ABSTRACT
As a topic in the philosophy of psychology, dreaming is a fascinating, diverse, and severely underdeveloped area of study. So dreaming should be at the forefront of our interdisciplinary investigations: theories of mind which fail to address the topic are incomplete. 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. David Foulkes, a cognitive psychologist whose positive views on dreaming we examine below, offers a relatively neutral characterization of the phenomena in question: dreaming is “the awareness of being in an imagined world in which things happen”. While J. Allan Hobson acknowledges a range of other kinds of mentation in sleep, he takes the following features to be paradigmatic of core cases of dreaming. The future of dreaming in both science and culture is at present intriguingly unpredictable.
