Retroactive Consciousness of Dreams: What Do We Remember When We Wake Up?

How skeptical should we be of dream memory? It’s hard to deny that some form of conscious experience occurs while we sleep that leaves memory traces which are reported on waking. However, a form of weak skepticism towards dream reports is warranted: many of the reports we make on waking are not of conscious episodes that occurred during sleep. Instead, we become conscious of most ‘dreams’ only upon waking. This is because both memory and other cognitive capacities in dreams can be severely degraded. The conditions under which mental events occur in sleep might prevent such processes from making it to the ‘global workspace’ or, alternatively, they may lack ‘access consciousness’. This makes it possible that when a subject is woken up during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, they become retroactively conscious of dreams, an updated version of Dennett’s cassette theory of dreaming. According to this weak skeptical view, most dream reports are of, in some sense, false memories.