Dreams and Heightened Narrowed Immersivity

Dreams are immersive experiences that share ontological and phenomenological properties with fictional worlds, properties that waking reality lacks. The chapter proposes a model called 'heightened narrowed immersivity' (HNI) to capture dreams' specificity. HNI supports recent theories that dreams have an evolutionary value against the brain's overfitting, a function that also extends to fictional indeterminacy, linking dreamworlds and fictional storyworlds.

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Abstract

Abstract This chapter proposes an interdisciplinary model for oneiric experientiality, which makes the case for dreams being immersive, and for immersive worlds. It compares dream and waking lives, and it provides conceptual, phenomenological, and ontological contrast by adding also our experience of fictional worlds to the mix (via the concepts of fictional immersion and ‘saturation’). The chapter argues that dreamworlds share some ontological and phenomenological properties with fictional worlds that are missing in our waking reality (or, vice versa, they lack properties that the real world displays). To capture, explore, and partly explain dreams’ phenomenological and ontological specificity, the chapter proposes a new model for dreams’ immersive experiences that it calls ‘heightened narrowed immersivity’ (HNI). The chapter concludes by suggesting that HNI supports recent theories proposing an evolutionary value for dreams against the brain’s overfitting—a function that HNI extends to fictional indeterminacy too, thus linking dreamworlds and fictional storyworlds even more.