The second point I want to focus on is Voss and Hobson’s desire to consider other states of consciousness to better understand the state of lucid dreaming. In particular, they express an interest in considering altered states such as hypnosis or mind wandering. I suggest that there might also be benefit in considering meditation. Specifically, I think we can fruitfully make use of how the notion of insight in meditative experiences is developed to clarify that of insight in lucid dreaming. We would first have to show that there are enough important similarities between the notion of insight involved in meditation and the notion of insight involved in lucid dreaming, and this will be my aim in what follows.
To be sure, there are many and various meditation styles and practices, each with its own experiential path to higher states of awareness. Broadly speaking, there are three categories of meditative practice, each with variants, and there is overlap in some respects between the categories.[11] First, there is focused attention meditation—this involves developing one’s ability to concentrate on an object for an unlimited amount of time. Second, there is open presence meditation—this involves opening one’s awareness to all experiential aspects of the moment, e.g., mental states, bodily sensations, environmental stimuli, etc., and not attending to anything in particular. Third, there is insight meditation—this involves developing mindfulness or meta-awareness over one’s mental states. More specifically, and most interestingly when compared to the concept of insight in lucid dreaming, “[insight meditation] is also one of the earliest and most fundamental forms of meditation. For Buddhist theorists, [insight meditation] is a style of meditation that, in combination with the focus or stability provided by cultivating [focused attention], enables the practitioner to gain insight into one’s habits and assumptions about identity and emotions” (Lutz et al. 2007, p. 504). For my purposes here, I will set the finer variations among these three main styles of meditation aside since I’m merely concerned with drawing out the similarities, in broad strokes, between the sought-after meditative state and the insight it is intended to provide, and the lucid dreaming state and the insight required to bring it about. Interestingly, however, the concept of insight applied to the practice of insight meditation is quite similar in many respects to the concept of insight applied to the experience of lucid dreaming.
To be sure, the concept of insight, as it relates to meditation, is very complex, and also not fully defined. There are many levels of insight, and many aspects of mental life, the self, and life more broadly that one achieves insight about, depending on the style of meditation one engages in and the level of mastery one develops in one’s meditative practice. For example, in the practice of focused attention meditation, a novice practitioner might be said to have gained insight upon becoming aware of the difficulty involved in maintaining attention on the flow of the breath through the nostrils. The insight here is of a particular aspect of mental life, namely, the fleeting nature of attention. Whereas in the case of an experienced practitioner with hours of meditative experience, the insight gained may involve the nature of the self—for example, that it is characterized by desire and craving, or that it is ultimately an illusion. Nevertheless, I think that we can certainly make use of the way the concept of insight is broadly understood in meditation to clarify its relation to lucid dreaming, if it has any relation.
First, I take it that when we speak of insight gained through meditation, we aren’t referring to a particular state that is achieved, but rather to a form of knowledge that is gained within a state of consciousness. The state from within which we might be said to achieve insight is a state of meta-awareness, but being in this state doesn’t necessarily imply that insight has been achieved. For example, the novice practitioner may become meta-aware of what it is like to try to maintain focused attention on the breath, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that he gains knowledge from this about the nature of attention and consciousness more broadly. Conversely, it seems that in the case of lucid dreaming, at least as described by Voss and Hobson, insight is understood to be synonymous with meta-awareness. This seems a natural understanding given that, as per Voss and Hobson, when lucidity is achieved there is necessarily insight. That is, one could not, it appears, be meta-aware of their dreaming without having insight into the fact that they are dreaming. However, is this really insight? This is where I think we may want to tease apart the notions of lucidity and insight, following our understanding of meta-awareness and insight in cases of meditation.
In the case of lucid dreaming, there certainly is the experience of coming to realize one is in a dream state. This is the phenomenological interpretation of the state of insight I discussed in the previous section—what I also called the self-awareness of dreaming. However, we may want to refer to this aspect of lucid dreaming as lucidity, rather than insight. In other words, when lucidity occurs while dreaming, why should we not be satisfied saying that one has simply become aware of their dreaming? Why should we take this to be insightful? Maybe because lucidity doesn’t merely involve a passive awareness of the dream state, but also an understanding by the dreamer of what she has become aware of—and this enables dissociation, plot control, etc. The suggestion that there is now an understanding that the dreamer has of being in a dream, however, brings into the picture the epistemological interpretation mentioned earlier. Given this, insight is better viewed as an epistemic state. In fact, maybe there is not only a need to dissociate lucidity from insight in the case of lucid dreaming; we may want to grant that both admit to phenomenological and epistemological degrees.[12] As we see in meditation, there are many levels of insight—many areas of our existence of which we can gain knowledge—and so maybe there is also reason to think that there are further forms of insight to be had in lucid dreaming as well. One particularly interesting point of convergence between the empirical work on lucid dreaming and meditation is in the phenomenon of dream yoga.[13] As a result, we might not want to define insight as a state of consciousness, or as a meta-awareness. Rather, we may instead see insight as a form of knowledge that accompanies lucidity, and lucidity as a form of meta-awareness.
Another area of similarity between meditation and lucid dreaming that I want to explore lies in the structure of each of these experiences.[14] Both seem to involve some form of dissociation. As Voss & Hobson (this collection) describe, “lucid dreams can be considered dissociated states of consciousness in which the dream Self separates from the ongoing flow of mental imagery. The dream is still a dream but the person is able to distance him/herself from the ongoing imagery and may even be successful in gaining (at least partial) control over the dream plot” (pp. 8–9). The experiential feature of separation of the dreamer from the dream while the dream continues to unfold is akin to the observational stance that one strives to take in meditation, in particular in focused meditation. When meditating, one aims to become aware of one’s stream of consciousness—one tries to separate oneself, as it were, from the stream of thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc., in order to become aware of its transient nature. For example, one becomes aware of, say, the fleeting nature of attention and mental life. Similarly in lucid dreaming, one becomes aware of being in a dreaming state.
However, the concept of “self” that seems to underlie Voss and Hobson’s discussion of lucid dreaming is quite different from how the self is understood in meditation. Voss and Hobson appear to have a very robust sense of self at play, and I’m not quite sure why this is so, or whether we want to bring such a conception of self into the picture. One of the most telling passages in their article, and one that I find most problematic is the following:
This fits well with the common description of lucid dreams as (partial) awakening in your dreams and of involving a split between dreamer and dream observer who coexist and change relative dominance of the mind at will (Occhionero et al. 2005). The implications of this line of reasoning have profound impact on the theory of mind. There are two selves suggesting that the self is a construct elaborated by the brain (Metzinger, 2003, 2009, 2013a). The two selves of the lucid dreamer […] (Voss & Hobson this collection, p. 9, emphasis added).
Why would we want to describe the result of the dissociation in lucid dreaming as one that involves a split between a dreamer self and a dream-observer self? Furthermore, on the basis of what would there be reason to argue that the self is a construct?
If the experience in lucid dreaming is one of shifting back and forth between being meta-aware of being in dream consciousness and being in the dream itself as the dreamer, why would we not want to speak of this as a change in experiential perspective rather than as an experience of two selves?[15] Moreover, if we look to how similar meditative experiences are described, we don’t speak of there being two selves, the self within the stream of consciousness and the self that observes the stream of consciousness. Rather, we speak of our shifting experiential perspectives wherein we move, as a single subject of experience, from being within the flow of consciousness to observing the flow of consciousness. Furthermore, one of the insights gained from meditative practice is that there is indeed no self.
I grant that it is perhaps in keeping with the subjective reports of lucid dreamers to speak of two selves in the lucid dream state. If the subjective report that Voss & Hobson quote in their paper (this collection, p. 9) is but one example of the way in which subjects describe their experiences, then it certainly seems natural to take on such a view of the self. However, I suspect that the subjective reports may be constructed in a manner that is biased by a certain colloquial manner of speaking about the self,[16] and thus don’t rightly capture if and what the self is in relation to the structure of consciousness. Certainly I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t take the subjective reports seriously—indeed I think that they provide invaluable information into the phenomenology of lucid dreaming. However, we must be careful to properly interpret these reports, and perhaps this will involve developing ways to discover whether certain biases have come into play in the subject’s report of her experience, and how these biases have affected the qualitative data.