In the Theater of Dreams: Global Workspace Theory, Dreaming, and Consciousness

Utilizing the Global Workspace System of Baars (1988), this paper compares conscious and unconscious processes across waking, nonlucid, and lucid dreams. Sleep psychology can display gross functional dissociation between perceptual and cognitive consciousness. We utilize this observation to develop models of sleep experience and dream generation. These models accommodate Hunt’s (1989) “multiplicity of dreams”, as well as the intrinsic variation of perceptual and cognitive activity during dreaming. Lucid dreams are suggested to result from the presence of a skill-based mental set, the lucid dream context, which allows voluntary interaction with the spontaneous dream process. Our view of dreaming provides an explanation of the tendency of lucid dreams to either fade or revert to nonlucid dreams. Neurobiological considerations lead us to hypothesize that, in the sleeping brain, a reversal of information flow from medial temporal lobe mnemonic structures to thalamocortical perceptual circuits imparts parameterization to dream perceptual consciousness. A consequence of our thinking is that dreaming results in a “mental recombination” of cerebral information networks, which contributes to the ability of waking consciousness to generate novel and adaptive responses. © 1999 Donald J. DeGracia