Reflections on Insight

A Reply to Lana Kühle

Author

Ursula Voss

voss @ psych.uni-frankfurt.de

Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität

Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Commentator

Lana Kühle

lkuhle @ ilstu.edu

Illinois State University

Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, USA

Editors

Thomas Metzinger

metzinger @ uni-mainz.de

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität

Mainz, Germany

Jennifer M. Windt

jennifer.windt @ monash.edu

Monash University

Melbourne, Australia

In this reply to Kühle, I will respond to her comments on the role of insight in lucid dreaming, especially regarding the question of whether it may be knowledge-based or instead express a sensorial experience. My answer rests on experimental findings, acknowledging Kühle’s remarks, and taking her methodological challenges into account. I will challenge her proposal that insight might be called a state, opting for a definition of a transient thought atypically embedded within the state of dreaming, which may suffice to retrospectively call a REM dream lucid, but which will not satisfy the assumptions underlying the existence of a state.

Keywords

Insight | Lucid dreaming | Lucid scale | REM sleep