DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Animal Consciousness Kicks off New Series
When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness
David Pena-Guzman (2022)
This is the first in a series of book reviews and articles about "Imaginative Worlds." In recent years, I have become increasingly interested in the impact and importance of imagination on human experience, as demonstrated by dreams of animals and humans, the cave art of early humans, dramatic art, romance, the fascination with games, cultural stories that shape personal identity, cultural meaning in general and mathematics.
I begin with a review of an outstanding book on the dreams of animals, in part because of the scientific progress in recent decades in understanding the neurological foundation of dreams and the purpose of dreaming, which for so long was a mystery to both scientists and everyone else. There is still much that is not well understood about dreams, especially how both humans and many animal species construct meaningful dream narratives through a combination of sensory images and affect. Nevertheless, as Pena- Guzman explains with admirable clarity and philosophical skill, the science of dreaming has made huge progress in recent decades, in part by shedding behaviorist principles, and also through a willingness to engage with philosophers in discussions of consciousness. Pena Guzman is right to insist that "Scientific research is always haunted by questions about the meaning of data that will never be answered with more data." One of the strengths of When Animals Dream is Guzman's analysis of consciousness, a framework whose usefulness extends well beyond the psychology of dreams.
Pena-Guzman summarizes the scientific evidence that almost all mammals and possibly some species of fish dream as follows:
"... mammals and fish have remarkably similar sleep architectures despite having divergent evolutionary histories and dissimilar brain structures. Just as mammals have deep sleep and REM sleep, fish have SBS ( "slow bursting sleep") and PWS ("propagating wave sleep"). The similarities between REM sleep in mammals and PWS in fish are astounding: in both cases, there is a distinctive neural signature, a unique brainwave that differentiates them from non-REM sleep and SBS respectively..." In addition, "The French neuroscientist, Michel Jouvet, has convincingly argued that understanding dreams requires more than analysis of brain activity. It requires analyses of sleep -related behaviors. ... there are endless on- line videos of sleeping animals behaving in ways that suggest dream experience." And,
"Laboratory experiences have demonstrated that a broad range of species display the same "oneiric" (mental replay) behaviors that in humans we accept as trustworthy markers of dream experiences, usually during a phase of their sleep that looks eerily like REM sleep .."
Jouvet became famous for deactivating the part of cats' brains that inhibit physical movement during dreams as indicated by both brain activity and behavior while dreaming. "When cats with pontine lesions entered REM sleep they indeed "acted out" their dreams. They got up, meowed, walked around, groomed themselves and explored their surroundings," Pena- Guzman states. He maintains that "the dreams of animals seem to be action packed sequences that fit in a clear narrative frame."
Pena-Guzman asserts that among 6,000 species of mammals, "With a few possible exceptions, all mammals dream." And "...if we look at the electrophysiological data, it is likely that birds and fish also dream."
If so, this suggests that dreaming has an ancient evolutionary history, and that it is likely that dreaming is necessary to waking in animal species. But why does the instrumental awareness of waking life in animal species require nightly experiences of an imaginary dream world? Pena-Guzman does not have an adequate answer to this question, at least one that satisfies me, though it's apparent from his discussion that the answer begins with the pruning and shaping of memories in dream states and with the imagined reflection and strengthening of motivation through the imaginary world of dreams.
Some chapters of When Animals Dream develop philosophical arguments related to the nature of consciousness, e.g., "My thesis is that it is impossible for an organism to dream and lack consciousness." Pena-Guzman utilizes the SAM model of consciousness "that segregates consciousness into three types: subjective, affective and metacognitive. He argues that "the dreams of animals are always evidence of subjective consciousness, often evidence of affective consciousness and occasionally even evidence of meta-cognitive consciousness." He also follows Buddhist texts that identify "luminosity" as the hallmark of all types of consciousness. Speaking concretely, dreams are often vivid and deeply felt, they are sometimes remembered ( especially some elements ) and a few persons are capable of lucid dreams in which the dreamer is aware that she/ he is dreaming and can act intentionally in the dream.
As often occurs in discussions of consciousness, Pena- Guzman sometimes muddies the distinction between philosophical arguments and scientific arguments. In his view, dreaming logically requires consciousness, and he insists: "in the dream world we always have a feeling of subjective presence and a sense of bodily awareness," a claim which seems uncertain to me. I am in more agreement with the sentiment, "dreams are just weird." Part of that weirdness is that they do not respect the rules of waking consciousness, especially in how they develop meaning.
Pena-Guzman has extraordinarily interesting things to say regarding the imaginative functions of animal minds, "More than passively receiving experience ready-made, animals transform the chaotic flows of sense data that affect them into a single, meaningful and coherent phenomenal world from within. ... all conscious experience is fundamentally creative." And "This creative impulse is always at work in our conscious life, independently of whether we are awake or dreaming. What makes dreaming unique ... is that it generates a field of meaning under the radical conditions of near total sensorimotor blockade." Dreams are "mental works of art the mind creates for itself, "a quote Pena-Guzman takes from Allan Hobson.
In Pena-Guzman's perspective, dreaming is a part of "the extraordinary world building power of animals -- animals who, even in the oceanic calmness of sleep, give birth to enigmatic and imaginary worlds from the deepest depths of their being."
The series "Imaginative Worlds"
When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness
The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists
-- Dee Wilson