Montaigne in (The Apology for Raymond Sebond) noted that wakefulness itself teems with reveries and illusions, which he thought were even more epistemologically worrisome than nocturnal dreams.
“if a person is in any state of consciousness it logically follows that he is not sound asleep”]
the concept of dreaming is derived, not from dreaming, but from descriptions of dreams, i.e., from the familiar phenomenon that we call “telling a dream”. (
Malcolm argued that retrospective dream reports are the sole criterion for determining whether a dream occurred and there is no independent way of verifying dream reports
If a man had certain thoughts and feelings in a dream it no more follows that he had those thoughts and feelings while asleep, than it follows from his having climbed a mountain in a dream that he climbed a mountain while asleep
One goes back to Maury’s (1861) description of a long and complex dream about the French revolution that culminated in his execution at the guillotine, at which point Maury suddenly awoke to find that the headboard had fallen on his neck. Because the dream seemed to systematically build up to this dramatic conclusion, which in turn coincided with a sudden external event, he suggested that such cases were best explained as instantaneous memory insertions experienced at the moment of awakening. Similarly, Gregory (1916) described dreams are psychical explosions occurring at the moment of awakening.
His position is that personal identity depends on psychological continuity, including recall:
]The standard view is that dreams have the same phenomenal character as waking perception in that they seemingly put us in contact with mind-independent objects, yet no such object is actually being perceived.
This means dreams count as hallucinations in the philosophical sense (Crane & French 2017; Macpherson 2013). Even if, in a particularly realistic dream, my visual experience was exactly as it would be if I were awake (I could see my bedroom, my hands on the bed sheets, etc.), as long as my eyes were closed during the episode, I would not, literally, be seeing anything.
Even where philosophers agree dreams are experiences, they often disagree on how exactly to characterize dreaming relative to wake-state psychological terms. Often, questions about the ontology of dreaming intersect with epistemological issues. Increasingly, they also incorporate empirical findings.
Aristotle (On Dreams) already noted that one can sometimes be aware while dreaming that one is dreaming
REM sleep in healthy subjects, these patients show complex, seemingly goal-directed outward behaviors such as running or fighting off an attacker during REM sleep. Retrospective dream reports often match these behaviors, suggesting that patients literally act out their dreams during sleep of rest and passivity, but there is a sleep architecture involving different stages of sleep that is relatively stable/
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