Melissa asked:

My question is: How can I relate or argue that dreams are experiences that contain aspects of
consciousness? I want to tie in some philosophical references and form some sort of argument. Any
suggestions on how I could go about doing this?

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Well you can start with Descartes who considered the possibility that he might be dreaming. A
suggestion here is that dreams are indistinguishable from being in an experiential perceptual state
and while this isn't pertinent to Descartes' project, there is the assumption that dreams are conscious:
A subject is aware of some content present to the mind and he also has self-awareness.

I am not sure that anyone has said that dreams are not conscious. Rather, it the case that they point
an analyst to truths about the unconscious. So you can read Freud on this, since he analyses the
content of dreams and so he too assumes that dreams are conscious or the patient would be unable
to remember then. Of course, we cannot always remember dreams but that doesn't mean we didn't
experience them at the time. Dreams are always experienced, but not always remembered or known.

Although it is thought that dreams point to truths about the unconscious, they also issue from
unconscious desires or wishes, according to Freud. There is a causal relational state from the
unconscious and consciousness which differs from perceptual states where the initiating causal state
is something external in the world.

It so happens that I am reading Adam Philips (On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored) and came
across a discussion of the work of Masud Khan, again an analyst rather than a philosopher, but he
has written a lot about dreaming. He sees the dream not just as an experience, but as revealing
something about the 'impenetrable privacy of the self'. It would be interesting to look into this: The
nature of the subject in a dream (is his ego present?) and the nature of representation in dreaming (in
terms of the phenomenology of dreams, I would say that dreaming is quite different from perception,
and Descartes ignored the phenomenological aspect of their closeness and strangeness. He didn't
need to consider this of course because he was concerned to find evidence for the truth of
sensations). But anyway this is where you might consider which aspects of consciousness are
present in a dream. For this, Khan will be more helpful than Freud. And then to return to philosophy,
you can look at John Wisdom's Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.

Rachel Browne

The kind of dreaming that you yourself guide in a state of semi-consciousness is in some circles
called lucid dreaming. IF some dreams are about real life then see it as improvising on a theme. It
helps if you can guide such a free stream of thought. Techniques like yoga are often used for this
purpose.

Maybe on http://www.rider.edu/~suler/dreams.html, and on
http://www.knuten.liu.se/~bjoch509/works/aristotle/dreams.htmlyou'll find clues. It were the only
references that I found that seem to give substantial information.

Henk Tuten