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My research

Current Research: Daydreaming and Dreaming as Mental Simulations

My current ongoing postdoctoral project aims at investigating what makes certain episodes of mental imagery feel as real as genuine acts of perception, including the way in which those imaginings appear to us, as well as the psychological impact they have on us. I argue that, contrary to other instances of mental imagery, mental simulations evoke a sense of presence in the imagined world, a feeling of being "there"- they allow us to feel present in a world even in the absence of one. As part of this project, I am examining the phenomenon of "maladaptive daydreaming" as instances of daydreaming that are closer to nightdreaming. You can read some of this work in progress here.

Publications

PhD research

My PhD investigated the nature of minimal forms of consciousness during sleep. Specifically, it focused on examining the state of “witnessing-sleep”, an experience widely reported by Indo-Tibetan Buddhist traditions as an instance of “just awareness”. I argued that these sorts of experiences belong to a wider range of sleep states, experiences that appear to us as “objectless”, yet they might still contain some conscious content. My PhD research implemented a novel approach to the study of these sorts of states that combined empirical work with philosophical conceptual analysis. The result was the first interdisciplinary scholarly piece in the field providing a nuanced examination of the various ways in which conscious states during sleep might be experienced as lacking content or be about “nothing”.

Conceptual work

Some questions I asked in my thesis are: How should we better describe the experience of witnessing-sleep? Are those a type of dream experience or a sui generis type of experience? And how should they be situated within other sleep phenomena?

I have addressed some of those questions in here. I have considered a recent proposal which conceives certain instances of witnessing-sleep as an experience of "lucidity" akin to "lucid dreaming". I have argued that, if we want to conceptualise such experiences as instances of objectless sleep awareness, a different notion of lucidity is needed.

I have also developed a new theoretical model aiming at situating experiences like witnessing-sleep within other experiences of minimal awareness across sleep and waking.

Empirical work

As part of my PhD, I collected and analysed reports of different forms of conscious awareness during sleep that depart from ordinary dreaming, including some states that are described by their experiencer as "objectless" or "contentless". You can find some of those reports, and an analysis of their phenomenological features here and here.

Other projects

  • The minimal phenomenal experience

    As part of my research on witnessing-sleep, I am interested in investigating minimal forms of consciousness – states of awareness that do not usually involve an ordinary object of awareness or are said to lack a ‘content’ of awareness. Given the features of witnessing-sleep, a state of awareness in which one is said to be aware during deep sleep and nothing else, some authors have proposed that such a state could be an instance of a minimal phenomenal experience (see Windt, 2015; Metzinger, 2021). States sharing a similar phenomenology to that of witnessing-sleep can be found during meditative experiences, but also during experiences of drug-induced ego-dissolution and mystical states. I’m currently a collaboration partner for a research network investigating minimal forms of awareness.

  • First-person methods for studying consciousness

    I’m a firm advocate for combining philosophical and theoretical research on the nature of consciousness with phenomenological research. To that aim, I have followed training on the micro-phenomenological interview (MPI), a qualitative research tool that aims to gather fine-grained reports of subjective experiences. The MPI method has recently gained a lot of interest in cognitive science given its fit with the neurophenomenology research programme, a research framework developed by Francisco Varela (1999) which encouraged the interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscience and qualitative research methods to the study of the subjective experience.