On Dreams and Free Will

I’ve long thought that the phenomenological evidence for free will doesn’t get enough emphasis. While many arguments regarding free will and the extent to which we possess it center around physicalism or trying to locate the root of free will in the world or in our brains, I think it bears considering the direct evidence we have for it, regardless of any causal mechanism.

In short, we experience free will and we experience it to less or greater extents based on circumstances and physical states. Specifically, I want to explore the fact that we have reduced or eliminated free will in dreams while still retaining many of our other conscious faculties.

To state my priors here, I believe that we have free will. We do not have radically unshackled free will, of course. But we do make decisions and have great latitude in deciding our own behavior and, to a lesser extent, our own thoughts. I think that this power of free will differs meaningfully between people, with some people being able to exercise free will over aspects that some other people can’t. (See, e.g., the many cases of people apparently having control over autonomic nervous functions or the highly varied effects of trauma on the future ability of sufferers to manage their own lives.) I think that free will is a core function of consciousness and so other conscious entities have some degree of free will as well. Humans are not special. Elephants, orcas, octopuses, corvids, etc. all likely have free will of some sort.¹

In the waking world, we feel ourselves exercising free will. I chose to draft this essay on a particular Spring morning. In fact, when I sat down to write, I was feeling resistance. I was between writing projects and didn’t know which one to start. Knowing that I needed to get over this resistance and that, once I did, writing would become easier, I decided to review my list of essay topics that I keep. I decided to start this one because it was one which I felt I would develop my ideas by writing it.

All of these decisions were accompanied by mental sensations of choice. Often my intentional orientation was towards the need to make a choice.

In the waking world, this is typically how we go about our days. We experience and intend choices and then experience ourselves analyzing and resolving those decisions.² In dreams however, we take actions and, indeed, resolve choices without ever consciously making them. We decide on actions without experiencing free will.

It’s worth highlighting that in dreams we aren’t anything like a P-Zombie. (Indeed if we were, dreams wouldn’t exist, since they are purely comprised of mental qualia, which P-Zombies don’t have.) We have access to our sensorium, emotions, language, and even some sort of logical faculties.³ The most notable thing that we are lacking is our ability to choose our own actions. Properly speaking, we don’t participate in dreams. Dreams are a thing that happen to our minds in a purely passive state. ( I’ll address the interesting case of lucid dreaming below.)

Importantly, in dreams we maintain our philosophical intention. We orient ourselves towards objects in dreams. We have desires and do things to try and achieve them. An example of this is the broadly-reported dream in which the dreamer has forgotten that they have a class and now have to sit for a final exam. The dreamer understands the situation, feels real distress about it, and wants to do well on the exam. The final exam is a proper intentional object, but one that the dreamer didn’t choose.

So in dreams, intentionality is divorced from choice. The dream selects our intentional objects for us, and our consciousness of those objects doesn’t then raise any question of what we should do with those objects.⁴ This implies that the sensation of free will is something that we can lack and still have significant, related experiential phenomena.

People can, however, restore their free will in dreams. The practice of lucid dreaming allows dreamers to realize that they are in a dream and that, therefore, they can take any actions they wish. This includes choosing to do things that would be impossible in the waking world. I have had one lucid dream in my life, which wasn’t particularly interesting for this discussion, because after only a few cursory, exploratory choices⁵, I woke up. I think being on the verge of wakefulness may have made me more prone to lucidity.

What’s more interesting, however, are the number of pseudo-lucid experiences I’ve had in dreams. For instance, cases in which I’ve realized I must be in a dream, but did not have any ability to control my own actions. In one instance, I dreamt I was riding a motorcycle across India. In my dream, I made the entire trip, a distance of about two thousand miles, in a matter of minutes. I thought to myself in the dream, “ah, that’s impossible. And I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle anyway. This must be a dream.” And then, with that knowledge, the dream continued to play out.

In other cases, I’ve been able to predict the next action I was going to take, but without any feeling that I could do anything different. In these cases, it felt like watching a cut scene in a first person video game. I knew the character well, and knew exactly what they were going to do, but had no control over it.

I contend that we can draw a few inferences from this phenomenological evidence. First, that if we lived in a world with mental qualia but without free will, we would expect it to feel a lot more like a dream. No matter what our intentional focus was, we would experience any “decisions” as if in a dream: with possible predictive ability, but without the sensation that we were in any way in control of them.

Secondly, if we don’t have free will, but feel like we do, then we need some alternative explanation for the sensation of free will. By what mechanism could it have arisen? What possible evolutionary purpose could it have served? What does it tell us about metaphysics that we have specific sensations related to choice that we don’t meaningfully have?

I don’t think this argument is in any way conclusive, but it is one that I find highly compelling. That we can decouple the sensation of free will from our other mental qualia in dreams, indicates that it is a separate phenomenological function of the conscious mind, and as such, must have some cause. To me, it seems like the principle of parsimony indicates that its cause is that we actually have free will and are experiencing ourselves exercising it.