The third and last point I want to consider is the place of the body, and bodily awareness, in lucid dreaming. I was particularly struck by two lucid dreamer reports. The first is the one that Voss & Hobson quote in their paper wherein the lucid dreamer explains that “[i]n these short periods of lucidity the awareness of the acting dream body and the real body in bed exist simultaneously and it costs a lot of concentration to keep the balance between both” (this collection, p. 9). The second comes from Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, who coined the phrase “lucid dreaming”:
In January, 1898 […] I was able to repeat the observation. […] I dreamt that I was lying in the garden before the windows of my study, and saw the eyes of my dog through the glass pane. I was lying on my chest and observing the dog very keenly. At the same time, however, I knew with perfect certainty that I was dreaming and lying on my back in my bed. And then I resolved to wake up slowly and carefully and observe how my sensation of lying on my chest would change to the sensation of lying on my back. And so I did, slowly and deliberately, and the transition—which I have since undergone many times—is most wonderful. It is like the feeling of slipping from one body into another, and there is distinctly a double recollection of the two bodies. I remembered what I felt in my dream, lying on my chest; but returning into the day-life, I remembered also that my physical body had been quietly lying on its back all the while. This observation of a double memory I have had many times since. It is so indubitable that it leads almost unavoidably to the conception of a dream-body. (van Eeden 1913)[17]
I found the description of there being two bodies rather interesting, and, particularly in the subject report cited by Voss and Hobson, the mention of the cost of concentration to be very intriguing. To be sure, there is but one physical body, namely the one lying in bed. Yet the dreamer experiences both the body in bed and the body with which she is engaged in the dream, and finds it somewhat demanding to maintain an experiential balance between both. In this last section, I put forward an explanation of this experience by relying on the Hybrid State Hypothesis alongside my work on bodily awareness during waking consciousness.
According to the HSH Voss and Hobson put forward, lucid dreaming is a hybrid state with both elements of waking and dream consciousness. This is so because there is a dissociation that occurs between the dream self and the ongoing dream imagery. Physiologically, although brain activity associated with REM sleep continues, in lucid dreaming there arises, in addition, brain activity in parts of the brain associated with conscious awareness and executive ego functions. The hypothesis, then, is that “lucid dreams push the arousal system towards waking yet remaining within the region occupied by REM sleep […]. Lucid dreaming is, thus, a fragile, destabilized hybrid state” (Voss & Hobson this collection, p. 9). If this hypothesis is correct, then there may be value in looking at how we are aware of our body in a waking conscious state to help better understand the seeming duality of bodily awareness involved in lucid dreams. More specifically, if we take seriously the above-quoted subjective report, then the hybrid state hypothesis in combination with certain hypotheses about bodily awareness in waking conscious states might shed light on how the experience arises.
What I find particularly interesting about the reports are two things:
a. the simultaneous experience of a dream body and the real body in bed; and
b. the amount of concentration needed to keep the balance between both.
In regards to the first, I find myself wondering the following: what does the subject mean by simultaneous, here? Does she mean that both bodies are experienced at the same time, or rather, that there is a very quick and continuous shift back and forth from the dream body to the real body, such that it seems like they are both being experienced simultaneously? I am inclined to think that what is happening is a very quick attentional shift back and forth between the two “bodies”. My reasons for thinking this come from how I account for our bodily awareness in waking life.
I take it that in our everyday experiential lives we are aware of our body both as an object and as a subject. The distinction between awareness of the body as object and as subject stems from the Phenomenological tradition[18] and it is best understood as follows. I can be said to be aware of my body as object when I direct my attention to my body and thereby perceive it as I would any other object in the world. The key characteristic of our awareness of the body as object is that it is attentional. Alternatively, I can be said to be aware of my body as subject when I am aware of my body as that through which I experience the world—not as an object onto which I turn my attention, but rather as that which engages with my environment. My awareness of my body as subject is also referred to as a bodily self-awareness, and it is characterized by an inattentional awareness—a form of awareness that does not involve holding attention to an object.[19]
Now, my typical experiential consciousness involves a bodily self-awareness, although it doesn’t always involve an awareness of the body as object. This is because I don’t always attend to my body. Take, for example, my sitting in a chair reading a book. Typically, my attention lies with the book—I focus on the words on the page, say. In attending to the book, I don’t simultaneously attend to my hands holding the book, although they are certainly a part of my overall experience insofar as they don’t disappear from my awareness entirely. I certainly can shift my attention to my hands, and thereby become aware of them as object; however, in doing so, I contend, I am no longer attentively aware of the words I was reading a moment ago. In fact, I take it that if I were to try to be aware of my hands and the words on the page simultaneously, I would find this quite difficult as it would involve a continuous and rapid shift in attention back and forth between the words and my hands. I think a similar account holds in the case of lucid dreaming with regard to the dream body and the real body.
I propose that in the case of one’s bodily awareness in lucid dreaming, the real body is experienced both as subject and as object. It is the subject’s actual body, and therefore one that she is aware of as subject, but in addition her experience of her real body, in the lucid dream, is of her body as an object—she becomes aware of her body as object by her attention shifting to it momentarily. However, her attention does not remain with her real body; instead it quickly shifts back to the dream body as well. In that experiential moment, the dream body becomes an object for her as she attends to it. I think the further clue as to why we should interpret the experience of the body in lucid dreams as one of shifting attention, and even perhaps competing attention between the real and the dream body, comes from the second element of the subject’s report mentioned above—the claim that “it costs a lot of concentration to keep the balance between both”.
Why is there a need to keep a balance between the real and the dream body? Perhaps because, as the HSH suggests, there are elements of both waking and dreaming states at play. If we take bodily awareness to be a fundamental element of waking consciousness—or even consciousness tout court, as I do—as well as a key element of dream consciousness, then it makes perfect sense that in a lucid dream the subject finds herself with these two bodies that must be balanced in the same way that the waking and the dream states must be balanced to remain in the lucid dreaming state.[20]
The question then becomes: why does it cost a lot of concentration to maintain this balance? I think the answer to this question brings us right back to my suggestion above, namely that the simultaneity of the dream and real body experience is one of shifting, or even competing attention. If there is a continuous shift in attention, rather than a joint experience of both bodies, then this would explain the apparent cost of trying to maintain concentration on both bodies in a lucid dream state. It would be like walking a tightrope, trying to avoid leaning too far to the right or too far to the left, and doing so by continuously shifting your body to maintain that balance. It would require an incredible amount of concentration—in a general sense, one experiences everything all at once, but in a more precise sense, one’s attention is continuously shifting between one’s body and one’s environment in order to maintain balance.[21]
One last point of inquiry. As I mentioned above, there is a distinction to be made in accounting for our bodily awareness in waking experiential consciousness between our awareness of the body as object and our awareness of the body as subject, i.e., bodily self-awareness. However, I wonder if a similar distinction might also apply in cases of lucid dreaming given the HSH. In other words, is there a bodily self-awareness—of the real body or even the dream body in a lucid dreaming state? And, if so, how does it relate to the awareness of the dream body and the real body described by subjective reports? To begin answering these questions we would need to explore the subjective reports of lucid dream experience in relation to bodily awareness more specifically. Perhaps we might begin by looking back upon the report by van Eden. Indeed, I certainly take this to be an interesting avenue of exploration given the ever-increasing interest in taking an embodied approach to consciousness.