For as long as I can remember, I have told people that I do not dream. I close my eyes at night and open them in the morning with no memory of what happened in between. I had never made much of an effort to change this, so I was curious whether our dream exercise would make any difference. Before bed, I reminded myself that I wanted to remember my dreams, and when I woke up, I reached for my phone immediately. I was unsurprised to find that, even after five nights of trying, I had nothing to record.
When we discussed the exercise in class, I expected to do more listening than talking, but my peers found my empty log interesting in its own right. They suggested that I might dream without remembering it, which seemed plausible given how much I forget in waking life. That made me listen to their accounts differently. I had assumed they were describing something I did not experience, but now I wondered whether their stories could help me imagine something happening in my own mind.
As I listened, I kept comparing their dreams with things I knew from waking life. I can picture a scene or become absorbed in a memory, but I usually know that I am imagining or remembering. I tried to imagine what it would feel like for a person I had pictured to say something I had not expected. I might pause to interpret their words or change what I had planned to say. Those familiar responses helped me picture a dream as an encounter I could take part in without knowing where it would lead.
In trying to picture that encounter, I became more aware of the thinking involved in the effort itself. I was drawing on familiar conversations and imagining how someone’s words might make me feel, then stepping back to ask how closely any of this resembled dreaming. The experience I was trying to understand remained out of reach, but I could pay attention to my own mind as it worked toward it. Consciousness was something I was using and experiencing in the process of trying to understand it.
I began to notice how often the course asks us to make this kind of effort. In the ICU, I tried to imagine being aware of people around me while having little ability to respond. In the operating theater, I considered how someone could follow an instruction under anesthesia and later remember nothing about it. In both cases, I had some sense of the experience I was trying to imagine, even if I struggled to picture it under those conditions.
When we turned to newborns, I had less shared experience to draw on. I could imagine being left alone, but I would know that people still existed outside the room and might return. I could imagine hunger, but I would recognize the feeling and know what could relieve it. These comparisons helped me approach an infant’s experience, though I kept bringing in knowledge the infant was still acquiring. I had done something similar with dreams, drawing on familiar feelings while struggling to picture them from a dreamer’s perspective.
In trying to understand both infants and dreamers, I was learning something about my own mind through the difficulty of imagining someone else’s. If dreaming already challenged my sense of what another mind might feel like, I am curious what will happen when we turn to animals, plants, and AI. I wonder whether I will recognize something of my own experience in them, or discover how much my idea of consciousness has depended on being able to do so.
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