Abstract

This treatise examines what I call the ‘traditional view’ on the phenomenology of dreaming. According to this view, dreams are experienced in more or less the same way as waking reality – that is, our experience of “being-in-the-dream” is very much like our experience of “being-in-the-world”. The traditional view will be examined from three different standpoints: phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience. It will be shown that the traditional view generates a number of problems. These problems have to do with dream delusion, dream narration, dream agency, and dream symbolism. A large portion of this treatise will be devoted to the solution of these problems in the form of speculative accounts based on theory and data coming from cognitive science and neuroscience.