first time in two years, I had entered the OBE state again. The
clarity, the same electrified sense of lightness in my double
body, made me excited and extremely happy, and I immediately
began to experiment. I moved toward the closed glass door of
the second-floor balcony in my parents’ house. I touched the
door, gently pushing it until I penetrated it and slid out onto the
balcony. I flew down into the garden and landed on the lawn,
where I moved around in the dim moonlight and looked at
things. Again, the overall experience was crystal clear.
When I became afraid of not being able to sustain the condition
much longer, I flew back up, somehow returned to my
physical body, and awoke with a mixture of great pride and joy. I
had not managed to make any verifiable observations, but I had had another OBE, in a clear, cognitively lucid way, fully controlled
and without any intermediary blackouts. I sat up, wanting
to take notes as long as everything was still fresh, but
couldn’t find a pencil.
I jumped out of bed and went over to my sister (who slept in
the same room), woke her up, and told her, with great excitement,
that I had just managed to do it again, that I had just been
down in the garden, bouncing around on the lawn a minute ago.
My sister looked at her alarm clock and said, “Man, it’s quarter
to three! Why did you have to wake me up? Can’t this wait until
breakfast? Turn out the light and leave me alone!” She turned
over and went back to sleep. I was a bit disappointed at this lack
of interest.
I also noticed that while fumbling with the alarm clock, she
had accidentally set it off. It was beeping away and I hoped it
hadn’t wakened anybody else. Too late! I could hear someone
approaching.
At that moment, I woke up. I was not upstairs in my parents’ house in
Frankfurt but in my basement room, in the house I shared with four
friends about thirty-five kilometers away. It was not quarter to three at
night; the sun was shining and I had obviously been taking a short afternoon
nap. For more than five minutes, I sat on the edge of my bed almost
frozen, not daring to move. I was unsure how real this situation
was. I did not understand what had just happened to me. I didn’t dare
move, because I was afraid I might wake up again, into yet another ultrarealistic
environment.
In dream research, this is a well-known phenomenon called false
awakening. Did I really have an out-of-body experience? Or did I only
have a lucid dream of an out-of-body experience? Can one slide from an
OBE into an ordinary dream via a false awakening? Are all OBEs forms
of lucid dreaming in the first place? To wake up twice in a row is something
that can shatter many of the theoretical intuitions you have about
consciousness—for instance, that the vividness, the coherence, and the
crispness of a conscious experience are evidence that you are really in touch with reality. Apparently, what we call “waking up” is something
that can happen to you at any point in phenomenological time. This is a
highly relevant empirical fact for philosophical epistemology. Do you
recall from chapter 2 the discussion about the evolution of human consciousness
and how the distinction between things that only appear to
us and objective fact became an element of our lived reality? Now we
can see what it means that the appearance/reality distinction emerged
only on the level of appearance: False awakenings demonstrate that consciousness
is never more than the appearance of a world. There is no
certainty involved, not even about the state, the general category of conscious
experience in which you find yourself. So, how do you know that
you actually woke up this morning? Couldn’t it be that everything you
have ever experienced was only a dream? Dreams are conscious because they create the appearance of a world,
but, as noted in chapter 2, they are offline states—global states of conscious
experience in which the Ego is decoupled from sensory input and
unable to generate overt motor behavior. The dream tunnel not only
contains the appearance of a world but also (in most cases) creates a
fully embodied, spatially extended self moving around in a spatially extended
environment. The virtual self thus born is an exclusively internal
phenomenon in an even stronger sense than that of the waking self: It is
immersed in a dense mesh of causal relations, all of which are internal to
the brain. Dreamers are self-aware, but functionally they are not situated.
Dreams are subjective states in that there is a phenomenal self;
however, the perspective from which this conscious self perceives the
world is very different—and much more unstable—than it is during
wakefulness.
Have you ever noticed that you cannot control your attentional focus
in your dreams? High-level attention is typically missing. Accordingly,
the dream-self generated inside the Ego Tunnel when you are sleeping
lacks the specific phenomenal quality I described in the preceding chapter
as attentional agency, the conscious experience of directing the beam
of your inner flashlight deliberately and selectively at various objects.
But attentional agency is not just the ability to “zoom in” on certain
things or point your mind at particular features of your world-model; it also entails the sense of ownership—ownership of the selection process
preceding the shift in attention. Both aspects are missing in dreams. In a
way, you are like an infant or a severely intoxicated person. The dream
Ego is much weaker than the waking Ego.
If one penetrates deeper into the specific phenomenology created by
the dreaming Ego, one discovers a considerable weakness of will and severe
distortions of the thought process. In ordinary dreams, you sometimes
cannot experience yourself as any sort of agent at all. It is difficult,
for example, to make a decision and follow through with it. But even if
you manage that, you are typically unable to ascribe agency to yourself.
The dreaming self is a confused thinker, severely disoriented with regard
to places, times, and people’s identities. Short-term memory is
greatly impaired and unreliable. Also, only rarely does the dream self
have such sensory experiences as pain, temperature, smell, or taste.
Even more interesting is the extreme instability of the first-person perspective:
Attention, thinking, and willing are highly unstable and exist
only intermittently, yet the ordinary dreaming Ego does not really care
about this, or even notice it. The dream self is like the anosognostic patient,
who lacks insight into a deficit following brain injury.
At the same time, the dream self creates intense emotional experiences—
some aspects of the self are clearly stronger in the dream tunnel
than in the tunnel of waking consciousness. Anyone who has ever had a
nightmare knows how intense the feeling of panic can become during
dreams. In the dream state, the emotional self-model can be characterized
by unusually intense degrees of feeling, though this is not true for
all emotions; for example, fear, elation, and anger predominate over sadness,
shame, and guilt.Occasionally, the dream tunnel enables the Ego to access information
about itself that is unavailable during the waking state. Whereas shortterm
memory is commonly impaired, long-term memory can be greatly
enhanced. For instance, it is possible to relive childhood episodes
vividly—memories that would never have been accessible during wakefulness.
We tend to forget these afterward, because most of us have
weak dream recall. But as long as the dream lasts, we have access to
state-specific forms of self-knowledge. Blind people are sometimes able to see in dreams. Helen Keller, who
turned blind and deaf at the age of nineteen months, emphasized the
importance of these occasional visual experiences: “Blot out dreams,
and the blind lose one of their chief comforts; for in the visions of sleep
they behold their belief in the seeing mind and their expectation of light
beyond the blank, narrow night justified.” In one study, congenitally
blind subjects produced dream drawings that judges were unable to distinguish
from drawings of sighted subjects, and as EEG correlates between
were sufficiently similar, this strongly suggests that they can see in
their dreams—but do they? It is also interesting to note that Keller’s
dream tunnel contained the phenomenal qualities associated with smell
and taste, which most of us experience only rarely in the dream state. It
seems as if her dream tunnel became richer because her waking tunnel
had lost some of its qualitative dimensions.
The dream tunnel shows to what extent conscious experience is a
virtual reality. It internally simulates a behavioral space, a space of possibilities
in which you can act. It simulates real-life sense impressions. As
discussed in chapter 3, this is exactly what modern designers of virtual
realities are trying to achieve (indeed, one of the best scientific journals
on virtual-reality technology is titled Presence). It is precisely this sense
of presence and full immersion that our biological ancestors achieved
long ago. The resultant Ego, however, has created a more robust sense of
presence for dreaming and for waking life as well. If it had not done so,
we probably would not be trying to create virtual realities today, nor
would we research the ability of the human brain to achieve this miracle
within itself.
Even though dreams are behavioral spaces, they are not causally coupled
to the real behavioral space of the dreaming human organism.
Dreamers are not bodily agents; their behavior is internal, simulated behavior.
The inhibition of the spinal motor neurons prevents bodily behavior
from being generated during dream sleep—that is, REM
(rapid-eye-movement) sleep. This is how the dream Ego is separated
from the physical body. When this motor inhibition fails, as it does in a
disorder known as RBD (for “REM-sleep behavior disorder”), internal
dream behavior is acted out in the waking world. Typically found in men over sixty, RBD is associated with a loss of the muscle atonia that typically
accompanies REM sleep. Patients suffering from RBD are forced to
act out dramatic and often violent dreams. They will shout or grunt.
They may attempt to strangle their bed partners, set fire to their beds,
jump out of windows, even fire a gun. Later they will recall little or
nothing of this physical activity—unless they fall out of bed or bump
into furniture or injure themselves or someone else and wake up. But
they can usually recall the dreams themselves, which typically involve
such physical activities as fighting, running, chasing or being chased,
and attacking or being attacked. These patients also seem to experience
violent and aggressive dream content more frequently than healthy
subjects do. Obviously, this is a dangerous condition that can lead to
self-inflicted injuries and serious sleep deprivation. What we can learn
from it is how the dream body, in normal circumstances, is decoupled
from the physical body. Normally, dreamers are not bodily agents, and
all their behavior is purely internal, simulated behavior. But when motor
inhibition fails, as it does in RBD, internal dream behavior is enacted by
the physical body.
The most interesting feature of ordinary dreams leads to some
deeper philosophical considerations about the nature of consciousness.
The dream tunnel is generated in a very special configuration: During
REM sleep, as noted, there is an output blockade, responsible for the
paralysis of the sleeper, and there is an input blockade, which prevents
(at least to a degree) sensory signals in the sleeper’s environment from
penetrating conscious experience. At the same time, chaotic internal
signals are generated by what are known as PGO waves. They are electrical
bursts of neural activity named for the brain areas involved (the
pons, the lateral geniculate nucleus in the hypothalamus, and the occipital
primary visual cortex) and are closely related not only to eye movements
but also to the processing of visual information. As the brain tries to understand and interpret this chaotic internal
pattern of signals, it starts telling itself a fairy tale, with the dream ego
playing the leading role. The interesting point is that the dream Ego does
not know that it is dreaming. It does not realize the signals it is turning
into an internal narrative are self-generated stimuli—in philosophical jargon, this feature of the dream state is a “metacognitive deficit.” The
dream Ego is delusional, lacking insight into the nature of the state it is
itself generating.
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