*What the sense of agency in sleep tells us about dream phenomenology * Melanie Rosen (Macquarie)
Date: 31 July Time: 13:00-14:00 Venue: Blackshield Room, W3A (6 First Walk) 501* All welcome *Abstract*: Surprisingly, there is much disagreement about the nature of our phenomenal experience during dreams. Despite the fact that dreaming is something we have all experienced, what it is like to dream is still contested. Part of this is due to scepticism about our ability to accurately report dreams after waking and our inability to report them while they are occurring. The common belief is that dreaming is perceptual: to dream is to hallucinate. However, perhaps after waking we just *believe *we have hallucinated... dreaming may instead simply vivid imagination. By looking at indirect indicators extracted from dream reports, we can gain evidence about what exactly it is like to dream. One such indicator is the sense of agency (SoA). Looking at how we feel in or out of control in a dream can fill in the gaps of our knowledge. Dream SoA is particularly interesting as dreams display many fascinating agentive indicators such as achieving goals and feelings of control over bodily movement as well as failed SoA, delusion-like experience and passivity. Here I argue that reports of SoA during dreams are consistent with a pluralistic approach: dream phenomenology involves imagination, illusion and hallucination. Theorists' preference for a simple definition of dreaming may lead research groups to focus on only a subset of dream experience. However by analysing holistic, narrator and comparator approaches to SoA in dreams, I will argue that dream experience is not reducible to a simplistic definition. Contact: Karola Stotz ([email protected]) -- Karola Stotz Senior Lecturer, TWCF Fellow Philosophy Department Macquarie University [email protected] http://www.karolastotz.com [image: Macquarie University] <http://mq.edu.au/> Honorary Associate Unit for History and Philosophy of Science University of Sydney
--------- SydPhil mailing list To unsubscribe, change your membership options, find answers to common problems, or visit our online archives, please go to the list information page: https://mailman.sydney.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/sydphil
