Perspectives in Imagination, Memory, and Dreams

When we are awake, we occupy a spatiotemporal perspective, and while occupying that spatiotemporal perspective we can simultaneously exercise a capacity to represent a distinct spatiotemporal perspective that we do not occupy—for example, when we imagine or recollect events. The first half of the paper compares and contrasts the ways in which this capacity is exercised in imagination and episodic recollection. The second half of the paper draws on the above accounts in order to frame hypotheses about the ways in which perspectives can feature in dreams. The paper argues that some unusual and distinctive features of dreams can be explained by making intelligible the idea that it is possible to represent a spatiotemporal perspective while failing to meet the conditions required for occupying a such perspective. In such circumstances, one fails to occupy a conscious perspective that makes possible even the minimal orienting knowledge ‘I am here now’.