Jennifer M. Windt, Tore Nielsen, and Evan Thompson, ‘Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 871-82.

Recently I’ve been wondering (only a bit; I have exams to mark) about what leads us to consider how our minds work. The pursuit of knowledge is an end in itself, oh sure, but there are external prompts as well. For the seventeenth century poets I read, for example, there was a theological motive: to know if you were truly feeling faith, a more or less impossible task, you might try to monitor and understand the workings of your own cognition. What about today? Well, a lot of psychological research is carried out in and around economics, business, and marketing faculties: shopping rather than salvation. In the careers of Kahneman and Tversky (biography enjoyed here, worried about here, both interstitially) military service posed a set of questions.
      Well this sort of thing was somewhat on my mind when I read the piece by Windt et al. It’s about dreaming, mind-wandering, and consciousness, and it made me think of recent forays into the subject here and here. In those posts I was suggesting that the writers of Medieval dream vision poems might have interesting things to say about the ways in which our minds work unintentionally. Motivated by their wish to make links between the imagination and the everyday, to pursue unworldly truths in worldly forms, they found themselves spectating upon unintentional shifts of focus and attention, and representing them as moments of poetic inspiration.

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Windt et al. are working on the different things that happen when we’re asleep. Rather than focusing on REM sleep as usual, they use ‘serial awakening paradigms’ to find out about the previously featureless landscape of ‘dreamless sleep’. Having bothered their poor subjects (‘somnonauts’, I want to call them) sufficiently, and evaluated their reports, they claim to have rendered that landscape featureless no more. They find that people report on sensations and experiences in dreamless sleep, and there are distinct and interesting subtypes. For example, some of the time the ‘immersive character of dreaming’ is missing; some of the time the ‘simulational character of dreaming’ is missing. There may be ‘selfless’ states, and ‘contentless’ states. Ultimately they’re arguing that we need to have a more multi-faceted, multi-dimensional understanding of consciousness, and its lack: it’s not just a single spectrum from ‘on’ to ‘off’.
      This definitely broadens the field in which my poetic dreamers could find themselves. Literature has explored fringe-conscious states in a variety of ways, sometimes (as in the dream visions) aiming to reproduce or harness the sort of cognition that goes on, just off the grid. Unfortunately (I really do have exams to mark) there’s no time to deal with this properly now.