The first element of Voss and Hobson’s piece on which I want to focus my attention is the concept on insight. More specifically, I want to explore what the notions of lucidity and insight involve and how they relate to dream consciousness. As the authors clearly state throughout their paper, lucidity involves insight, and insight seems to be the key feature of lucid dreaming as it serves the basis of dream lucidity and enables the other elements of dream lucidity to arise, e.g., dissociation, control, etc. Without insight, it appears, one could not have lucid dreaming. Or, at the very least, it seems conceptually essential to have insight in order to be in a state of lucid dreaming.[5] Given the importance of insight, it is key that we obtain a clear view of precisely what it is.
In the first place, I think it is necessary to distinguish between the state of insight and what one has insight about—let us refer to this as the content of insight. With regards to the state of insight, it is not so clear what this precisely is, and the authors do not adequately clarify it. For example, if it is an epistemic state, then it would have an intentional object. The questions then become: what are the intentional objects of the state of insight? What kind of knowledge does the state of insight involve? It is in the second section of their paper, “Quantification of Dream Lucidity as Subjective Experience”, that Voss and Hobson attempt to describe and define what the state of insight is. There, they liken insight to a subjective awareness of our mental state. This subjective awareness, they go on to claim, is a form of secondary awareness, or meta-awareness that arises in lucid dreaming. They define meta-awareness, following Metzinger (2013), as “an instance of actively acquired self-knowledge or a sudden insight, regardless whether it is accurate or counterfactual” (Voss & Hobson this collection, p. 4). In short, insight appears to be a form of awareness that arises out of a more primary awareness, and it allows the subject to attend to, or “see” what is occurring in primary awareness.
Now, a number of questions and issues arise from this definition of the state of insight. First, it seems quite problematic to define insight as a form of meta-awareness, and then to define meta-awareness as an instance of sudden insight. Perhaps, however, we might want to rely on the first half of the disjunct in the definition quoted above and understand insight as a form of actively-acquired self-knowledge. Given that the authors refer to insight as a form of reflection (Voss & Hobson this collection, p. 6) and as a form of knowing (ibid. p. 8) elsewhere in the text, I will assume that this is the more accurate reading of the definition. However, this still raises questions. In what way are we to understand “actively acquire” in the case of lucid dreaming? What does the dreamer do in a non-lucid dream state to acquire insight and thus bring about lucid dreaming? Is lucid dreaming an ability?[6] If so, then perhaps it is trainable. Trainability might, in turn, provide us with an answer to the first two questions: namely, what might be involved in actively acquiring insight and what exactly the dreamer does. If it is an ability, perhaps the ability in question is one of moving into a state of meta-awareness. Moreover, if the ability to shift into a state of meta-awareness is an element of what the subject “does” to actively acquire insight while dreaming, then looking to other mental states that involve meta-awareness and that are also “trainable” could be beneficial.
One such set of mental states that involve an aspect of trainability are meditative states. Meditation is a practice, and with practice one is able to achieve and sustain certain forms of awareness—focused attention, open awareness, etc.[7] If we take the element of practice in meditation as being akin to a form of trainability, and the forms of awareness in meditation to be akin to meta-awareness, then looking at the practice of meditation—what one does, how one improves, and so on—might be informative in ascertaining whether actively acquiring insight in lucid dreaming is something that is trainable.[8] As I will detail in the next section, I believe there are also other reasons to consider meditation in relation to lucid dreaming.
Another line of questioning that arises from Voss and Hobson’s definition of the state of insight relates to the concept of self-knowledge that, they claim, is an element of insight. How are we to understand the concept of “self-knowledge” as it applies to the insight gained in lucid dreaming? What is the “self” involved? And how strict a use are we making of the concept of knowledge—do we mean a justified true belief? The state of insight seems to involve very different characteristics. Voss and Hobson hold that insight involves knowledge, or the realization that one is dreaming, and they also describe insight as an experiential phenomenon, and one that involves reflection. The issue here is that “knowledge”, “realization”, “experiential phenomenon”, and “reflection” are not interchangeable concepts. It remains quite unclear from the descriptions of insight provided whether we should view the state of insight as an epistemic or phenomenal state of consciousness. Based on the information Voss and Hobson provide in their piece, I am inclined to move away from an epistemological view of the state of insight as I think the concept of self-knowledge is too complex for the phenomenon that Voss and Hobson describe. What I mean here is simply that with the concept of self-knowledge come notions of identification, veridicality, the self, and so on, and I do not think that such a complex concept is necessary to account for the experience of insight in lucid dreaming. As Voss & Hobson explain, insight is “[t]o some extent, the dreamer [having]”—“however limited”—“access to secondary consciousness, enabling her to reflect on her present state” (this collection, p. 8), and “[b]y secondary consciousness we mean the subjective awareness of our state in dreaming” (ibid., p. 4). Instead, I would suggest using the concept of self-awareness to capture what is involved in insight, and by self-awareness I mean here simply the awareness of being in a certain experiential moment.[9] So, in the case of insight, one becomes aware of dreaming—a self-awareness—rather than acquiring the self-knowledge that one is dreaming. Perhaps, however, there is reason to separate the concept of insight from that of lucidity, and with this distinction we might want to describe lucidity as a phenomenal state and insight as an epistemic state. I think there might be good reason to take this route, and I explore this in the next section by considering the potential relation between insight in lucid dreaming and insight in meditative states.
Now, these are issues that arise when considering what is meant by the “state” of insight. As I distinguished earlier, however, there is also the “content” of insight. With regards to the content of insight, in cases of lucid dreaming things are relatively clear: one gains insight on the nature of one’s current dream state, i.e., that one is currently dreaming. In other words, insight involves coming to realize that one is dreaming. This way of describing what occurs in insight, however, could be seen as problematic in that it takes insight to involve a particular kind of knowledge, namely, knowledge-THAT. If indeed insight involves knowledge-THAT, then this opens the door to theory-contamination; that is, the content of insight is contaminated by what one already believes about dreams, consciousness, etc.[10] Although I grant that this issue shows that there is a need to clarify what exactly the content of insight is, I am uncertain that it is as problematic as it might at first seem to hold that insight involves knowledge-THAT. How else would one be able to “realize” that one was dreaming if one was not able to identify, to some degree, that the state one is in is a dream state? Moreover, it certainly seems that to perform such an identification one would rely on theory-contaminated beliefs—certain conceptions of what a dream is like, etc. Perhaps there is no way of avoiding theory-contamination altogether, and thus the issue becomes one of determining how much contamination is allowable in the case of insight.
I certainly grant that given the state of research into lucid dreaming—it is still very much in its infancy, no doubt—it is not unexpected that a clear understanding of a complex concept such as “insight” is still lacking. To be sure, the authors have provided a good starting point for developing a full description of the state of insight. However, given that it is, arguably, the key element of dream lucidity, I worry about how well we can empirically investigate, or interpret our empirical findings of the whys and hows of lucid dreaming if we don’t first ensure that we have a working understanding of insight. To define insight as a form of meta-awareness, or secondary consciousness that involves actively acquired self-knowledge, is not informative enough to allow us an understanding of what insight in dream consciousness is or why it is so special and important.
To be sure, I think it would be entirely inappropriate to hold Voss and Hobson accountable for not teasing out the concept of insight further. They are empirical researchers, and as such have paved the way for future research in this area. However, I think that the lack of conceptual clarity and the semantic vagueness that remains in this area point to the need for philosophical inquiry and the value of integrating philosophical work with empirical work on lucid dreaming. It now lies in the hands of philosophers to ensure that the future progress of this research is based on a strong conceptual foundation. One direction to take in this endeavor is to follow Voss and Hobson’s suggestion and look at other areas of research concerned with meta-awareness, reflection, and insight. In the next section, I propose that one such area is that of meditation.