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The Definition of Consciousness
Me, I, My and Us, the MIMU of Self
BY LYNARD – JAANUARY, 18, 2022

What started my search for the definition of consciousness was the question of where dream images originate. The answer would seem rather simple. Neuroscientists and psychiatrists like J. Allan Hobson address dream imagery in the aggregate, as pictures in a hallucinatory, altered conscious experience and a vital part of the conscious awake-state. There is a problem with this approach. The issue of course is the definition of consciousness.

This interlude is about the classification of dreams and how this alternate state of “consciousness” in which they occur is really not an alternate state at all but, as Hobson rightly points out, a continuation of waking consciousness–both the brain “consciousness” and the mind “consciousness”.

Until I started classification of the 5,094 dreams I recorded between March 1975 and August 2021 (roughly 16,500 nights of dreaming), I would have given a passing nod to the description of dreams as “hallucinations” occurring between the states of wakefulness and sleep. After all, despite the theory of Sigmund Freud and the symbol books for dream “interpreters”, dreams are only dreams. Emotive adjuncts to daily reality. But after going through slightly more than four thousand dreams (eliminating over a thousand because they did not meet my classification requirements) I have had to elevate dreams from adjuncts of reality to road maps, encompassing past, present and future reality.

Recording Dreams

I recorded my first dreams in 1975 in a three-ring notebook. Nineteen years later (1994) a friend gave me an evaluation copy of a computerized DAILY JOURNAL (1.0). I transferred my notebook entries to the computer program. It was slightly less than two hundred entries. The evolution of the WINDOWS operating system made the DAILY JOURNAL program obsolete by 2010. I rewrote the program in 2010, adding features to specifically track words and phrases in addition to sleep times and sleep phases. This tracking methodology–words, phrases–was woefully inadequate for making sense of dreams but I was not to find that out until eleven years later. Transferring the roughly eighteen hundred records from the DAILY JOURNAL program to my TGJOURNAL was a fairly easy automated process.

Pondering a Dream Classification Scheme

Later I will go over the dream classification statistics for the roughly four thousand records. I spent six months trying various classification schemes. They all proved inadequate, including the final seven categories and thirty-six categories used. For instance, a dream in which you see yourself chasing yourself –fear as the type dream dose not fully capture the essence of the dream. Then there are a whole class of flying dreams in which flying is the least significant part of the dream. More work is required on the classification scheme but the broad designations have revealed some surprises. These will be covered in the next exploration interlude.

My daily habit is to wake between five and six, make coffee and record my dreams. I never go back to look at yesterday’s entry, a practice which I apparently shared with Hobson and his record of 300 dreams¹⁵. This record-it and leave-it is a highly significant aspect of examining dreams. Previously, the only time I examined entries was when I transferred handwritten entries into the automated DAILY JOURNAL.

Shock and Thought

I started paying attention to my dreams when I was around eleven or twelve years old which I think is rather typical. What hooked me were the incredibly rich colors appearing in my dreams. I never recorded these dreams of course. Memory of the intense, vivid colors have stayed with me. My real dream recording did not start until 1975, sporadically, and became a dedicated endeavor while in college and working on a novel which was never published.

A Hypnagogic Experience

While in college, I had a dream-like experience which cemented my interest in dreams and consciousness. I will not bore you with a verbatim recitation of dreams, however there are two highlights which I must relate in order to clarify where I am going here.

One day after returning from my morning classes at college, I laid down to continue reading a biography of Andrew Jackson. Most likely the book was by Marquis James ( I do not know this for sure) since it was a library re-sell book. As I was reading I fell asleep. Or at least, I think I fell asleep.

Life as A Hallucinatory State

While asleep, with the biography of Andrew Jackson near my pillow, I read the entire book. There were vivid images of pages of the book as I read through it. I have never read a two or three hundred page book in one sitting. At the time however I had no doubt I had read the Jackson biography while in a sleep state and I considered it very strange and weird. Did I really read the entire book in my sleep? Is it even possible? The easy answer is no. The science based answer is I have no idea.

This takes me to the second reason for my interest in dreams. Fast forward roughly ten years and I underwent an eye-opening experience related to dreaming.

FOUNDATION OF A FALSE MEMORY

In driving south on Interstate 55 one December morning I passed a section of the highway in which huge square section were cut into the left lane roadway and blocked-off by construction barriers. I remember thinking at the time that if a car ran into one of the square holes the car would certainly flip and possibly cause death. Eight hours later, traveling back north and about five miles or so from the highway work area, I see a bright, yellowish explosion of light in the sky ahead. Thoughts running through my head included farmers burning brush–it was a farm area–or my first and only UFO sighting.

When I finally arrived at the construction area I saw what apparently had happened. A tractor-trailer truck cab was leaning slightly into one of the square holes carved into the left-hand side of the highway. A highway patrolman was waving meager slow-moving traffic forward. I also saw a rather heavyset man, whom I assumed was the truck driver, in a brilliant white T-shirt with his back to me sitting on a guardrail opposite to where the truck-tractor had come to a stop. I drove home without farther incident.

Four or five days after the incident I awoke from a night of three dreams. In one of those dreams a smaller truck was crushed between two tractor-trailer trucks [record #555] when the lead semi-tractor abruptly stopped. A white car drove by the accident scene and just barely escaped being part of the wreckage. The dream event happened on a city expressway I occasionally drove to and from work. The dream left me apprehensive about driving on expressways. Not frightened, but cautious. Sometime after the dream, I remember mentioning the accident I saw on I-55 to a co-worker. My apprehension about driving on highways and expressways quickly went away afterwards.

So, first there was the accident. Four or five days later, the dream. Several days later, recounting the general outline of the highway accident to a coworker. The three events seemingly unrelated.

There was no one Eureka! moment when I finally figured out that one element of my memory of the Interstate-55 accident was a false memory. It was a gradual realization. The clearest and starkest memory of the accident was memory of the truck driver in a white T-shirt sitting on a guardrail. The problem was that the memory image was too clear, too stark. It was very much like one of my dream images.

Approaching Dream Reality

There are two ways of approaching this dream. We could go all Freudian and delve into emotional suppression and projection. We could also go all Allan Hobson or Michel Jouvet and view the dream as a coping mechanism for bridging the gap, and possibly the residual adrenaline, between a waking consciousness experience and a sleeping consciousness hallucination. Or, just as reasonably, we could look at the dream as both an emotional and physiological reaction to a traumatic experience resulting in a false memory. The Jackson biography book-reading incident is something slightly different, maybe somewhere between the Freudian and Hobsonian brick road.

Labeling a memory as a false memory is a very big deal. Saying that the basis of a false memory is buried in the hallucinatory adjunct to reality of dreams may not appear a big deal but it is. And when you delve more deeply into the dream state, we find support for Hobson’s contention that “consciousness” has both an awake and an asleep state. Note that consciousness is in quotes here because we have yet to define it. For now, we will go with Rene Descarte’s “” definition. But if the “I am” can subsist on the basis of “little” false memories derived from a “hallucination”, what does this say about the “I think” of consciousness?

False Reality as Reality

During all the time I was recording my dreams I thought the majority of those dreams were centered around train travel and a recurring visit to a large, leaky house.

After going through over four thousand dreams I was surprised to find that what I thought was a recurring dream was in fact not a recurring dream but rather variations on a recurring theme tied to an illusionary house.

Recurring Dreams, False Reality

Instead of recurring dreams, what I found was that the idea of a recurring dream can occur within the dream itself. A cousin of the dream generated false-memory with just as powerful an effect.

I once had a dream (#998 record, 2011) in which, in the dream itself, I thought I had repeatedly been in a very large, multi-storied house with a leaky roof and very messy rooms. The house dream was one of those clear, vivid dreams requiring no effort to remember. A memory occurring within a dream is rare. Even rarer is a feeling of something having happened before (a deja vu experience) in a dream, but I have had two such dreams and assume others have as well.

What I thought was a recurring dream, #998, first occurred in May 1998, approximately three-and-a-half years after I experienced a leaking roof in my condo (between 1996 and 1997). The MESSY HOUSE theme occurred in four more dreams (#2734-#3559). There was no repeat of the #998 dream itself. This recurring dream theme has a beginning, middle and end.

I have never been in such a large house with a leaky roof. However, fifteen years before the leaky house dream I experienced a leaking roof in my small condo and had to take corrective action. The first leaking roof dream occurred two years later (#318 record 1998), followed by another dream nine months later (#85). Neither of these dreams involved a large house nor a house that belonged to me. No other leaking-roof dreams occurred until twelve years later. By the time of the large house dream when my dream-self remembered being in the house before, my walking conscious was prepared to accept the conclusion that any dream involving a leaking roof was about the large house.

Dream sequences such as the MESSY HOUSE dreams make us susceptible to the belief that dreams are filled with symbols and conceal significant insights into our waking life. The dreams are “logical” and seem to reflect an obscure reality that, if only we could interpret them correctly, they would reveal something of earthshaking importance.

I could trace my erroneous belief that “most” of my dreams concern train travel to a similar sequence of dreams in which I remember dreaming of being on trains. The dynamic mechanism resulting in the MESSY HOUSE fixation is most likely the same for trains. And there are other examples.

How connected are our dream memories and the memories we walk around with defining who we are?

The Reality Dream Continuum

In J. Allan Hobson’s CONSCIOUS STATES he posits that dreams are an interruption of wakefulness generated by biochemical activity of body and brain, resulting in the hallucination of dreams. A more logical and scientific argument might be that being awake is an interruption of sleep and dreaming. But then, this raises the question of whether life in the womb started out as us sleeping or awake.

Hobson is correct in viewing the continuum of wakefulness and sleep, and additionally dreams. Confusion is introduced into his excellent exposition into waking and dreams when he uses the term “consciousness”. Acknowledging that the “hard problem”–the self being aware of self– is an issue he, like neurologists in general, to ignore because it seems insolvable.

The Boxy Problem of the “hard problem”

In simplest terms, qualia is the ability of the human mind to perceive itself as a perceiver of a mind. Yeah, sounds like a box of assorted chocolates where you can drop in concepts like God and gods, ESP, ectoplasm and my personal favorite, electromagnetic waves from superior alien beings. Mysticism, spiritualism, parapsychology are all disciplines in which the hard problem are not only addressed but solved. Science has pretty much declared the problem currently beyond its capacity to address. Hobson follows the science, thus “consciousness” is defined simply as life beyond the life-path of an ameba. I have a different take. Science has already solved the problem of qualia.

Consciousness As Life

For neuroscientists, consciousness is a state of the brain producing a mind. Animals go from wakefulness, to drowsiness to sleep, all measured by the amplitude of brain waves. If we use brain state as defining consciousness then all animals with a brain are conscious. That would include dogs, cats, monkeys, birds–the usual zoo. All are endowed with this state-of-life consciousness. It includes dreaming.

The Three Worlds of Reality

We know from observations aided by technology that mature human fetuses, at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks, display brain wave indicators of dreaming. Are fetuses assimilating events of the day? And before you question exactly what events a fetus would have to assimilate, think what it would be like to live inside a vibrant body encased in 27 to 20 ounces of amniotic fluid where sounds and motions are easily transmitted. An even more pressing question is whether dreaming came first or the capability to respond to stimulus and assimilate that stimulus came first. Either way, the fetus is living in a strange, isolated world where “hallucinations” constitutes a reality. Let’s call this the First World.

The fetus enters the Second World the moment they are born. It is very doubtful the fetus could have dreamed a more traumatic hallucination than being exposed to air. The Third and final World is when the infant is first touched.

First World existence can last from as few as ten days (opossums) to as long as ninety-five weeks (African Elephants). Second World is as experience can last minutes to hours throughout the animal kingdom because nature has apparently perfected the method. Third World experience can last as short as one year (house mouse) and as long as 500 years (sharks). It is in the Third World experience that humans deviate from the rest of the mammal kingdom.

A house mouse for example, with a life span of one year, is dependent upon their mother for 21 days and reaches sexual maturity in around 35 days. At the age of around six weeks, they begin mating. Humans are very dependent upon their mothers for the first six years of life and do not reach sexual maturity until twelve and twelve -and-a-half years. Why can a mouse mature in twenty-one days and a child takes twelve years? One way to look at this is to consider that the only thing a mouse has to learn to survive in life is to walk in search of food and pee at the same time while a child has to learn to stand and balance, process a plethora of vocal sounds, and recognize a parked car from a speeding car.

Science and Philosophy Consensus

There is nothing here for neuroscientists, philosophers and dream-interpreters to quibble over. All animals undergo a period of incubation, birth and then first breath. (Marine mammals are a slightly different story of course). But once in the Third World, humans take a drastically different course of development

The upshot of all this, when it comes to dreaming and wakefulness, is that it is impossible to define consciousness unless the entity–human or animal–is present in the Third World. This is the first clue to what constitutes the qualia of consciousness and you would think it would be the starting point for neuroscientists in connecting brain and mind. But there is a conundrum here. It is a variation of Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s cat in a box thought experiment.

The Ten Second Reality Switch

And for dream researchers in particular, while some assume a long dream and a short dream are related to the amount of time slept, the two elements appear to be unrelated. The reality is that the sixty to ninety minutes we spend in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep manifests as a dream only within the ten to twenty seconds it takes for us to become fully awake. Memory is not available to record a dream as it occurs. Thus, dreams are fleeting and most of us do not remember them consistently. More importantly, memory of a dream can be distorted in any number of ways. The sleeping and waking cycle itself occurring during the night can distort a dream and not to mention the sound of an alarm clock or a burst of music.

Final Word

This is a long interlude toward defining consciousness. But just about everyone who tackles the definition of consciousness start with dreams. The reason is the contrast: dreaming is regarded as an alternate state of consciousness where the individual is “out of this world”. Science can argue legitimately that the chemical and bio-electrical activity of the brain starts twenty to twenty-five weeks after conception and continues to death. Between is this curious alternate state of sleep and dreams. Biologically related. But separate from “consciousness”. Intuitively, we reject this notion

Right now, if it were possible for you to slow your thoughts, that voice racing through you head, and you lost the ability to remember the moment to moment transition of time, you would in fact be dreaming. Until you read THIS!

Our dreams are part of our lives and we claim ownership of them just as we claim ownership of our internal voice. Part of a continuum. It is one of the reasons we consult dream “symbols” and regard them as revealing “unconscious” thought-threads shaping our perspective of “reality”. We even look for hints of the future in our dreams.

In the final interlude toward defining consciousness, I will present the classification of my dreams.

REFERENCES:

15. Conscious States: The AIM Model of Waking, Sleeping, and Dreaming, pg 151, Copyright 2017. Hobson, Allan, edited: Nicholas Tranquillo, Anthony K. Shin, 288 pages, ISBN: 154669756X. See page 151.

© Lynard Barnes, 2020