Dr Adriana Alcaraz Sánchez
Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2024-June 2025
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Adriana works at the intersection between philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science to the study of consciousness, specifically, altered states of consciousness. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Glasgow (2023) where she investigated the nature of the state of “witnessing-sleep” or clear light, an altered state of consciousness during sleep widely described by Indo-Tibetan Buddhist traditions as a state of “just awareness”. Her PhD combined theoretical work and qualitative methods to explore how such states can shed light on our understanding about the nature of consciousness. With a background in psychology and cognitive science, Adriana aims to incorporate findings and methods from the empirical sciences to address philosophical questions about the nature of the mind. Before joining IASH, Adriana was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Antwerp, where she worked on a project on mental imagery and dreaming.
Project Title: Intensified Forms of Mental Imagery: From Daydreaming to Dreaming
A significant portion of our everyday experiences arises in the absence of sensory input and processing; that is, they are not triggered by perceiving something “out there” in the world. Nevertheless, these experiences do not feel less real or authentic; it still appears to us as if we are “perceiving” something. Some paradigmatic cases are daydreams during wakefulness and dreams during sleep. While they are highly ubiquitous experiences, the nature of daydreams and dreams is still not well understood. For instance, are these experiences more like imagination or perception? And what can they tell us about the nature of human consciousness? Can we have an experience of a wholly realistic world in their absence?
This project aims to develop the basis for a theoretical framework that can adequately capture the nature of daydreaming and dreaming and their connections with genuine cases of perception. To that end, the project will consist of two parts. The first part will explore the extent to which daydreams and dreams belong to the same type of experience by examining the overlapping phenomenological features between those states. This part will focus on studying the links between very realistic daydreams and a characteristic type of dream: lucid dreams, dreams in which one knows that one is dreaming. The second part of the project will elucidate the claim that daydreams and dreams occur under a similar hybrid state of consciousness, a state between sleep and waking. This second part will draw upon experimental work in neuroscience and sleep research on “local sleep,” localised sleep-like brain waves during wakefulness.