Intensified forms of mental imagery: from daydreaming to dreaming
In my current postdoctoral research, I am developing a new ontological framework of dreaming as a type of mental imagery—a perceptual experience arising in the absence of sensory input and processing. I argue that classifying dreams in this way offers a more accurate picture of the nature of dreaming, resolving an ongoing debate in philosophy regarding whether dreams are more like imaginative experiences or hallucinations. My current work serves as the initial step in a broader project that will position dreams within other related experiences, like daydreaming.
Publications
- Alcaraz-Sánchez, A. (2022) Is lucid dreamless sleep really lucid? Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
- Alcaraz-Sánchez, A. et al. (2022) Nothingness is all what there is: an exploration of objectless awareness during sleep Frontiers in Psychology.
- Alcaraz-Sánchez, A. (2021) Awareness in the void: a micro-phenomenological exploration of conscious dreamless sleep Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences.
PhD research
My PhD investigated the nature of minimal forms of consciousness during sleep. Specifically, it focused on examining the state of “witnessing-sleep”, an experience widely reported by Indo-Tibetan Buddhist traditions as an instance of “just awareness”. I argued that these sorts of experiences belong to a wider range of sleep states, experiences that appear to us as “objectless”, yet they might still contain some conscious content. My PhD research implemented a novel approach to the study of these sorts of states that combined empirical work with philosophical conceptual analysis. The result was the first interdisciplinary scholarly piece in the field providing a nuanced examination of the various ways in which conscious states during sleep might be experienced as lacking content or be about “nothing”.
Conceptual work
Some questions that I asked in my thesis are the following: How should we better describe the experience of witnessing-sleep? Are those a type of dream experience or a sui generis type of experience? And how should they be situated within other sleep phenomena?
I have addressed some of those questions in here . I have considered a recent proposal which conceives certain instances of witnessing-sleep as an experience of "lucidity" akin to "lucid dreaming". I have argued that, if we want to conceptualise such experiences as instances of objectless sleep awareness, a different notion of lucidity is needed.
I am also developing a new theoretical model aiming at situating experiences like witnessing-sleep within other spontaneous experiences across sleep and waking.
Empirical work
As part of my PhD, I collected and analysed reports of differents forms of conscious awareness during sleep that depart from ordinary dreaming, including some states that are described by their experiencer as "objectless" or "contentless". You can find some of those reports, and an analysis of their phenomenological features here and here.
Other projects
The minimal phenomenal experience
As part of my research on witnessing-sleep, I am interested in investigating minimal forms of consciousness – states of awareness that do not usually involve an ordinary object of awareness or are said to lack a ‘content’ of awareness. Given the features of witnessing-sleep, a state of awareness in which one is said to be aware during deep sleep and nothing else, some authors have proposed that such a state could be an instance of a minimal phenomenal experience (see Windt, 2015; Metzinger, 2021). States sharing a similar phenomenology to that of witnessing-sleep can be found during meditative experiences, but also during drug-induced ego-dissolution experiences, or mystical experiences. I’d be keen on collaborating with other researchers working on investigating other forms of minimal phenomenal experience. I’m currently a collaboration partner for a research network investigating this sort of experience.
First-person methods for studying consciousness
I’m a firm advocate for combining philosophical and theoretical research on the nature of consciousness with phenomenological research. To that aim, I have followed training on the micro-phenomenological interview (MPI), a qualitative research tool that aims at gathering fine-grained reports of subjective experiences. The MPI method has recently gained a lot of interest in cognitive science given its fit with the neurophenomenology research programme, a research framework developed by Francisco Varela (1999) which encouraged the interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscience and qualitative research methods to the study of the subjective experience. My current empirical research ascribes to this research method as well as to its theoretical framework. I’m preparing a couple of collaborative projects in which I will apply this research tool in experimental sleep research. I’m eager to hear from other experimental researchers that would be keen to collaborate (either by carrying out further empirical research or theoretical work).