Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez (UAntwerp): "I woke up with a blank mind. White dreaming and associated phenomena"

Monday 5 Feb 2024, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

B-30/0-000 - Big meeting room (CRC)

Abstract: White dreaming is a term used in dream research to describe the feeling upon awakening that one had a dream but cannot remember its content. The received view in dream research is that white dreams are forgotten dreams; one did indeed have a dream which now one cannot remember (Cohen, 1972; Lewis et al., 1966). Recently, two alternative proposals have been put forward in the literature: that white dreams are about sleep experiences of minimal content (Windt et al., 2016), or dreams with reduced content (Fazekas et al., 2018). Thus, we have reasons to believe that not all white dreams are forgotten dreams and that this construct alludes to a more heterogeneous range of phenomena (see Windt, 2021). In this paper, I advocate for a pluralistic account of white dreaming which conceives us as caused by a spectrum of experiences, including forgotten dreams, but also dreams and other sleep experiences. In addition, I put forward two additional explanations about the causes of white dreaming, (i) metacognitive illusions, and (ii) unconscious sensory processing. To that aim, I compare white dreams to similar experiences during wakefulness: feelings of knowing, feelings of familiarity, and mind blanking. 

Bio: Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. Her work on the philosophy of mind is empirically grounded and draws from research on psychology and cognitive science. To date, her work has focused on the study of different forms of sleep consciousness, including those that might be regarded as “contentless”. Currently, she is examining the links between daydreaming, dreaming and perception. 

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