Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2025
Andy Mckilliam, Manuela Kirberg
5 citations
Mental imagery has traditionally been considered a conscious experience, but recent findings suggest it can occur unconsciously. People with aphantasia, who report no conscious imagery, often perform similarly to controls on imagery-requiring tasks, show imagery-based priming, and exhibit imagery-related neural activity in visual cortex. However, investigating unconscious imagery faces challenges: ensuring imagery is genuinely unconscious rather than unreported due to response biases, and clarifying how imagistic or indirect perceptual processing must be to qualify as imagery. This paper examines the evidence, argues it is less compelling than initially appears, and proposes a strategy for advancing research.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 11, 2025
Manuela Kirberg, Jonathan Robinson, Jennifer Windt
3 citations
Spontaneous thoughts and experiences like dreaming and mind wandering share many features but also differ in important ways. This study compared 340 questionnaire responses about dreaming and waking mind wandering, using a self-caught design to capture spontaneous experiences in daily life. Mixed-effect binary logistic regression identified dimensions that significantly predicted either dreaming or mind wandering, revealing differences between the two states. Visual and immersive imagery and scene-organization were central to dream phenomenology. Results showed a complex picture of similarities and differences, suggesting that dreaming may be intensified along certain dimensions compared to mind wandering.
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 5, 2026
Jennifer Windt, Manuela Kirberg, Tomas Andrillon
This special issue brings together theoretical and empirical work on dreaming and waking mind wandering, two areas with growing attention in cognitive neuroscience and psychology but limited philosophical exploration. Despite being studied separately, phenomenological and neurophysiological overlaps between waking mind wandering and sleep-related experiences indicate they are closely linked. These connections prompt questions about the nature and functions of spontaneous mental phenomena, their relationship to wakefulness and sleep, and implications for theories of attention, action, and consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2026
Manuela Kirberg, Jennifer Windt
Dreaming and mind wandering share features of spontaneous thought, but their precise relationship remains unclear. Bizarreness—unusual features of experience—has traditionally been seen as unique to dreams, though some propose it exists on a continuum where dreaming is an intensified form of mind wandering. Analyzing 379 spontaneous reports from the same participants in a naturalistic setting, the findings show that both dreaming and waking mind wandering have unique bizarreness profiles with similarities and differences. The comparison between the two changes depending on the type, subtype, and content of bizarreness measured. Thus, dreams cannot simply be described as intensified mind wandering; a more nuanced approach with specific measures is needed.
April 29, 2024
Manuela Kirberg, Jonathan Edward Robinson, Jennifer Windt
preprint
Spontaneous thoughts like dreaming and mind wandering make up much of human consciousness, but their similarities and differences are not well understood. This study compared 340 questionnaires on dreaming and mind wandering, covering 13 to 27 dimensions depending on participant responses. Using a naturalistic self-caught design in daily life, rather than laboratory settings, the researchers applied mixed-effect binary logistic regression models to identify dimensions that significantly predicted whether an experience was a dream or mind wandering. Visual and immersive imagery and scene-organization were central to dream phenomenology. Results revealed a complex pattern of differences and similarities, suggesting dreaming may be an intensified form of mind wandering along certain dimensions.
Philosophical Psychology
February 27, 2022
Manuela Kirberg
Dream bizarreness is not a marker of a sharp divide between waking and sleeping consciousness but a common feature of spontaneous offline simulations across the sleep-wake cycle. The author proposes that bizarreness arises from the dynamic, unconstrained, (hyper)associative, and highly variable nature of spontaneous thought. Rather than misrepresenting waking reality, bizarreness can reveal the building blocks of spontaneous cognition. The absence of bizarreness in thought is imposed by automatic and deliberate cognitive constraints; without such constraints, thought and memory processes are inherently marked by different degrees and types of bizarreness.