I experienced a lucid dream this afternoon (nap time :)[Now more than a week ago] of a type I have had before, but not for some time, but this time I was armed with a mind more informed on issues of consciousness and a cat.

The type of dream is fairly straight forward. I dream that I am in bed or wherever I was when I feel asleep and in the same position I was. I am looking from where my head supposed to be. So far the dream is very much the same as the experience I would have if I had just awoken.

In the next part of the dream I find that I can move my arms independently of my physical arms (that I can see, in the same position they were in when I fell asleep). I can feel my own body or objects within reach.

On this occasion my cat had fallen asleep on top of me and my real arms were touching him, one in front and one on his back. This allowed for an experiment: what would happen if I touched the cat with these ‘extra’ arms? At first I gently touched the cat and felt the texture of the fur. Then I stroked him and finally hammered him as hard as I could ~ no response.

I’ve long since noted that it is usually one modality that hallucinates freely in dreams and others simply follow on in a way consistent with the environment created by the hallucinating one. The one that hallucinates is usually the visual.

But if proprioception hallucinates then visual conditions are likely to be quite mundane, as in the lucid dream I experienced. The same is true of haptic dreams in which I might touch things and have a heightened sensation of textures. Spatial orientation dreams may be responsible for flying etc.

But I have also had plenty of dreams that change from one hallucinating sense to another. My proprioceptive dream changed to visual near the end and things started to shift from actual ambient conditions at the same time the fidelity of the proprioceptive experience diminished.

The traditional assumption is that dreams are entirely confabulated. But my experience indicates that only one modality hallucinates and all others follow on in a logical fashion ie as would be expected given the environment cause by the hallucinating modality. Modalities include various perception, such as vision, various somatosensory, such as proprioception, various effectors and various subjective states such emotion eg getting angry, insulted, happy, compassionate etc.

Dreams would be considerably more bizarre if each modality hallucinated freely eg you dream of seeing a murder, feel like you are taking a warm bath, smell cooking chickens, feel like you are flying although you are on the ground, feel guilt for not feeding the cat etc.

By concentrating only on the confabulation element of dreams we may have missed thinking about the great consistency that actually exists. Dreams are, then, highly faithful to waking conditions (except for at least one hallucinating modality).