the
discovery of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and of the cognitive revolution, have opened
up both entirely new concerns and distinctive twists on older philosophical topics
(Churchland 1988; Revonsuo 1995; Flanagan 2000; Clark 2005; Windt & Metzinger
2007; Sutton 2009; Windt & Noreika 2011). Theories of consciousness, metacognition,
psychophysical reduction, and embodied cognition, to mention just a few examples, can
be both informed and constrained by the expanding array of psychological and
neurocognitive approaches within dream science (Solms 1997; Foulkes 1999; Hobson,
Pace-Schott & Stickgold 2000; Domhoff 2003; Schwartz et al. 2005; Nir & Tononi 2010;
Valli 2011).
In this paper, we pick out two related, highly specific, and (we think) deeply puzzling
dream phenomena which, in addition to their intrinsic interest, also exemplify the possibil-
ities for philosophical engagement with the cognitive sciences. These phenomena involve
the surprisingly complex ways in which we represent ourselves in dreams and experience
dream events from a first-person perspective –although as we’ll see these are not exactly
© 2013 The Authors
Philosophy Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
equivalent. While these topics clearly connect back to traditional philosophical issues, our
methodological angle here is a strongly integrative form of naturalism, in which we seek
to put distinct and somewhat disconnected parts of the cognitive sciences into contact. This
philosophical strategy involves direct interactive engagement with the relevant sciences,
seeking mutual coevolution of theory and evidence, as is standard in philosophy of biology
or philosophy of neuroscience (Griffiths & Sterelny, 1999; Craver 2007). In the philosophy
of psychology, such work can function as a catalyst, bringing together disparate fields of
enquiry within the relevant sciences (compare Sutton 2009, or for the case of emotion,
Griffiths 1998 and Colombetti 2013). This catalyst function is increasingly important,
because of the daunting (sub-)disciplinary specialization of contemporary sciences. It can
be required not only to put into contact research programs across distinctive levels which
might be mutually informative, such as cognitive psychology and molecular neuroscience
but also across different neurocognitive domains. This latter kind of integration is specifically
relevant in the current case, because certain processes of self-representation in dreams may
overlap with those involved in some forms of remembering and imagining.
Dreaming’s similarities to and differences from perception, imagination, and memory
respectively have been the subject of discussion and controversy in both philosophy and
science (Foulkes 1999; Sosa 2005; Horton, Moulin & Conway 2009; Ichikawa 2009; Windt
2010; Horton 2011). Dreaming involves a sharp bidirectional break in memory, such that
our dream selves seem to be significantly disconnected: typically, we can neither reliably
access our own autobiographical memories while dreaming nor clearly recollect our dreams
on waking. This suggests that dreams and memory at least are firmly dissociated. But since
our common sense categories for psychological processes need not map neatly on to the
underlying mechanisms, there may also be overlaps and interactions across apparently distinct
domains of cognition. In this paper, addressing some of the ways in which self and body are
represented in dreams, we point to some specific and puzzling phenomena, which demand
treatment using pooled theoretical resources from different cognitive domains as well as
different disciplines.
Consider these two dream reports, gathered in controlled studies amongst large numbers
of recollected dreams:
I was in a sort of South American country, two hundred years ago, I was mounting a horse: with me
there were two more persons riding a horse, and other people on foot. We were pursuing a man,
who was myself, we were pursuing him because he had some money, and I was observing the
whole scene. (Cicogna & Bosinelli 2001, p.32)
I was walking (apparently it was me) in a suburban area, past a house whose yard was about one and
a half meters above the street level. In the yard a girl I know from medical school was leading a big
bearlike dog. I was leading a dog that actually was my female classmate from medical school. The
girl suddenly attacked the bear-dog and they fought. The person in the dream that so far had been
me, now was suddenly my classmate J. Somehow I became (physically) detached from myself and I
noticed that I was not me but him. This was accompanied by a funny feeling. (Revonsuo, 2005,
pp.213–4)
These reports fit a general picture of typical dreams as involving more or less bizarre
narrative sequences. In the sciences of dreaming, the ‘bizarreness’of dream reports is often
analyzed into three distinct forms. The most common form of bizarreness is incongruity or
mismatch of character, event, or setting, followed by vagueness or uncertainty, while full-
scale discontinuity of narrative sequence is the least common (Stickgold & Hobson 1994;
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Flanagan 2000, pp.147–8; Revonsuo & Tarkko 2002): There is, however, ongoing disagree-
ment on precisely how to measure bizarreness and on its prevalence in all of our dreams as
opposed to those which are most memorable (Domhoff 2003; Sutton 2009, pp.531–2;
Colace 2010; Rosen 2012, ch.2).
But the bizarreness in these two reports has the notable extra feature that it stretches to
touch the self, which is here variously shifting, doubled, observing, transformed, and de-
tached. Such disruptions are not typical in most people’s dreams, for sure. In by far the
majority of dream experiences, as Revonsuo puts it, ‘the self in the dream is the character
who represents the dreamer’and ‘is positioned in the center of the dream world’such that
‘the dream setting and events are seen and experienced from his or her point of view’
(2005, p.207). Even if, as David Foulkes’developmental studies suggest, it takes some time
and some cognitive sophistication before the self regularly appears as an active character in
extended dream narratives (Foulkes 1990, 1999), this does typically occur in the bulk of adult
dreams. In another large-scale study, Strauch and Meier found that ‘the Dream Self appears
in nearly every dream’, and for the most part (in 71% of dream reports) as a clear and active
participant in each person’s own dream: but in addition to the 11% of cases in which the
dreamer is present but inactive, there were also some 18% of dream reports in which the
dreamer was either entirely uninvolved or explicitly absent (1996, pp.114–5). Despite meth-
odological challenges in characterizing and coding different ways in which self-representa-
tion in dreams might diverge from the standard case, various studies show that such
divergence occurs in a sizeable minority of dreams. Our project here is to describe, probe,
and assess the implications of two of its primary forms. Revonsuo notes the theoretical
significance of the fact that the dream self ‘is not present in every single dream’, such that
there is a simulated ‘world of subjective experiences devoid of an explicit representation of
the self’(2005, p.209). Here, we examine cases in which the self is displaced as well as miss-
ing. Even within the study of self-representation in dreams, one can ask a range of other live
questions, relating for example to our understandings of our own and others’character and
psychology in dreams, to the mechanisms of identification and misidentification in dreams
and in delusions, and to the particular range of emotional experiences in dreaming (Foulkes
et al. 1991; McNamara, McLaren & Durso 2007; Gerrans 2012). We focus on two of a
number of possible forms of ‘polymorphism of Self’in dreams (Occhionero & Cicogna
2011, p.1009): dreams (or dream episodes) in which I take an external visuospatial perspec-
tive on myself, and those in which I take someone else’s perspective. These phenomena not
only demand explanation in their own right but also pose empirical and conceptual problems
about the nature of self-representation, which may have implications beyond dreaming.
2. Perspective in Dreams
In the first dream report quoted above, involving a pursuit in South America, the dreamer is
both the pursuer and the pursued, either sequentially or simultaneously. But he is also
‘observing the whole scene’, including himself. Likewise, in another report from the same
databank of 800 laboratory dreams, ‘I was seeing my body lying on the bed, and it was
completely white, better “beige”. I was able to see myself lying on that bed …’ (Cicogna
& Bosinelli 2001, p.31). These are cases in which there is a clear self-representation in the
dream, and in which the dreamer is a character, but the visual or visuospatial perspective
of the dream experience does not coincide with what would be the perspective of the self
or the protagonist in the dream.
There are, we suggest, three key features of this kind of dream in which the dreamer
reports observing himself or herself; though each of these features can probably vary
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independently, they do often coincide. Firstly, the dreamer reports seeing his or her own
body. Secondly, that body is immediately and unreflectively taken to be the dreamer, the
dream self or the character representing the dreamer: there is no inference, uncertainty, or
further question about the identity of that observed character. Thirdly, there is a definite
visual or visuospatial perspective from which this observation occurs: this contrasts with cases
in which dream events are experienced from no visual or visuospatial perspective at all. We
suspect that our second initial report, in which the dreamer says that ‘somehow I became
(physically) detached from myself and I noticed that I was not me but him’, is a case of the
latter, distinct kind, accompanied as it was by ‘a funny feeling’.
In identifying these features of what we suggest are an important, if relatively rare type of
dream experience, we are explicitly guided by our understanding of related phenomena in
memory and imagery, which have been extensively studied in cognitive psychology and
(increasingly) cognitive neuroscience. Take memory first. In remembering specific events
and experiences in my past, I may recall them from my original vantage-point, seeing the
remembered scene as through my own eyes, with what appears to be my original field of
view; or I may recall them from an external vantage-point, such that I see myself in the
remembered scene, while adopting (now) an observer’s point of view. After first being noted
by Freud and others in the 1890s, this distinction between ‘field’and ‘observer’modes of
remembering has become a popular topic in mainstream cognitive psychology, since Nigro
and Neisser’sinfluential paper (1983) and a systematic general renewal of interest in episodic
and autobiographical memory. Among an array of robust findings, psychologists have shown
that, in general, memories retrieved from an ‘own-eyes’or field perspective are more
common (especially for more recent events) and generally contain more information on
emotional and other subjective states than memories recalled from an observer perspective
(Berntsen & Rubin 2006; Rice & Rubin 2009). There are parallel phenomena in the case
of imagery. In imagining a possible or future action or event, for example, I can visualize
it either from my own point of view, or as if I am observing myself in action. There is solid
evidence that the perspective from which I imagine or tend to imagine future actions can
have definite and lasting effects on cognition, emotion, and action (Libby & Eibach 2011).
Philosophers have asked whether there can in fact be genuine memories in cases where
past events are recalled from an external perspective that diverges from that of the agent’s
perceptual experience at the time (Vendler 1979; Debus 2007; Sutton 2010). But this
distinction between field (internal) and observer (external) perspectives in remembering
and imagining has also been studied intensively in applied domains of considerable
independent interest. In the psychology of sport and movement, for example, practices of
visualization among elite athletes and dancers are investigated to identify any differential
effects of imagining one’s expert performances from the inside or as an observer (Morris &
Spittle 2012). Though it may seem natural to think that a field visuospatial perspective in
imagery would tap and promote kinesthetic processes more effectively, in fact research
suggests that external or observer perspectives may be more useful for certain kinds of
movement task: the challenge of integrating kinesthetic sensation, 1
st
-person or field visual
perspectives, and the experience of watching one’s own moving body from the outside is
faced regularly for elite sportspeople in using video analysis of their performance (Callow
& Hardy 2004; Sutton 2012). In clinical psychology, in turn, there are ongoing discussions
on the point of view from which traumatic experiences are recalled or relived. In general,
remembering experiences from an observer perspective involves less detail on emotions
and bodily sensations. This leads some clinicians and psychologists to argue that the adoption
of an observer perspective in remembering trauma is a defense mechanism associated with
ongoing or increasing negative psychological symptoms, whereas the adoption of a field
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perspective can ward off or diminish such symptoms (McIsaac & Eich 2004; Kenny et al.
2009). Others see the abstraction, which external perspectives may bring as potentially
beneficial, and argue that external perspectives can scaffold our capacity to consider different
evaluative and emotional perspectives on our own past (Mackenzie 2008; Goldie 2012).
Below, we focus in on a specific issue arising in these established research traditions on
perspective in memory and imagery, to apply back to the case of dreams. But first, we under-
line the point that the availability of distinct perspectives appears to operate in many of the
same ways across all these domains. As in memory, dream experiences in which an external
or observer perspective is adopted may well be less common, but do occur in a significant
minority of cases (Foulkes & Kerr 1994; Soper, Milford & Rosenthal 1994; Soper 1999).
Even though while dreaming we can rarely access anything like our full autobiographical
narrative, so that essential features of memory are not available in dreams, it is notable that
these same mechanisms of visuospatial perspective-taking can operate in common across
the domains. This can be harder to recognize because some scientific analyses of dream
reports do not clearly acknowledge the existence of dreams experienced from an observer
perspective. Strauch and Meier (1996) code ‘participation of the dreamer’under the
categories of ‘dreamer active’,‘dreamer inactive’,‘dreamer uninvolved’,or‘no dream self’.
Dreaming from an external or observer perspective does not quite map on to any of these
categories, which do not distinguish the agency of the dream character from the perspective
from which the dream events are experienced. Likewise, in a more fine-grained scheme
derived from the large Italian sample, Occhionero and colleagues code some reports as
including a ‘representation of self as a passive observer of the dream events’; but their use
of the term ‘observer’here is potentially misleading, since by this, they mean not what
memory researchers call an observer perspective, but a dream from a standard field perspec-
tive in which the dream self is inactive (‘I was at a service station and I was observing this
scene …’). In contrast, they classify the case in which the dreamer reports seeing himself
or herself lying on the bed under the category of a ‘total or partial Self body image’
(Occhionero & Cicogna 2011, p.5; compare Occhionero et al. 2005, pp.79–80): this charac-
terization misses the key extra fact that this ‘Self body image’is experienced and observed
from outside, from an external vantage-point.
Thefactthattheliteratureonfield and observer perspectives in memory and imagery
is not explicitly discussed in contemporary research on self-representation in dreams is
both puzzling and problematic. In the 1980s, there was a lively research focus on links
between memory, dreams, imagery, and out-of-body experiences (OBEs), in which
people see their own body from an external perspective. Susan Blackmore’sinitial
hypothesis that people who report more regular OBEs would also remember their past
more often from an external or observer perspective turned out to be unsupported. But
those people did report adopting observer perspectives in their dreams more often than
others, and were able to switch between internal and external perspectives in memory
and imagery more easily (Blackmore 1987, 1988; compare Irwin 1986). But these earlier
connections between dreaming and OBEs, on the one hand, and memory and imagery,
on the other hand, have not been studied even in the recent dramatic revival of research
on OBEs, as we now explain.
Out-of-body experiences are one of a range of autoscopic phenomena, in which one
‘sees oneself’as if from the outside. The pathological waking conditions in this domain
include not only OBEs but also cases in which people see a duplicate or double of their
own body, while retaining their own standard first-person perspective on that doubled
body (an ‘autoscopic hallucination’)(Brugger2002;Blanke&Mohr2005;Mishara
2010). OBEs, previously a focus of some scepticism among scientists, have recently
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turned out to be linked to quite specificneurologicaldisturbances,andtobeopento
experimental induction (Blanke & Metzinger 2009). But these researchers have not
incorporated observer perspectives in memory and imagery into their classificatory
schemes. We suggest that the adoption of external perspectives in remembering,
imagining, and dreaming temporarily replicates certain features of OBEs, with which
it is likely to share certain neurocognitive mechanisms. A link between dreaming in
general and OBEs has been drawn by both Metzinger (2004, 2005) and Occhionero
and Cicogna (2011), and there is ongoing investigation into possible neurocognitive
commonalities with regard to vestibular function and the disintegration of standard
waking mechanisms for binding multisensory information, leading to an usually partial
or ‘polymorphous representation of body image’(Occhionero & Cicogna 2011,
p.1013). The link back to the ordinary temporary adoption of external perspectives in
memory and imagery has not been made by these authors, but, we suggest, recollection
from an observer perspective is another full-scale form of autoscopy. By explicitly noting
and thematizing the existence of observer perspectives in both memory and dreams,
researchers can now focus on psychological and neural links between both sets of
ordinary psychological phenomena and the rarer cases of OBEs.
We believe that both the prevalence and the significance of flexibility or fluidity in
visuospatial perspective-taking, which may be particularly striking in dreams, have been
underestimated in a number of domains. Perhaps internal or field perspectives are the
‘default’mode (Morris & Spittle 2012), and perhaps it will turn out that in the case
of memory at least, they are more likely than observer perspectives to arise when we
are remembering accurately. But recent evidence suggests that external or observer
perspectives in memory may also turn out be relatively common, diverse, and functional
(Rice & Rubin 2009, 2011). So in dreams too, the availability of external perspectives
may signal the flexibility of our self-representational capacities, rather than their
disruption, incompleteness, and weakness (Occhionero 2004). To note just two lines
for inquiry, which could draw on established methods elsewhere in psychology, it
would be useful to know if the emotions generally associated with distinctive perspec-
tives in memory also typically accompany those perspectives in dreams and to get a
better grip on the role of perspective in the way we represent our own movements
through space both in waking and dreaming cognition (Schönhammer 2005; Cook
2011; Tversky 2011).
3. Vicarious Dreams
In documenting a variety of ways in which ‘the self’can be represented in dreams,
Occhionero and Cicogna note that the dream self can also be experienced ‘either by
way of embodiment-in or identification-with other characters or even objects’(2011,
p.1013). Occasionally, on waking, the dreamer remembers having a dream in which
the protagonist –the character or agent in the dream from whose viewpoint the dream
events were experienced –was not the dreamer herself. Revonsuo’s dream database
includes the following report from a 25-year-old, blond female student:
It’s the Second World War and I am a dark-haired, strongly built, Finnish male soldier. The
enemies are probably German …[Later in the same dream]: I could see myself in a mirror.
Now I was a blond, strongly built woman. (Revonsuo 2005, p.213)
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In a case from the Italian studies, the dreamer reports ‘a lot of beautiful actresses …
I’m transformed and become a famous actor’(Occhionero et al. 2005, p.80). In these
cases, the dreamers report a shift within the dream, either to or from being the
protagonist of their own dream. In other cases, the protagonist is not an embodied
person at all. ‘I was inside a giant photocopying machine. I knew I was inside this
machine, not as a physical human being but as an abstract entity, as a mind, so I
couldn’tseemyself’(Cicogna & Bosinelli 2001, p.32); another female student was ‘a
dog or some other animal’in the dream, and reported events experienced from the an-
imal’s point of view, ‘running in a dark forest with another animal, hunting for prey’
(Revonsuo 2005, p.214).
Each of these dream reports has its own unusual features. In some cases, perhaps
including the photocopy machine, the dream protagonist is still the dreamer, albeit
atypically located in some other kind of body. These are not cases of observer perspec-
tives, but simply of muted or incongruous forms of self-representation within otherwise
standard dream experience. But other cases, such as the woman dreaming as a dark-
haired male soldier, are arguably distinct again: these, we suggest, are vicarious dreams,
in which the holder of the first-person perspective in the dream is someone (or some-
thing) other than the dreamer. In vicarious dreams, the perspective of the dream is that
of one of the dream characters, the one we call the protagonist, but this protagonist does
not identify himself as the dreamer, and correlatively, the dreamer does not treat or
identify herself as the protagonist.
Vicarious dreams are rare, certainly. As we noted above, in most remembered dreams the
protagonist is, or is in some sense continuous with, the dreamer: this is true too in the cases of
dreaming from an external observer’s perspective discussed in Section 2 above. In those cases,
there is no doubt that the observed protagonist is still me. Vicarious dreams are unlike
observer perspective dreams and like standard dreams in that the events are experienced from
an ‘own-eyes’or field perspective, such that the first-person perspective is occupied by a
character in the dream. But they are unlike standard dreams in that the protagonist from
whose perspective the dream occurs is someone other than the dreamer. One of us (MR)
has had dream experiences in which the protagonist was a male engineer on a spaceship,
trying to prevent the ship from crashing into the earth, and in another case, an old man
having a heart attack. In addition to the cases described in the scientific literature, what we
are calling vicarious dreams have received some philosophical discussion. J.J. Valberg first
describes a more complex case, a dream in which the two characters are X and JV, but where
the first person perspective is occupied by X: ‘in the dream I am not JV but X (X is me)’,so
that ‘in the dream I am a human being other than the human being that I am’(2007, p.62). X
can interact with JV in the dream, refer to JV as ‘him’and observe JV from an external
perspective. If the protagonist feels pain and thinks ‘I am feeling pain’, Valberg suggests, ‘I’
refers to X rather than JV, whereas JV’s pain behavior is observed in the dream from an
external perspective. Valberg then introduces what we see as the paradigmatic vicarious
dream by noting that ‘JV need not have been in the dream at all’(p.63): in this case, the
protagonist X, from whose first person perspective the dream events are experienced, is still
someone other than Valberg the dreamer. In this case, the dreamer or the waking self is not
represented in the dream at all: the protagonist or subject of the dream, the one ‘at the centre
of the dream’(Valberg 2007, p.65) just is X (or the dark-haired Finnish soldier, or the famous
actor, or the running animal).
In waking life, Williams argues, I can imagine being Napoleon and looking over the
battlefield without this entailing either that Napoleon exists now, or that I might have been
Napoleon (1973, pp.42–45). So it seems from the examples we have given above that I can
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dream as Napoleon. This means not that in the dream my waking self has somehow been
transplanted into Napoleon’s body, or vice versa; rather, it means that the centered and
embodied (or dream-embodied) subject position of the dream protagonist, from whose
first-person perspective the dream events unfold, is occupied by Napoleon and not by me.
But the phenomenon of vicarious dreaming raises puzzles about ownership of experience,
self-representation, and self-reference. Who do the experiences belong to in such dreams,
the dreamer or the protagonist? Who exactly is the protagonist? And to whom does ‘I’refer
when, in the dream, Napoleon thinks or says ‘I see the battle’, or the dark-haired Finnish
soldier thinks ‘I see the Germans’? We work with the Napoleon case because it underlines
the implausibility of answering these questions by simply identifying the dream self, the
one occupying the first-person perspective in the dream, with the apparent thinker and
speaker. Napoleon does not now exist: even if he did it would be odd for him, that actual
person, to be thinking and speaking in dreams which my brain generates and hosts. But what
alternative approaches are available here? Shortly we examine some philosophical resources
developed to deal with the parallel cases in waking imagination, but first we examine three
other options. We do not offer a single preferred solution here, but intend to raise the
problems sharply for further attention.
Perhaps, firstly, the occupant of the first-person perspective in vicarious dreams really is,
despite all appearances, the dreamer. On this view, the label ‘vicarious’is a little misleading,
for a dream protagonist is always an altered version of the waking self. In my dream, perhaps,
I am a shorter, more megalomaniacal version of myself. Perhaps the soldier dream is of this
kind, with the 25-year-old female student inhabiting a different dream body, but still
identifying herself as the protagonist. But though such cases do occur, as we have noted, they
do not exhaust the possibilities or entirely capture the phenomena we have described. In
general, the psychological discontinuity between waking self and dreaming self can be
extreme. And in particular, in our other examples of vicarious dreaming the waking self just
does not enter the picture within the dream at all. As Valberg says of such cases, ‘in the dream
JV is not me (I am not JV)’: rather, someone else –X or Napoleon or the soldier –‘is at the
center of the dream’(2007, p.67).
Secondly, if the protagonist is neither Napoleon nor the dreamer, perhaps it is just a
‘dream Napoleon’. This would be a challenging result, because unlike other characters in
the dream, dream Napoleon appears to be consciously experiencing the dream environment
from a first-person perspective. This would mean that some experiencing protagonists only
exist for a short period during a dream, in what could be considered an extreme implemen-
tation of Lockean psychological continuity theory. Locke considers the possibility of ‘two
distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting in the same body, the one constantly by
day, the other by night’(1690/1975, II.27.23, p.344), arguing that they would be distinct
selves. In dreams, however, the protagonist is not always the same person: the protagonist
of last night’s dream is not usually psychologically linked with other dream protagonists in
the way Locke seems to think of his ‘nightman’. Given the fluidity and discontinuity of
dreams as shown by our examples above, a dream protagonist may exist only for a short part
of a dream, as with the famous actor dream. Each protagonist, both within and across dreams,
may have varying levels and kinds of connectedness with other dream protagonists and with
the dreamer, and many such protagonists may have no such connectedness at all. So the
nightman would not be a singular dream protagonist who persists ‘constantly’through all
of my dreams.
This line of thought might force us to posit temporary and highly fleeting subjects of
experience in vicarious dreams. We think this option is worth pursuing, but acknowledge
that it may be so counterintuitive as to encourage adoption of a third possibility, that the
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dream protagonist just is no kind of subject or self at all, and that the first-person perspective
apparently occupied in these dream experiences is in fact empty after all. We return to these
thoughts after discussing an attempt to defuse the puzzle by pushing harder on the parallel
with imagining.
David Velleman (1996) argues that the use of the first person pronoun is
unproblematic when imagining that I am someone else. In such cases, as the actual
subject, I actively frame my thoughts and imaginings so that they diverge from my
own and arise from the perspective of the ‘notional subject’, the imagined center of
perspective: ‘imagining that I am Napoleon is first-personal, but it is, so to speak,
first-personal about Napoleon, in the sensethatitisframedfromNapoleon’s point of
view’(1996, p.40). This framing of perspective is unlike the genuine reflexivity of
unselfconscious first-person thoughts, yet raises no special mystery once we understand
that thoughts thus framed enact this explicitly specified gap between actual and notional
subjects. He applies this account not only to imagining being someone else but also to
certain possible relations between the present self and past or future selves, seeking a
unified framework for understanding perspectival selfhood across a range of psycholog-
ical states and processes.
Although Velleman does not discuss dreams, we might naturally try to extend his
approach from imagining and remembering to dreaming. Perhaps when I dream of being
Napoleon, my first-person thoughts are not genuinely reflexive. Rather, a self-conscious
framing contextualizes ‘I see the battle’: the dreamer is the actual subject who frames the
thought from the perspective of Napoleon, the notional subject.
Unfortunately, this tidy solution does not work. In vicarious dreams, there need be no
explicit framing: the actual dreamer, whose brain is generating or hosting the dream, is
nevertheless not accurately described as an actual subject of the dream. In lucid dreams,
certainly, the dreamer realizes that she is dreaming and might thus be in a position to frame
certain thoughts and experiences as being those of a distinct notional subject (LaBerge &
DeGracia 2000). But ordinary, non-lucid dreams are quite unlike this. The dreamer is neither
in the dream nor framing the dreamed perspective. This contrasts sharply with the case of
imagining as described by Velleman, in which the actual subject unselfconsciously retains
her own perspective whilst deliberately adopting the imagined perspective. In vicarious
dreams, there is only one centered subjective perspective, and it is the first-person perspective
of the dream protagonist, Napoleon (or X or the soldier). In contrast to the kind of
imagining discussed by Williams and Velleman, the dream protagonist experiences the dream
world as if he is the actual subject. (In some kinds of imagining, such as more hallucinatory
forms of fantasy or mind wandering, the duality of perspective which Velleman describes also
disappears, perhaps giving rise to related problems).
There are two possible responses here, further ways to develop a Velleman-style solution
to the problem of vicarious dreaming. Perhaps the dreamer either forgets the framing that
occurred during the dream, or frames the perspective of the dream protagonist tacitly or
unconsciously. We do not think either option works for vicarious dreams. Regarding the
first explanation, indeed, forgetting of the framing thoughts may sometimes occur, but it is
unlikely as a plausible explanation of all vicarious dreams. There seems to be a clear distinc-
tion between dream reports in which the protagonist remains somehow aware of the waking
self despite doing Napoleonic things such as riding a horse and looking over a battle, and
dreams in which the dream protagonist believes they are Napoleon, in which there is no
distinction between the actual subject and the notional subject just because the actual subject
is out of the picture entirely and not even engaged in some tacit or background framing.
Such cases are the ones we find most philosophically interesting.
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Secondly, the possibility that the framing of certain thoughts could occur outside conscious
awareness is not consistent with Velleman’s framework. For Velleman, only standard, genuinely
reflexive first-person thoughts are ‘unselfconscious about their reference, in that they require no
other thought about whom they refer to. I can think of NB as notionally “me”only by
deliberately placing him where he will intercept this inward-directed pointer, thus rendering
its reference to him self-conscious’(Velleman 1996, p.60). If we allow that non-genuine
reflexive thoughts can also be established in an unselfconscious manner, it is not clear how
the distinction between genuine and non-genuine cases can be maintained. Perhaps such auto-
matic or non-conscious framing does operate in the case of imagining, where there is an
ongoing duality of coexisting distinct perspectives: the actual subject, doing the framing, is still
in the picture at the same time as the notional subject roams free in the imagined world. But
even if this is possible in imagining, it will not explain vicarious dreaming: in vicarious dreams,
there is no actual subject distinct from the notional subject during the dream. The dream
protagonist is the holder of the center of perspective, and the waking self is not represented
in the dream. When the protagonist uses a first-person pronoun, it points out the center of
perspective: other perspectives, such that of the waking self, are not involved. This contrasts
with the case of imagining as described by Velleman, in which the waking self has a real world
perspective whilst adopting the imaginary world perspective. In such dream experience is there
is only one perspective, that of the dream protagonist.
So vicarious dreams are not analogous to imagining being someone else. Perhaps we are
left with the possibility that the dream protagonist is a temporary separate entity, a fleeting
self (Rosen 2012). We leave this open as a live option, but finish with one further note
about the idea that there is no subject or self at all in such dreams. Even such a diehard
realist about dream experience as Antti Revonsuo, discussing dreams in general rather than
vicarious dreams in particular, offers a line of thought which might support this notion.
Revonsuo argues that it is only with the subsequent waking reconstruction of a dream
experience on the basis of memory traces that a sense of ownership of the dream arises:
only at that point do I ‘feel that this experience originally took place in the same system
of conscious experience in which my current experiences take place’.Thisideathatthe
dream ‘becomes my experience …only after the original experience is long gone’has, as
Revonsuo notes, the striking consequence that there is no sense of ownership of
unremembered dreams: they were ‘experiences in my brain’, but their potential to be my
experiences is unactualized (2005, pp.209–210).
The two unusual dream phenomena we have discussed –external perspectives and
vicarious dreams –are much less common than ordinary dreams in which the dreamer is
straightforwardly represented in the dream protagonist. Yet they appear to occur in a
significant minority of dreams, and plausibly more for some dreamers and in some
circumstances than others. They need to be incorporated into our best understanding of
the nature of self-representation in dreams. We have suggested some specificlinesof
enquiry in each case, along with some direct connections to parallel but strangely
disconnected literatures on remembering and imagining. We see dreaming as a fruitful
domain for integrative, naturalistic work at the interface between philosophy and the
cognitive sciences.
Acknowledgments
Our thanks to Glenn Carruthers, Max Coltheart, Helen Gillespie, Chris McCarroll, and
Peter Menzies, as well as to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions,
and to Ron Mallon and Edouard Machery.
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Short Biographies
Melanie Rosen is interested in the intersection between philosophy and cognitive science.
Her research takes a broad focus toward the philosophy of mind, consciousness, the self,
and the relevance of our scientific knowledge of the brain and cognition. Rosen completed
a BABFA (Fine Arts and Philosophy Conjoint) and MA (Philosophy) at Auckland University
and recently in 2013, graduated from her PhD at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her thesis
titled ‘Dream Pluralism: A Philosophy of the Dreaming Mind’focused on dreaming and its
relevance for philosophy and cognitive science. Rosen argued that a pluralistic approach to
the wide variety of cognitive phenomena that occur during sleep can help further our under-
standing of a variety of cognitive states. Dreaming is a conscious state that involves interesting
features such as body representation in absence of the real, waking body, and a variety of cog-
nitive defects that provide insight into the self, consciousness and cognition. She is currently
teaching at Macquarie University and the Australian Catholic University and does research at
the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).
Her teaching interests range from ethics to metaphysics, philosophy of mind and critical
thinking. She won the 2009 International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) paper
prize and is currently preparing further papers on dreaming.
John Sutton is Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, Sydney, where he
was previously head of the Department of Philosophy. His degrees are in Classics from
Oxford and in Philosophy from Sydney, and he has held visiting fellowships at UCLA,
UCSD, Edinburgh, and Warwick. His research centers on memory, both in and at the inter-
sections of philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and the social sciences. His book Philosophy and
Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge) was reissued in paperback in 2007, and
he is coeditor of Descartes’Natural Philosophy (Routledge, 2000) and of the interdisciplinary
journal Memory Studies. His recent work addresses distributed cognition, collaborative and
social memory, perspective in autobiographical memory, skilled movement and embodied
cognition, and cognitive history.
Note
*Correspondence: Cognitive Science, Macquarie University. Email: john.sutton@mq.edu.au.
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