Dreaming as fascinated predictions: bridging Sartre’s phenomenology and predictive processing
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences October 16, 2025 Rasmus Sinn, Marc Borner
Jean-Paul Sartre's early phenomenology treats dreaming as an active, imaginative consciousness distinct from perception. Predictive Processing (PP) theory, which describes the brain as continuously generating predictions across hierarchical neural levels, conceptualizes dreaming as the predictive brain's activity constrained by REM sleep physiology and disconnected from sensory input. Although PP typically views imagination and perception as overlapping while Sartre treats them as separate mental phenomena, this paper argues the conflict can be resolved across sub-personal and personal levels of analysis. Under PP, relentless prediction generation without sensory constraint parallels Sartre's notion of dreaming consciousness as "fascinated" by its own images, helping refine PP accounts and situating Sartre's phenomenology as a resource for contemporary dream research.