Abstract
James’s method of “placing things in their series”—so akin to Wittgenstein (1979) on the descriptive rendering of features along multiple lines of “family resemblance” and its recent formalizations within social science—provides the methodological context for our approach to lucid dreams, both in terms of their descriptive phenomenology and psychophysiological processes. By considering the striking interrelations and overlap among dream lucidity and control, highly bizarre dreams, mundane true-to-daily-life dreams, out-of-body experience, “near-death” epidsodes, and the range of meditative experiences and techniques, it becomes clear that prototypical lucid dreams can be seen as a species of spontaneously realized meditative state, and this in their phenomenological, physiological, and cognitive aspects.
Phenomena are best understood when placed in their series, studied in their germ and in their over-ripe decay, and compared with their exaggerated and degenerated kindred... [This] method of serial study is so essential for interpretation that if we really wish to reach conclusions we must use it... We renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon as it is classed with others,... refusing to consider [its] place in any more general series and treating [it] as if [it] was outside of nature... s order altogether... The only novelty I can imagine this course of lectures to possess lies in the breadth of the apperceptive mass.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1920)
The authors would like to thank Kate Ruzycki for her careful reading and editorial assistance.
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Hunt, H.T., Ogilvie, R.D. (1988). Lucid Dreams in Their Natural Series. In: Gackenbach, J., LaBerge, S. (eds) Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0423-5_17
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