Windt’s second contribution is to propose a conceptual and phenomenological model of dreamless sleep experience (see Section 3 of her commentary). Starting from my presentation of the Indian conception of dreamless sleep experience as characterized by a feeling of peacefulness and the dissolution of the subject-object duality, as well as my comparison of this conception with Husserl’s conception of pre-reflective and pre-egological retentional time consciousness (see Thompson 2007), Windt proposes that dreamless sleep experience is a candidate for minimal phenomenal experience, one characterized only by the phenomenal “now” and a sense of duration, but having no further intentional content. So described, dreamless sleep experience would qualify as the simplest form in which a state can be phenomenally conscious, namely, as minimal phenomenal temporality.
I find this analysis very promising, though two issues require further analysis. The first concerns whether such a minimal phenomenal experience counts as “selfless.” Windt proposes that it does, because minimal phenomenal selfhood requires some sense of spatial self-location, whereas dreamless sleep experience consists only in a minimal sense of temporal self-location—not, of course, in the sense of mental time travel (retrospection and prospection), but rather in the sense of a bare feeling of existing “now,” with a minimal feeling of flow or duration. Nevertheless, both Advaita Vedānta and Husserl would take issue with this conception of a phenomenal state as “selfless.” As I describe in my target article, Advaita Vedānta describes dreamless sleep experience as a state in which the true nature of the self as non-intentional, reflexive consciousness is more apparent than in the ordinary waking and dreaming states. For his part, Husserl also describes the pre-egological retentional time consciousness as a minimal structure of self-experience (see Zahavi 2005; Thompson 2007). It may be that this issue is in part terminological, but there are also likely to be deeper conceptual disagreements about how to analyze the notion of self—whether this notion can be applied to the reflexivity of passive retention (Husserl) or the reflexivity of pure awareness (Vedanta), or whether such states do not meet the criteria for minimal phenomenal selfhood.
Second, and relatedly, I proposed in my target article that, from a Western phenomenological and cognitive scientific perspective, dreamless sleep experience might be describable as a minimal mode of sentience consisting in the feeling of being alive. My point in describing the experience this way was to call attention to the possibly minimal sense of embodiment present in the state. Windt’s proposal raises the question of whether even this minimal sense of embodiment may drop away in dreamless sleep, leaving only a bare phenomenal sense of “now.” One way to address this question would be to determine whether there can be such a minimal phenomenal temporality in sleep with no affective character, given that one might take the presence of an affective phenomenal character to imply some felt sense of embodiment (assuming that there is a constitutive relation between affect and felt embodiment).