Mind

Are dreams experiences?

Comments

Great question! Some philosophers have denied that they are. Norman Malcolm is probably the most famous for claiming dreams are not experiences. It has been jokingly said that, for Malcolm, dreams are simply lies we tell each other over breakfast. The problem is that if you are a materialist dreams seem to be hard to identify with physical processes: there is no color in the brain, for example, and yet subjects report rich visual experiences with color, shape, and dimension. Those who believe that there is more to persons than physical-chemical processes (like H.H. Price or G.E. Moore) treated dream experiences in a way that is akin to their recognition of sense-data or the visual field in ordinary life. Setting to one side the big questions of materialism versus dualism, I suggest it is difficult to deny the reality of dream experiences. Subjects (and this group includes me) report what we appear to experience when sleeping, and these appear to be richly detailed, colorful scenes in which action unfolds (sometimes I am appear to be an agent in dreams, sometimes a mere observer).

For the denial that dreams are experiences, see Malcolm's Dreaming, and Daniel Dennett's "Are dreams experiences?" Philosophical Review, 1976, and for a modest less counter-intuitive treatment see Colin McGinn's Mindsight. If you are going to adopt a negative answer to your question, I would strongly recommend McGinn over against Dennett or Malcolm. But on the whole, many philosophers still follow the traditional view (perhaps made most famous by Descartes in his skeptical arguments) that dreams are akin to perceptual experiences.

Read another response by Charles Taliaferro

Read another response about Mind