In this post, I interview Louise Moody, Associate
Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York, and Tom Stoneham, Professor of Philosophy & Dean of
the Graduate Research School, also at the University of York. Tom and Louise
are presently researching dreaming: specifically, they are investigating an
alternative model of dreaming (one that holds dreams are confabulations on
waking rather than experiences of some type that are remembered and reported as
dreams) and whether this model might be beneficial for those experiencing
parasomnias.
SS: Why is the topic of dreaming of interest
to philosophers and what contributions have philosophers made so far?
LM & TS: The first thing to say is that dreaming
takes up a surprisingly large amount of our mental lives with most of us
apparently dreaming 4-6 times a night – indeed, awakenings from all
sleep-phases (i.e. both r.e.m and non-r.e.m sleep) elicit dream reports between
50-90% of the time (e.g. Dement & Kleitman 1957; Nielson 2000). Yet
dreaming receives relatively little attention from philosophers: whilst the
possibility that we are now dreaming is often used to prop up sceptical arguments,
the nature of dreaming is rarely directly examined - notable exceptions include
Malcolm (1959) who thought the notion of any mental activity during sleep
self-contradictory, Dennett (1972) who proposed that dreams might be
non-consciously composed ‘cassettes’ that are inserted into memory for
‘playback’ on waking, and more recently, Ichikawa (2009) who treats dreams as
sensory imaginings.
Almost everyone who has had a dream takes
their experience to support the ‘Standard Model’ of dreaming: dreaming is a
conscious experience of some type which happens during sleep, is encoded in
memory, recalled – often partially – upon waking, and sometimes shared with
others. That is just what it feels like. But as the great Islamic Philosopher
Al-Ghazali pointed out in 1105, this model is likely to strike someone who has
had no personal experience of dreaming as very puzzling. People are reporting
having perceptions at times when they are clearly not having perceptions,
precisely because they are asleep and not in the presence of those things they
report perceiving. The very familiarity of dreaming has stopped philosophers
(with very few notable exceptions) from seeing just how theoretically puzzling
this idea of ‘offline’ perception really is.
SS: I understand you’re developing an
alternative model to that outlined above, one that centrally involves imperfect
cognitions? Tell us more!
LM & TS: Despite seeming incredibly obvious, the
Standard Model is surprisingly hard to prove or disprove, precisely because it
postulates a realm of private experiences that cannot be directly reported upon
(note: LaBerge (1981) purportedly found that lucid dreamers can ‘signal’ that
they are dreaming by performing a series of pre-arranged eye movements, but we
take this finding to be methodologically controversial). Other well-known
problems with the Standard Model, as Freud originally noted (1900: Ch.1),
include pre-cognitive ‘alarm clock’ dreams (suppose you dream of an explosion
and wake up to find this sound merging smoothly with the buzzing of your alarm
clock; then you must have somehow predicted that your alarm clock was about to
buzz, which is wildly implausible) and time-compression (experiences that would
take a long time in waking life are often temporally compressed in dreams, and
no-one has yet explained why such experiences are special cases).
The standard model
also has some problems explaining the function of dreams. If dreams are
conscious experiences, then their function must be one of those functions which
conscious experiences perform, such as remembering, or planning, or deciding.
While some dreams may seem to have such functions, large-scale analysis of
dream reports suggests they are in the minority (there is a serious risk of
both survivor bias and confirmation bias in all attempts to look for functions
of dreaming). These explanatory weaknesses are what drives Freudian and Jungian
theories, with their postulation of further hidden mechanisms: we fall into the
trap of explaining one mystery by another.
Taking these issues seriously has led us to
explore alternative models of dreaming, and in particular, the idea that dream
reports are not recollections of experiences but confabulations. The idea is
not new – it was proposed by Edmund Goblot in 1896 as an explanation of Maury’s
famous ‘pre-cognitive’ dream (in which he reportedly woke up from a dream of
being guillotined just as his headboard struck his neck) – but it has not yet
been developed in the light of more recent understanding of the physiology of
sleep and the sociology of dream reporting.
Here is a striking example: For physiological
reasons, pubescent males are particularly prone to nocturnal emissions and
concomitant reports of erotic dreams (see Lucretius, 1910: BK 4, 1025-1036 for
an early poetic description!). How does this come about? While asleep the young
man may have some awareness of physiological changes such as the erection and
ejaculation; when he wakes he is confused for he has been asleep, alone and not
masturbating; the concept of a dream – taught to him at a young age to help
soothe the night terrors – provides a handy explanation; so he confabulates a
sequence of experiences which would explain the ejaculation (were they real
experiences, of course); this confabulation conforms to culturally expected
norms, further embedding the problematic experience of nocturnal ejaculation
into a familiar narrative. What norms might these be? Well, given the
widespread Freudian idea that dreams are revelatory of suppressed desires, we
would predict some oedipal confabulations (for famous example, one only needs
to listen to David Bowie’s ‘Sister Midnight’ in which he recounts a series of
dreams of ‘mother in my bed’).
To sum up the theory in a sentence: Interoception
of physiological changes during sleep causes confusion on waking which is dealt
with by confabulating nocturnal perceptual experiences in accordance with
social expectations and cultural norms.
SS: Do you anticipate that that the research
will have implications beyond philosophy?
Certainly. One major implication is that –
and our early investigations are promising – it should inform therapeutic
treatment on people experiencing sleep-related disturbances. By that, we mean
people experiencing things like recurrent nightmares and nocturnal panic
attacks, as well as the associated mental and physical symptoms they tend to
produce. We’re now beginning to work out – in collaboration with mental health
practitioners – just how the Cultural-Social Model can be applied in practice.
Here is a bite-sized example that hopefully gives a sense of how it works:
Studies show that anywhere between 52-96% of people with Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder (as opposed to approx. 3% of those without PTSD) report disturbing
nightmares that ‘replay’ traumatic events that, understandably, exacerbate
PTSD-related symptoms (e.g. Hasler & Germain: 2009; Krakow et al. 2002). We
anticipate that – by removing the sense that PTSD-related nightmares somehow
result from a cognitive flaw in their internal processing of memories – clients
should see improvements in their PTSD sleep-related symptoms, and perhaps more
general improvements in their interpersonal and personal functioning.
Essentially, we think that the Cultural-Social Model has an immediate
‘real-world’ benefit in that it can improve the treatment of a wide range of
mental health conditions by improving talking therapies.
We should also point out that, on our
alternative model, one needn’t be undergoing therapeutic treatment of sleep
disturbances to gain greater insight and understanding of one’s dreams. Most of
us have, at some point, recalled a dream that seemingly reveals something
troublesome about our psychological makeup. Consider, for example, someone who
‘recalls’ a dream of violently stabbing their spouse, and takes this to be
indicative of some hidden or buried psychological issue – perhaps even of
unconscious murderous tendencies.
We resist the impulse to go down this
mysterious ‘Jungian’ road. Instead, we claim that there are perfectly ordinary
initial causes of such dream reports that, together with social conventions,
determine the confabulated dream content – in this example, the initial cause
could simply be a ‘trace’ memory of inadvertently striking one’s spouse whilst
‘tossing and turning’ during sleep that, together with a dream culture in which
we expect dreams to include shocking actions and social conventions about what
sort of dream that individual might have, then supply the content, viz., of
violently stabbing one’s spouse. So, beyond improving talking therapies, the
Cultural-Social Model – if it gains ground – would constitute a radical
paradigm shift concerning how most of us think about dreams.
SS: What are your future plans with this
project?
LM & TS: Our immediate goal is to theoretically develop
the Cultural-Social Model to a point where it will inform therapeutic treatment
of sleep-disturbances. Of particular importance will be to explain how social
and cultural factors can determine dream content in a way that is attentive to,
and consistent with, our best empirical understanding of dreams – indeed, Tom
has already taken the first steps towards doing this with a paper, ‘Dreaming,
Phenomenal Character, and Acquaintance’ appearing in 2018! (forthcoming in Raleigh (ed.) Acquaintance, OUP 2018).
We’re also in the
early stages of designing two case studies: one that tests the model’s
therapeutic efficacy in treating trauma clients, and one that involves clients’
who do not have trauma-related symptoms but who are nevertheless experiencing
sleep disturbances. If these studies prove fruitful, then we are optimistic
that the model could also inform therapeutic treatment of people who are in
some way affected by hallucination-related symptoms.
Louise Moody will be talking about this
project at PERFECT 2018, our confabulation workshop, in May 2018. You can find
out more, and register, here.