ABSTRACT
As a topic in the philosophy of psychology, dreaming is a fascinating, diverse, and severely underdeveloped area of study. The topic excites intense public interest in its own right, while also challenging our condence that we know what the words “conscious” and “consciousness” mean. So dreaming should be at the forefront of our interdisciplinary investigations: theories of mind which fail to address the topic are incomplete. Students can be motivated to think hard about dreaming, so the subject has denite pedagogical utility as entry into a surprising range of philosophical topics. Learning even a little about the sciences of sleep and dreaming, and about the many ingenious experiments designed by dream psychologists, is an excellent way into thinking about relations between phenomenology and physiology, and between empirical and conceptual strands in the study of mind. Students and researchers seeking complex and multifaceted intellectual challenges will increasingly be drawn to explore resources for the study of dreams. But despite the fascination of dreams for modern Western culture, the story of the discovery of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and the subsequent exploration of the psychophysiology of dreaming, which was among the great adventures of twentieth-century science (Hobson 1988: Ch. 6; Aserinsky 1996; Foulkes 1996; Kroker 2007), has barely inuenced the active self-image of mainstream philosophy of mind. Although epistemologists still use dreaming to focus concerns about scepticism, the psychology of dreams remained until recently a marginal subject in philosophy and the cognitive sciences alike. There are no references to sleep or dreams in Blackwell’s 1998 Companion to Cognitive Science; only short single entries in the substantial encyclopaedias of cognitive science published by MIT and by the Nature Publishing Group, and both by the same author (Hobson 1999a, 2003); and at the time of writing no entry on dreaming is listed in the projected contents of the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Yet this chapter can now draw on a small but increasing wave of recent work on dreams which takes a naturalistic and integrative attitude to philosophy of psychology, foreshadowed by Daniel Dennett (1976) and Patricia Churchland (1988), and exemplied by Owen Flanagan’s Dreaming Souls (2000).
