Editor

In this commentary, I propose a strategy for extending Evan Thompson’s argument on the existence of dreamless sleep experience. My first aim is to show that the Indian debate on reports of having slept peacefully is importantly similar to de-bates in scientific dream research and contemporary Western philosophy on the trustworthiness of dream reports. This analogy leads to a surprising conclusion: the default view of conscious experience as that which disappears in dreamless sleep, though widely accepted in cognitive neuroscience, is in fact inconsistent with the methodological background assumptions of scientific dream research. Im-portantly, the methods already used in scientific dream research, as well as the theoretical justification on which they are based, can be extended to the investig-ation of dreamless sleep experience. Second, I sketch the outlines of a conceptual model of dreamless sleep experience as involving pure subjective temporality, or phenomenal experience characterized only by the phenomenal now and the sense of duration, but devoid of any further intentional content. I suggest that under-stood in this manner, dreamless sleep experience is a candidate for minimal phe