In “What is the state-of-the-art on lucid dreaming?—Recent advances and questions for future research”, Ursula Voss & Allan Hobson (this collection) aim to defend the veracity of, and value in empirically studying lucid dreaming. They provide a detailed view of the features characterizing lucid dreaming as well as hypotheses for why and how lucid dreaming occurs. As they claim, not only is there benefit to studying lucid dreaming in itself, as this would give us a deeper understanding of dream consciousness, it is also an important endeavor because of the kind of conscious state lucid dreaming is. The authors argue that the study of lucid dreaming will also deepen our understanding of the structure of consciousness more broadly—the nature of meta-awareness, the notion of a self, and its relation to our ability to be meta-aware, etc.
To be sure, I think that Voss and Hobson make important in-roads in defending the veracity of lucid dreaming and putting forward hypotheses that ought to sprout new and exciting research in the area, as I will elaborate in section 2. However, I think there remains a need for caution in how we describe and define lucid dreaming, a great need for further clarification of what lucidity involves, and potentially fruitful connections to be drawn between lucid dreaming states and meditative states. In what follows, my goal is to elaborate on each of the following three points with a view to generating future discussion and discovery not only in the area of lucid dreaming research, but also in areas of meditation research and embodied awareness research.
The first point on which I focus—in section 3—is the concept of “insight”. To be sure, Voss and Hobson do offer us a definition of insight—an awareness of being in a dream, knowing that what one is currently experiencing is not real, etc.[1] However, their definition conflates and confuses whether the insight involved in lucid dreaming is a state or an ability, and whether it is an epistemic or phenomenal state/ability. In other words, does it involve knowledge of something, is it simply experiential, or is it an ability to do or know something, etc.? In this section, then, I delve deeper into what the authors mean by “insight” and explore these questions, as well as inquire whether insight is best understood using epistemological or phenomenological frameworks. Moreover, I consider what the consequences of an underdeveloped understanding of the concept of insight might be for the current state of research on lucid dreaming.
The second point on which I focus—in section 4—is the authors’ suggestion that we look at other states of waking consciousness with a view to determining how exactly insight comes to co-occur with REM sleep. I consider the potential similarities between lucid dreaming and meditation, and suggest that there are fruitful connections to be drawn between the meta-awareness associated with insight in lucid dreaming and the meta-awareness involved in certain meditative practices.
The third point I consider—in section 5—is the experience of the body in lucid dreaming. In particular, I argue that if we accept one of the authors’ hypotheses—the Hybrid State Hypothesis—then we can enrich our understanding of the bodily awareness involved in lucid dreaming by looking at certain accounts of bodily awareness in waking consciousness. More specifically, I offer one interpretation for why the dual experience of the dream body and the real body in lucid dreaming is said to demand a lot of concentration by appealing to my recent work on bodily awareness in waking experiential consciousness. Before I begin exploring each of these three points, however, let me first summarize Voss and Hobson’s important contributions.