Prof. Matthew Soteriou: Dreams of being someone else

Event details

Working from dream reports in established databanks, Rosen and Sutton (2013) consider various ways in which self-representation in dreams can be displaced, disrupted, or absent. They label one of the categories of dreams they discuss ‘vicarious dreams’. In these dreams, “the dreamer does not appear to figure at all, and the first person perspective on dream events is occupied by someone else…” (2013: 1041). In this talk I shall be focusing on a proposal about vicarious dreams that was once made by David Velleman (2008) (which he subsequently abandoned in Velleman 2015). According to this proposal, in a vicarious dream the dreaming subject is not representing herself. The first-person perspective in the dream isn’t a first-person perspective that the dreamer occupies. Moreover, it isn’t occupied by anyone at all. In such dreams, there is no self or subject at all, and dreamt-of uses of the first-person fail to refer to anyone or anything.

I shall be considering what it might take for this proposal to be the right account of self-representation in a dream, and I shall also be considering the following more general question: What is it that determines which individuals, times, and places feature in our dreams? I shall end by discussing the implications of the above for our understanding of the episodic recollection of dreams and for our understanding of the kind of self-representation that is involved in the process of emerging from a dream to wakeful consciousness.