The phenomenology of REM-sleep dreaming: The contributions of personal and perspectival ownership, subjective temporality, and episodic memory.
Psychology of Consciousness Theory Research and Practice November 8, 2018 Stan B. Klein 4 citations
Dreamers typically experience their dreams as real external events, not as self-generated narratives. This article argues that this misattribution arises from a dissociation between perspectival ownership (experiencing the dream from a first-person viewpoint) and personal ownership (recognizing the content as one's own production). The dreamer assumes the content in their head is not theirs, so it must be perceived from the outside. This framework, grounded in the concept of mental ownership, explains why mental time travel is severely limited in dreams and offers predictive power for understanding conscious experience.