The Dream Argument Against Utilitarianism and Hedonic Theories of Subjective Well-Being

If hedonic theories of value are true, we have compelling moral and prudential reason to invest large amounts of resources to improving the quality of our dream lives. But we don't have compelling moral or prudential reason to invest large amounts of resources to improving the quality of our dream lives. Therefore, hedonic theories of value are not true. [Revised 11:37 a.m. after helpful discussion on Facebook.]

Last night I had quite a few unpleasant experiences. For example, in my last dream before waking I was rushing around a fancy hotel, feeling flustered and snubbed. In other dreams, I feel like I am being chased through thigh-deep water in the ruins of a warehouse. Or I have to count dozens of scurrying animals, but I can't seem to keep the numbers straight. Or I lose control of my car on a curvy road -- AAAAGH! Sweet relief, then, when I awake and these dreams dissipate.

For me, such dreams are fairly typical. Most of my dreams are neutral to unpleasant. I don't want my "dreams to come true". In any given twenty-four hour period, the odds are pretty good that my most unpleasant experiences were while I was sleeping -- even if I usually don't remember those experiences. (Years ago, I briefly kept a dream diary. I dropped the project when I noticed that my dreams were mostly negative and lingered if I journaled them after waking.) Maybe you also mostly have unpleasant experiences in sleep? Whether the average person's dream experiences are mostly negative or mostly positive is currently disputed by dream researchers.

I was reminded of the importance of dream experience for the hedonic balance of one's life while reading Paul Bloom's new book The Sweet Spot. On page 18, Bloom is discussing how you might calculate the total number of happy versus unhappy moments in your life. As an aside, he writes "We're just counting waking moments; let's save the question of the happiness or sadness of sleeping people for another day." But why save it for another day? If you accept a hedonic theory of value, shouldn't dreams count? Indeed, mightn't we expect that the most intense experiences of joy, fright, frustration, etc., mostly happen in sleep? To omit them from the hedonic calculus is to omit an enormous chunk of our emotional experience.

According to hedonic theories of value, what matters most in the world is the balance of positive to negative experiences. Hedonic theories of subjective well-being hold that what matters most to your well-being or quality of life is how you feel moment to moment -- the proportion or sum of good feelings versus bad ones, weighted by intensity. Hedonic theories of ethics, such as classical utilitarianism, hold that what is morally best is the action that best improves the balance of pleasure versus pain in the world.

If hedonic theories are correct, we really ought to try improving our dream lives. Suppose I spend half the night dreaming, with a 5:1 ratio of unpleasant to pleasant dreams. If I could flip that ratio, my hedonic well-being would be vastly improved! The typical dream might not be frustration in a maze of a hotel but instead frolicking in Hawaiian surf.

If hedonic theories are correct, dream research ought to be an urgent international priority. If safe and effective ways were found to improve people's dream quality around the world, the overall hedonic profile of humanity would change dramatically for the better! People might be miserable in their day jobs, or stuck in refugee camps, or hungry, or diseased. But for eight hours a day, they could have joyful respite. A few hours of nightly bliss might hedonically outweigh any but the most intense daily suffering.

So why does no one take such proposals seriously?

Is it because dreams are mostly forgotten? No. First, it shouldn't matter whether they are forgotten. A forgotten joy is no less a joy (though admittedly, you don't have the additional joy of pleasantly remembering it). Eventually we forget almost everything. Second, we can work to improve our memory of dreams. Simply keeping a dream diary has a big positive effect on dream recall over time.

It is because there's no way to improve the hedonic quality of our dreams? Also no. Many people report dramatic improvements to their dream quality after they teach themselves to have lucid dreams (dreams in which you are aware you are dreaming and exert some control over the content of your dreams). Likely there are other techniques too that we would discover if we bothered to seriously research the matter. Pessimism about the project is just ignorance justifying ignorance.

Is it because the positive or negative experiences in dreams aren't "real emotions"? No, this doesn't work either. Maybe we should reserve emotion words for waking emotions or maybe not; regardless, negative and positive feelings of some sort are really there. The nightmare is a genuinely intensely negative experience, the flying dream a genuinely intensively positive experience. As such, they clearly belong in the hedonic calculus as standardly conceived.

The real reason that we scoff at serious effort to improve the quality of our dream lives is this: We don't really care that much about our hedonic states in sleep. It doesn't seem worth compromising on the goods and projects of waking life so as to avoid the ordinary unpleasantness of dreams. We reject hedonic theories of value.

But still, dream improvement research warrants at least a little scientific funding, don't you think? I'd pay a small sum for a night of sweet dreams instead of salty ones. Maybe a fifth of the cost of a movie ticket?

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Related:

How Much Should You Care about How You Feel in Your Dreams? (Apr 17, 2012)

[Image generated by wombo.art, with the prompt "hotel dream" (cyberpunk style)]

"I Think There's About a 99.8% Chance That You Exist" Said the Skeptic

Alone in my office, it can seem reasonable to me to have only about a 99% to 99.9% credence that the world is more or less how I think it is, while reserving the remaining 0.1% to 1% credence for the possibility that some radically skeptical scenario obtains (such as that this is a dream or that I'm in a short term sim).

But in public... hm. It seems an odd thing to say aloud to someone else! The question rises acutely as I prepare to give a talk on 1% Skepticism at University of Miami this Friday. Can I face an audience and say, "Well, I think there's a small chance that I'm dreaming right now"? Such an utterance seems even stranger than the run-of-the-mill strangeness of dream skepticism in solitary moments.

I've tried it on my teenage son. He knows my arguments for 1% skepticism. One day, driving him to school, a propos of nothing, I said, "I'm almost certain that you exist." A joke, of course. How could he have heard it, or how could I have meant it, in any other way?

One possible source of strangeness is this: My audience knows that they are not just my dream-figures. So it's tempting to say that in some sense they know that my doubts are misplaced.

But in non-skeptical cases, we can view people as reasonable in having non-zero credence in propositions we know to be false, if we recognize an informational asymmetry. The blackjack dealer who knows she has a 20 doesn't think the player a fool for standing on a 19. Even if the dealer sincerely tells the player she has a 20, she might think the player reasonable to say he has some doubt about the truth of the dealer's testimony. So why do radically skeptical cases seem different?

One possible clue is this: It doesn't seem wrong in quite the same way to say "I think that we might all be part of a short-term sim". Being together in skeptical doubt seems fine -- in the right context, it might even be kind of friendly, kind of fun.

Maybe, then, the issue is a matter of respect -- a matter of treating one's interlocutor as an equal partner, metaphysically and epistemically? There's something offensive, perhaps, or inegalitarian, or oppressive, or silencing, about saying "I know for sure that I exist, but I have some doubts about whether you do".

I feel the problem most keenly in the presence of the people I love. I can't doubt that we are in this world together. It seems wrong -- merely a pose, possibly an offensive pose -- to say to my seriously ill father, in seeming sincerity at the end of a philosophical discussion about death and God, "I think there's a 99.8% chance that you exist". It throws a wall up between us.

Or can it be done in a different way? Maybe I could say: "Here, you should doubt me. And I too will doubt you, just a tiny bit, so we are doubting together. Very likely, the world exists just as we think it does; or even if it doesn't, even if nothing exists beyond this room, still I am more sure of you than I am of almost anything else."

There is a risk in radical skepticism, a risk that I will doubt others dismissively or disrespectfully, alienating myself from them. But I believe that this risk can be managed, maybe even reversed: In confessing my skepticism to you, I make myself vulnerable. I show you my weird, nerdy doubts, which you might laugh at, or dismiss, or join me in. If you join me, or even just engage me seriously, we will have connected in a way that I treasure.

Does Skepticism Destroy Its Own Empirical Grounds?

You might think that empirically grounded radical skepticism is self-defeating.

Consider dream skepticism. Suppose I have, or think I have, empirical grounds for believing that dreams and waking life are difficult to tell apart. On those grounds, I think that my experience now, which I'd taken to be waking experience, might actually be dream experience. But if I might now be dreaming, then my current opinions (or seeming opinions) about the past all become suspect. I no longer have good grounds for thinking that dreams and waking life are difficult to tell apart. Boom!

(That was supposed to be the sound of a skeptical argument imploding.)

Stephen Maitzen has recently been advancing an argument of roughly that sort: that the skeptic "must attribute to us justified empirical beliefs of the very kind the argument must deny us" (p. 30). Similarly, G.E. Moore, in "Certainty", argues that dream skeptics assume that they know that dreams have occurred, and that if one is dreaming one does not know that dreams have occurred. (Boom.)

One problem with this self-defeat objection to dream skepticism is that it assumes that the skeptic is committed to saying she is justified in thinking (or knows) that this might well be a dream. The most radical skeptics (e.g., Sextus), might not be committed to this.

A more moderate skeptic (like my 1% skeptic) can't escape the argument that way, but another way is available. And that is to concede that whatever degree of credence she was initially inclined to assign to the possibility that she is dreaming, on the basis of her assumed empirical evidence and memories of the past, she probably should tweak that credence somewhat to take into account the fact that she can no longer be highly confident about the provenance of that seeming empirical evidence. But unless she somehow discovers new grounds for thinking that it's impossible or hugely unlikely that she is dreaming, this is only partial undercutting -- not grounds for 100% confidence that she is not dreaming. She can still maintain reasonable doubt: Previously she was very confident that she knew that dreams and waking life were hard to tell apart; now she could see going either way on that question.

Consider this case as an analogy. I have a very vivid and realistic seeming-memory of having been told ten minutes ago, by a powerful demon, that in five minutes this demon would flip a coin. If it comes up heads, she will give me a 50% mix of true and false memories about the half hour before and after the coin flip, including about that very conversation; if tails, she won't tamper with my memory. Then she'll walk away and leave me in my office.

Should I trust my seeming-memories of the past half hour, including of that conversation? If I trust those memories, that gives me reason not to trust them. If I don't trust those memories, well that seems hardly less skeptical. Either way, I'm left with substantial doubt. The doubt undercuts its own grounds to some extent, yes, but it doesn't seem epistemically justified to react to that self-undercutting by purging all doubt and resting in perfect confidence that my memories of that conversation are entirely veridical.

This is the heart of the empirical skeptic's dilemma: Either I confidently take my experience at face value or I don't. If I don't confidently take my experience at face value, I am already a skeptic. If I do confidently take my experience at face value, then I discover empirical reasons not to take it confidently at face value after all. Those reasons partly undercut themselves, but that partial undercutting does not then justify shifting back to high confidence as though there were no such grounds for doubt.

(image source)

Should I Try to Fly, Just on the Off-Chance That This Might Be a Dreambody?

I don't often attempt to fly when walking across campus, but yesterday I gave it a try. I was going to the science library to retrieve some books on dreaming. About halfway there, in the wide-open mostly-empty quad, I spread my arms, looked at the sky, and added a leap to one of my steps.

My thinking was this: I was almost certainly awake -- but only almost certainly! As I've argued, I think it's hard to justify much more than 99.9% confidence that one is awake, once one considers the dubitability of all the empirical theories and philosophical arguments against dream doubt. And when one's confidence is imperfect, it will sometimes be reasonable to act on the off-chance that one is mistaken -- whenever the benefits of acting on that off-chance are sufficiently high and the costs sufficiently low.

I imagined that if I was dreaming, it would be totally awesome to fly around, instead of trudging along. On the other hand, if I was not dreaming, it seemed no big deal to leap, and in fact kind of fun -- maybe not entirely in keeping with the sober persona I (feebly) attempt to maintain as a professor, but heck, it's winter break and no one's around. So I figured, why not give it a whirl?

I'll model this thinking with a decision matrix, since we all love decision matrices, don't we? Call dream-flying a gain of 100, waking leap-and-fail a loss of 0.1, dreaming leap-and-fail a loss of only 0.01 (since no one will really see me), and continuing to walk in the dream a loss of 1 (since why bother with the trip if it's just a dream?). All this is relative to a default of zero for walking, awake, to the library. (For simplicity, I assume that if I'm dreaming things are overall not much better or worse than if I'm awake, e.g., that I can get the books and work on my research tomorrow.) I'd been reading about false awakenings, and at that moment 99.7% confidence in my wakefulness seemed about right to me. The odds of flying conditional upon dreaming I held to be about 50/50, since I don't always succeed when I try to fly in my dreams.

So here's the payoff matrix:

Plugging into the expected value formula:

Leap = (.003)(.5)(100) + (.003)(.5)(-0.01) + (.997)(-0.1) = approx. +.05.

Not Leap = (.003)(-1) + (.997)(0) = -.003.

Leap wins!

Of course, this decision outcome is highly dependent on one's degree of confidence that one is awake, on the downsides of leaping if it's not a dream, on the pleasure one takes in dream-flying, and on the probability of success if one is in fact dreaming. I wouldn't recommend attempting to fly if, say, you're driving your son to school or if you're standing in front of a class of 400, lecturing on evil.

But in those quiet moments, as you're walking along doing nothing else, with no one nearby to judge you -- well maybe in such moments spreading your wings can be the most reasonable thing to do.

Dream Skepticism and the Phenomenal Shadow of Belief

Ernest Sosa has argued that we do not form beliefs when we dream. If I dream that a tiger is chasing me, I do not really believe that a tiger is chasing me. If I dream that I am saying to myself "I'm awake!" I do not really believe that I'm awake. Real beliefs are more deeply integrated than are these dream-mirages with my standing attitudes and my waking behavior. If so, it follows that if I genuinely believe that I'm awake, necessarily I am correct; and conversely if I believe I'm dreaming, necessarily I'm wrong. The first belief is self-verifying; the second self-defeating. Deliberating between them, I should not choose the self-defeating one, nor should I decline to choose, as though these two options were of equal epistemic merit. Rather, I should settle upon the self-verifying belief that I am awake. Thus, dream skepticism is vanquished!

One nice thing about Sosa's argument is that it does not require that dream experience differ from waking experience in any of the ways that dreams and waking life are sometimes thought to differ (e.g., dream experience needn't be gappier, or less coherent, or more like imagery experience than like perceptual experience). The argument would still work even if dream experience were, as Sosa says, "internally indistinguishable" from waking experience.

This seeming strength of the argument, though, seems to me to signal a flaw. Suppose that dreaming life is in fact in every respect phenomenally indistinguishable from waking life -- indistinguishable from the inside, as it were -- and accordingly that I could easily experience exactly *this* while sleeping; and furthermore suppose that I dream extensively every night and that most of my dreams have mundane everyday content just like that of my waking life. None of this should affect Sosa's argument. And suppose further that I am in fact now awake (and thus capable of forming beliefs about whether I am dreaming, per Sosa), and that I know that due to a horrible disease I acquired at age 35, I spend almost all of my life in dreaming sleep so that 90% of the time when I have experiences of this sort (as if in my office, thinking about philosophy, working on a blog post...) I am sleeping. Unless there's something I'm aware of that points toward this not being a dream, shouldn't I hesitate before jumping to the conclusion that this time, unlike all those others, I really am awake? Probabilities, frequencies, and degrees of resemblance seem to matter, but there is no room for them in Sosa's argument.

Maybe we don't form beliefs when we dream -- Sosa, and also Jonathan Ichikawa, have presented some interesting arguments along those lines. But if there is no difference from the inside between dreams and waking, then my dreaming self, when he was dreaming about considering dream skepticism (e.g., here) did something that was phenomenally indistinguishable from forming the belief that he was thinking about philosophy, something that was phenomenally indistinguishable from forming the belief that was affirming or denying or suspending belief about the question of whether he was dreaming -- and then the question becomes: How do I know that I'm not doing that very same thing right now?

Call it dream-shadow believing: It's like believing, except that it happens only in dreams. If dream-shadow believing is possible, then if I dream-shadow believe that I am dreaming, necessarily I am correct; if I dream-shadow believe that I am awake, necessarily I am wrong. The first is self-verifying, the second self-defeating. The skeptic can now ask: Should I try to form the belief that I am awake or instead the dream-shadow belief that I am dreaming? -- and to this question, Sosa's argument gives no answer.

Update, 3:28 pm:

Jonathan Ichikawa has kindly reminded me that he presented similar arguments against Sosa back in 2007 -- which I knew (in fact, Jonathan thanks me in the article for my comments) but somehow forgot. Jonathan runs the reply a bit differently, in terms of quasi-affirming (which is neutral between genuine affirming and something phenomenally indistinguishable from affirming, but which one can do in a dream) rather than in terms of dream-shadow believing. Perhaps my dream-shadow belief formulation enables a parity-of-argument objection, if (given the phenomenal indistinguishability of dreams and waking) the argument that one should settle on self-verifying dream-shadow belief is as strong an argument as is Sosa's original argument.

A Smidgen of Dream Skepticism

Every night I dream. And often when I dream I seem to think that I am awake. Is it possible, then, that I'm dreaming now, as I sit here, or seem to, in my office?

How should I go about addressing this question? The natural place to start, it seems to me, is with my opinions about dreams -- opinions that might be entirely wrong and ill-founded if I'm dreaming or otherwise radically deceived, but which I seem, anyway, to find myself stuck with.

Based on these opinions, I don't find it at all likely that I'm dreaming. For one thing, I tend to favor a theory of dreams on which dreams don't involve perception-like experiences but rather only imagery experiences (see Ichikawa 2009). If that theory is correct, then from the fact -- I think it's a fact! -- that I'm now having perception-like experiences, it follows that I'm not dreaming.

However, theories of this sort admit of some doubt. In the history of philosophy and psychology, as I seem to recall, many thinkers have held that when we dream we have experiences indistinguishable from waking perceptions -- Descartes held this, for example, and more recently Allan Hobson. It would be foolish arrogance to think there is no chance that they are right about this. So maybe I should I should accept the imagination model of dreaming with only, say, 80% credence? That seems pretty close to the confidence level that I do in fact have, when I reflect on the matter.

But even if I allow some possibility that dream experiences are typically much like waking perceptions, I might remain confident that I'm not dreaming. After all, I don't feel like I'm asleep. Maybe my current visual, auditory, and tactile sensory experiences could come to me in a dream, but I think I'm more rational in my cognition than I normally am when dreaming. And I recall, seemingly, a more coherent past. And maybe the stability of the details of my experience is greater.

But again, it seems unwarranted to hold with 100% confidence that dreams can't be rational, coherent, and stable in the way my current attitudes and experience seems to be. After all, people (if I recall correctly) have pretty poor knowledge of the basic facts about dream experience (for example, its coloration). Or even if I do insist on perfect confidence in the instability, incoherence, and irrationality of typical dreams, it seems unwarranted for me to be 100% confident that this is not an exceptional dream of some sort. So maybe I should do another 80-20 split? Or 90-10? Let's say the latter. Conditionally upon a 20% credence in a theory of dreams on which we have waking-like sensory experiences while dreaming, I have about 90% confidence that, nonetheless, my current experience has some other feature, like stability or rational coherence, that establishes that I am not dreaming. That would leave me about 98% confident that I am awake.

But I can do better than that! On some philosophical theories, I couldn't even form the opinion that I might be dreaming unless I really am awake. Alternatively, maybe it's just constitutive of being a rational agent that I assume with 100% confidence that I am awake. Or maybe there's some other excellent refutation of dream doubt -- a refutation I can't currently articulate, but which nonetheless justifies my and others' normal assumption, when awake, that they are indeed awake. Such theories are attractive, since no one (well, almost no one) wants to be a dream skeptic! Dream skepticism is pretty bizarre! So hopefully philosophy can succor common sense in this matter, even I don't currently see exactly how. I'm not extremely confident about any such theory, especially without any compelling argument immediately to hand, but it seems likely that something can be worked out.

Thus, I am almost certain that I am awake. Probably dreams don't involve sense experiences of the sort I am having now; or even if they do, probably something else about my current experience establishes that I am not dreaming; or even if nothing in my current experience establishes that I am not dreaming, probably there is some excellent philosophical argument that would justify confidence in the fact that I am not currently dreaming. But of none of these things am I perfectly confident. My degree of certainty in the proposition that I am now awake is somewhat less than 100%. I hesitate to put a precise number on it, and yet it seems better to attach an approximate number than to keep to ordinary English terms that might be variously interpreted. To have only 90% credence that I am awake seems far more doubt than than is reasonable; I assume you'll agree. On the other hand, 99.9999% credence that I am awake seems considerably too high, once I really think about the matter. Somewhere on the order of 99.9% (or 99.99%?) confidence that I am currently awake, then?

Is that too strange -- not to be exactly spot-on 100% confident that I am awake?

Portrayals of Dream Coloration in Mid-Twentieth Century Cinema

From the 1930s-1950s, people in the U.S. thought they dreamed mostly in black and white. Nowadays, people think they dream mostly in color. In previous work, I've presented evidence that this change in opinion was driven by people's over-analogizing dreams to movies -- assuming their dreams are colored if the film media around them are colored, assuming their dreams are black and white if the film media around them are black and white. A few days ago, I summarized my research on this at the Velaslavasay Panorama Museum in L.A., and media scholar Ann-Sophie Lehmann, who was in the audience, raised this question: If people thought they dreamed in black and white in that period, did the cinema of the time tend to portray dreams as black and white?

Here's the idea: If Hollywood directors in the 1930s-1950s thought that dreams were black and white, then color films from that period ought often to portray dream sequences in black and white. This would presumably have been, by the directors' lights, a realistic way to portray dreams, and it would also solve the cinematic problem of how to let the audience know that they're viewing a dream sequence. But that doesn't seem to have been the pattern. In fact, one of the most famous movies of the era actually goes the reverse direction: The Wizard of Oz (1939) portrays Oz in color and Kansas in black and white, and arguably Oz is Dorothy's dream.

I'm not worried about my thesis that people in the U.S. in that era didn't think they dreamed in color -- the evidence is too overwhelming -- but it's interesting that American cinema in that era did not tend to portray dreams as black and white. Why not? Or am I wrong about the cinema of the period? It seems worth a more systematic look. Thoughts? Suggestions?

Grounds for Dream Skepticism

In his famous anti-skeptical work, On Certainty, Wittgenstein wants "grounds for doubt". He wants positive reason to accept a radically skeptical hypothesis.

Trudeau obliges. The key panels:

Life going well? Implausibly well? Wake up and smell the latrine, baby!

The same reasoning might apply if things are implausibly hellish.

Such reasoning should apply especially to Wittgenstein himself. I mean, what's the prior probability of that being your life -- impoverished scion of a suicidal Austrian family of immense wealth, arguably the greatest philosopher of your day though unemployed and hardly publishing, etc.? At the time he wrote On Certainty, Wittgenstein should have thought: Surely all this is some weird dreambrain mashup of wish fulfillment and nightmare!

Philosophers at the peak of public fame should all be dream skeptics. QED.

How Much Should You Care about How You Feel in Your Dreams?

Psychological hedonists say that people are motivated mainly or exclusively by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of displeasure or pain. Normative hedonists say that what we should be mainly or exclusively concerned about in our actions is maximizing our own and others' pleasure and minimizing our own and others' displeasure. Both types of hedonism have fallen on hard times since the days of Jeremy Bentham. Still, it might seem that hedonism isn't grossly wrong: Pleasure and displeasure are crucial motivators, and increasing pleasure and reducing displeasure should be a major part of living wisely and of structuring a good society.

Now consider dreams. Often a dream is the most pleasant or unpleasant thing that occurs all day. Discovering that you can fly, whee! How much do you do in waking life that's as fun as that? Conversely, how many things in waking life are as unpleasant as a nightmare? Here's a great opportunity, then, to advance the hedonistic project! Whatever you can do to improve the ratio of pleasant to unpleasant dreams should have a big impact on the balance of pleasure vs. displeasure in your life.

This fact, naturally, explains the huge emphasis utilitarian ethicists have placed on improving one's dream life. It also explains why companies offering dream-improvement regimens make so much more money than those promising merely weight loss.

Not. Of course not! When I ask people how concerned they are about the overall hedonic balance of their dreams, their response is almost always "Meh". But if the overall sum of felt pleasure and displeasure is important -- even if it's not the whole of what makes life valuable -- shouldn't we take at least somewhat seriously the quality our dream lives?

Dreams are usually forgotten, but I'm not sure how much that matters. Most people forget most of their childhood, too, and within a week they forget almost everything that happened on any given day. That doesn't seem to make the hedonic quality of those events irrelevant. Your three-year-old may entirely forget her birthday party a year later, but you still want her to enjoy it, right? And anyway: We can easily work to remember our dreams if we want. Simply jotting down one's dreams in a diary hugely increases dream recall. So if recall were important, one could pursue a two-step regimen: First, work toward improving the hedonic quality of your dreams (maybe by learning lucid dreaming), and second, improve your dream memory. The total impact on the amount of remembered pleasure in your life would be enormous!

Robert Nozick famously argued against hedonism by saying that few people would choose the guaranteed pleasure one could get by plugging into an experience machine over the uncertain pleasures of real-life accomplishment. Nozickian experience machines don't really exist, of course, but dreams do, and, contra hedonism, our indifference about dreams suggests that Nozick is right: Few people value even the great pleasures and displeasures of dream life over the most meager of real-world accomplishments.

(I remember chatting with someone at the Pacific APA about this a couple weeks ago -- Stephen White, maybe? In the fog of memory, I can't recall exactly who it was or to what extent these thoughts originated from me as opposed to my interlocutor.  Apologies, then, if they're due!)

[Related post: On Not Seeking Pleasure Much.]

Empirical Evidence Against My View of Dream Reports

Nowadays, most Americans report dreaming in color. In the 1950s, most Americans reported dreaming in black and white. In a series of articles I have argued that the reason for this change is not that people used to dream in black and white and now dream in color. Rather, I argue, people over-analogize dreams to movies. Thus, as movie technology shifts, people's dream reports shift, though their dreams themselves remain the same.

(Two pieces of evidence for this view: (a.) The use of color terms ("brown", "orange", etc.) in dream diaries seems to have been consistent since the 1950s. (b.) Color dream reporting correlates with group history of black-and-white media exposure across socioeconomic groups in China.)

A new study by Hitoshi Okada and colleagues in Japan calls my research into doubt. In 1993, Okada and colleagues had found that young Japanese respondents tended to report colored dreaming while older respondents tended to report not dreaming in color -- a result entirely in accord with my hypothesis, due to respondents' presumably different histories of black-and-white vs. colored media exposure. Now in 2011, Okada at al. find almost exactly the same pattern of responding. Thus, the cohort of respondents that was in their 20s and 30s in 1993, and who reported mostly colored dreaming back then, reports relatively infrequent color dreaming now. Twenty years of (presumably) colored media exposure appears not to have shifted them toward reporting more colored dreaming -- if anything, the opposite.

Maybe these results can be reconciled with my view. For example, maybe older Japanese regard as the archetypal movie the old-fashioned high-art black-and-white movies of Kurosawa and others. But that doesn't seem especially likely.

Another possibility (as always!) is that Okada's research is open to interpretations other than its face-value interpretation.

The following is Okada et al.'s entire description of their questionnaire:

The participants were required to check one of five categories describing the frequency with which color occurred in their dreams during the past year: 1 (always), 2 (sometimes), 3 (occasionally), 4 (seldom), or 5 (never) (p. 216).

In English, I don't know that "sometimes" implies higher frequency than "occasionally", but I trust that this is just an infelicity of translation from the original Japanese.

One worry is that this measure has no denominator. So here's one possible explanation of the Okada et al. results: Older Japanese people report dreaming less in general than do younger Japanese, so they report less frequent colored dreaming too. This would be consistent with their self-reported ratio of black-and-white to colored dreaming being about the same. (In my own work on the issue, I ask some respondents about absolute frequency or colored dreaming and others about the proportion of colored to black-and-white dreams.)

Another potential concern is non-response bias. Okada et al. state that their participants were "students in Bunkyo University, Jissen Women’s University, and Iwate University, or members of their families" (p. 215). They don't indicate the response rates of the family members, but it's possible that only a minority of family members who heard about the questionnaire chose to respond. If so, those family responders would mostly be people with higher-than-average interest in the issue of black-and-white vs. colored dreaming. And we might reasonably worry that such people would not have views on that question that are representative of the population as a whole. (This is, of course, the notorious problem with online polls.)

I'd be very interested to see a follow-up study addressing these concerns.

Avowing Dream Skepticism in a Dream

Last night I dreamt I was giving a talk -- a talk I am due to give next week in Australia. The talk wasn't going so well, and I suggested to the audience that maybe, just maybe, I was actually dreaming giving the talk. My evidence was that I remembered having planned to polish things up in the remaining few days before the talk but now I couldn't remember those days having occurred.

Alex Byrne, in the back of the room, looked highly skeptical and a bit dyspeptic. Dave Chalmers looked mildly amused. Dan Dennett stood up and said, "I very much doubt that you are dreaming, but I agree that your talk is nightmarishly bad."

Of course, it turns out that I was right and they were wrong. So there!

Recoloring the Dreamworld

I'm hard at work these days on my second book, tentatively titled Perplexities of Consciousness. Chapter One, "Recoloring the Dreamworld", draws from these three earlier essays, integrating, updating, and adding new reflections. I've posted it here.

The chapter treats the rise and fall of the view, widespread in the U.S. circa 1950, that dreams are primarily a black and white phenomenon. I argue that it's likely that dreams themselves did not change over the course of the 20th century, but rather that what changed was only people's opinions about their dreams. The view that dreams are black and white was most likely due to an overanalogizing of dreams to the black and white film media dominant at the time. It's also possible, I suggest, that the contemporary view that dreams are in color -- as opposed to leaving unspecified the color of most of the objects represented -- is also due to overanalogizing to film media.

Corrections and objections welcomed, of course, either here or by email. (Unalloyed praise is of course also welcomed, though less useful!)

New Studies on Black and White vs. Colored Dreaming

In the mid-20th century, people generally thought most of their dreams were black and white; no longer. The key appears to be different levels of group exposure to black and white media. Two key questions are:

(1.) Does black and white media exposure lead people to really dream in black and white or does it lead people to erroneously report that they do?

(2.) Do people who report dreaming in color really dream in color or are the colors of most of the objects in the dreamworld unspecified? (If you have trouble conceiving of the latter, think about novels, which leave the colors of most of their objects unspecified.)

Two recent studies (Schredl et al. 2008; Murzyn 2008) cast a bit more light on these questions. Both researchers asked general questions about people's dreams and also had people answer questions about their dreams in "dream diaries" immediately upon waking in the morning.

First, both studies confirm that college-age respondents these days rarely report black-and-white dreams, either when asked about their dreams in general or when completing dream diaries. Murzyn finds that older respondents (aged about 55-75 years) more commonly report black and white dreams, but even in this group the rates of reported black and white dreams (22%) don't approach the levels of 50 or 60 years ago.

On issue 1: Both Schredl and Murzyn find that people with better overall dream recall report more colored and less black and white dreaming. Schredl also finds that people with better recall of color in (waking) visual displays report more color in dreams. On the face of it, this might suggest that reports of black and white dreams come from less credible reporters; but it could just be that the kind of people who dream in black and white are the kind of people who dream less often and less vividly and are less interested in color memory tasks; or black and white dreams may generally be less detailed. Also, it's possible that the experimenters' different measures corrupt each other: People who describe themselves as having frequent colored dreams may find themselves more motivated to report richly detailed colored dreams and to try harder on color recall tasks (as if to conform to their earlier self-portrayal) than do those reporting black and white dreaming.

On issue 2: Both studies find that respondents generally claim to dream in color or a mix of color and black and white, rather than claiming to dream neither in color nor in black and white. In Murzyn's questionnaire, only one of sixty respondents claimed to dream neither in color nor black and white (which matches my own findings in 2003). In their dream diaries, Murzyn's participants described only 2% of their dreams as neither colored nor black and white. In Shredl's dream diaries, participants listed objects central to their dreams and stated if those objects were colored. By this measure, 83% of dream objects were colored (vs. 3% black and white, 15% don't recall). Therefore, if it's true that most dream objects are neither colored nor black and white, respondents themselves must not realize this, even about their own immediately past dreams. This may seem unlikely, but given the apparent inaccuracy of introspection even about current conscious experience I consider it a definite possibility.

Squaring the Circle, in Malcolm's Dreams

Few works of philosophy are more perverse than Norman Malcolm's (1959) Dreaming, in which he argues that dreams do not occur when one is asleep and contain no feelings, imagery, sensations, or the like. Malcolm's view, rather, is this: When we wake, we're inclined to confabulate stories of a certain sort. Telling such a story is what we call "relating a dream", but there is no sense in which the dream exists independently of or prior to the story we tell about it, and no sense in which such a story can be evaluated as an accurate or inaccurate description of occurrences during sleep.

Malcolm knew about the then-recent REM research that most people think creates serious problems for his view. He cites and dismisses, on what seem to me flimsy grounds, Dement's research suggesting that reported dream duration on waking matches duration of REM sleep and his very suggestive finding that horizontal movements of the eyes during REM sleep correlate with dream reports of horizontally-salient events (such as a tennis match) and vertical movements of the eyes correlate with reports of vertically-salient events (such as climbing a series of ladders, looking up and down them).

So I don't recommend trusting Malcolm on dreams. But here is an interesting remark of his:

In a dream I can do the impossible in every sense of the word. I can climb Everest without oxygen and I can square the circle (p. 57).

So here's my question: What does it mean to say one can "square the circle" in dreams?

Surely Malcolm doesn't mean that the dreamer can actually coherently conceive of a square circle. That, I take it, is straightforwardly impossible. Somewhat differently, can one violate the laws of math and logic in fiction? Can I coherently tell a story in which 2 + 2 equals 5 (like I can coherently tell a story in which pigs fly)? I'm not particularly well read in the metaphysics of fiction, but my impression is that few philosophers of fiction would grant that -- though if we do grant it, we might be able to use it (with some additional assumptions) to give sense to the idea of squaring a circle in a dream.

More likely, Malcolm is expressing the idea that we can reach incredibly stupid judgments in our dreams, even baldly contradictory judgments. I have also long thought this (see section v. of this essay).

If we accept this view, it gives more juice to the dream skeptic than she is usually accorded. For if this right now might be a dream, then mightn't also my thinking be so baldly contradictory that I can't even trust my simplest-seeming judgments? The dream possibility calls, then, not only sense experience but also reasoning into doubt. If we allow ourselves the assumption that a faculty frequently unreliable is not to be trusted, there would be no hope that I can rely on my reason to establish the hypothesis that I actually am awake, or indeed anything else.

Color and Dream Experience in Philosophy, 1940-1959

As regular visitors to this blog may recall, I've occasionally discussed a historical trend in reports of the coloration of dreaming -- a tendency for Americans (that is, residents of the U.S.) to report overwhelmingly black-and-white dreaming in the 1940s and 1950s, and a tendency for pre-20th century philosophers and psychologists and 21st century Americans to report predominantly or exclusively color dreaming. With Changbing Huang and Yifeng Zhou, I found the same trend in subgroups in mainland China, where rates of reporting of black-and-white dreaming varied with the prevalence of black-and-white media in one's community. My hypothesis is not that the actual content of the dreams changed between these periods. (For example, rates of color-term use in dream diaries are amazingly consistent.) Rather, I hold that it was only the reporting that changed -- more specifically, that at least some people mistakenly assimilated the properties of film media to their dream experience.

Recently I've been wondering if I'd see the same trend among philosophers. Would philosophers of the 1940s and 1950s say that dreams were mainly black and white? This issue is especially interesting in the context of dream skepticism, the view (from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and from Descartes's first two Meditations and from many other sources) that we cannot, or cannot reliably, discriminate between dream experience and waking sensory experience. If waking visual sensory experience is pervasively colored and while dreams rarely contain colored objects, both of which many Americans in the 1940s and 1950s would have granted, it should be easy to tell the one from the other, right? So dream skepticism should be less compelling.

So far, however, in looking through the literature from that period, that's not what I've found. On the contrary, the issue doesn't even seem to arise in the literature on dreams and dream skepticism (though I still need to check more sources to say this definitively). Some philosophers even casually mention color as an element of dreams, without special remark or acknowledgement of the issue. Elizabeth H. Wolgast, for example, when reaching for an example of a dream in the context of a discussion of dream experience and waking sensory experience, imagines someone saying, "In my dream, I saw great blue grasshoppers" (Philosophical Review, 1958, p. 231). She does not remark in particular on the issue of coloration.

I'm not sure how much to draw from this. Even in the black-and-whitest days of black-and-white dream reporting, people tended to acknowledge the possibility, at least, of fully colored dreaming. And maybe that possibility is enough for philosophers to do their thing, and to justify dream skepticism to whatever extent it is justified?

How I Know I'm Not Dreaming (I Think)

I'm not dreaming. Neither are you.

Oddly, the second sentence seems to be self-confirming in a way the first isn't -- if it refers to an actual "you", that is, if anyone other than me actually reads the sentence, then the sentence must necessarily be true (barring paranormal dreamer-to-dreamer communication). But of course this doesn't imply that I have any special knowledge of your waking state. It's merely a trick of language....

How do I know I'm awake? Responders to the previous post, and others I've questioned, tend to offer the following grounds for knowing:

(1.) Sensory experience is more vivid or detailed in waking than in dreaming. The pinch test may be a version of this. Some claim not to feel their feet on the floor or to be pained staring at the sun. Others say the wide panoply of current visual experience would be impossible in sleep. (Jonathan Ichikawa has recently been arguing that it's not even sensory-like experience we have in dreaming but rather only imagery.)

(2.) Sensory experience is more stable and organized in waking than in dreaming. Some people, for example, say that the words on a page (or on a computer screen!) won't stay still during dreaming, or that a clock's time will be strange or blank or keep changing.

(3.) I cannot do some actions that I can ordinarily do when I try to do them while dreaming -- for example, I can't fly.

Now, I'm inclined to dismiss (3). Maybe, if I can fly, I can rightly conclude that I am dreaming, but the reverse doesn't seem to follow. I suspect that it's perfectly normal to have dreams in which one cannot fly, etc., even if one wants to (unless, perhaps, one realizes one is dreaming and so takes command of the dream, as in lucid dreaming).

(1) and (2) are more tempting. In fact, when I started planning this post I thought I might go for a version of (1). But here's my problem: I go to a quiet place and close my eyes. I still feel quite confident I'm awake. But my visual experience is not very distinct or organized -- certainly not so distinct and organized that I couldn't imagine my brain producing just such experience during sleep without the aid of external input. My auditory experience is pretty vague and thin too. I feel my feet on the floor, of course. But could it really come down to such a slender thread? Is that really my only basis for knowing I'm awake? What if I found a way to deprive myself of vivid or organized tactile sensation too (e.g., by floating in water)? Would I then have no basis for knowing whether I'm asleep or awake?

So maybe we should consider:

(4.) There's some direct and intrinsic knowledge we all have when we're awake that we're awake -- knowledge that's somehow immediate, not on the basis of anything sensory or quasi-sensory.

I point out that accepting some version of (4) -- or (1) or (2) -- does not imply that I can always know that I'm dreaming when I am dreaming. In dreams, we are often confused and leap to weird conclusions. This fact no more undermines my coherent, unconfused present knowledge of my wakefulness than the fact that a deluded, confused person might mistakenly think he's a philosophy professor undermines my non-deluded, non-confused knowledge that I'm a philosophy professor. Our opinions are differently grounded.

Now I wonder where in the philosophical or psychological literature we can find someone who develops an idea like (4). No one comes to immediately to mind, but surely there's someone....

How Do You Know You're Not Dreaming?

Things are quiet. People are on break -- visiting family, like me -- or they're sweating it out at the Eastern APA.

But maybe some of you visitors will do me a favor and answer this: How do you know you're not dreaming? Presumably you do know, right? Genuine radical skeptics are few. What I'm asking is how you know -- on what basis or by what means.

I have my own opinions about this which I'll post later, but first I'm curious to hear from some of you....

The Pinch Test for Dreaming

"Pinch me, I must be dreaming!" What assumption about dreaming lies behind this saying? I see two main candidates:

(1.) If I'm dreaming and someone in the dream pinches me, I will wake.

(2.) If I think I might be dreaming and someone in the dream pinches me, I'll be able to tell whether I'm dreaming or not.

The more dominant and more plausible view, I suspect, is (2). The thought presumably is this: In dreams, we don't have tactile sense experiences, or pain experiences, or we do have such experiences but they're different from waking tactile experiences in a way discernible to a dreamer.

A plausible assumption, I said. And appealing, I think, to many contemporary Americans. But is it right? Let me mention one reason to think it might be, two reasons for doubt, and two questions.

Reason to think it might be: I've read a lot of dream reports in the course of my research on dreams (e.g. here), and indeed it's not unusual to remark on the absence of tactile and pain sensations in dreams. For example, someone might report dreaming of being stabbed in the stomach and seeing blood come out, but without feeling any pain.

Reason for doubt #1: Traditional theories of dreams, like Descartes's, as well as most contemporary theories of dreams, don't give us much reason to suppose that we'd experience vision and hearing in dreams (or have visual and auditory imagery) but not other senses.

Reason for doubt #2: In the 1950s, people thought they dreamed in black and white. Both before and after the 20th century, people generally report dreaming in color. The best explanation for this, I think, is not that our dreams themselves changed from color to black-and-white and back again, but rather that our reports about our dreams assimilate them too much to the dominant media of our culture. (There was even a brief period when some psychologists said our dreams were generally silent, like Charlie Chaplin films!) Hence I suspect that if the dominant media involved tactile sensations, our dream reports would include them.

Question 1: I know there is considerable cortical activity in visual areas during REM sleep (including in regions associated with color experience). Is there a lower level of activity in brain regions associated with pain and tactile sensation?

Question 2: Is the "pinch me" thing primarily just American, or anglophone, or confined to Western cultures, or is something like it widely cross-cultural? If we don't have tactile and pain experiences in sleep, one might suppose that the reasons for that would apply cross-culturally.