For what it’s worth, I think Schwitzgebel’s premise makes more sense in the case of good dreams than bad dreams. In particular, it is intuitive to many people that positive fulfillment requires not just positive feelings, but also the appropriate grounding for these feelings—i.e. if your child died and someone gives you a shot that causes you to be thrilled about it, intuitively this is not good for you. On the other hand negative experiences don’t seem to have this same requirement, if your child is alive, and someone gives you a shot that makes you miserable about this, that is still bad for you even if it is not properly grounded in this same way.
In the case of dreams you could imagine a more direct connection, for instance if you improve your “dream life” that might mean giving yourself a sense of accomplishment you re-evaluate the overall quality of your life through, a sense of how well your life is going that is actually hollow and will either be forgotten, or cause regret on waking. Personally I’m not compelled by this very much either and think it actually would be a good thing to enhance one’s dreams to be even more positive, but if this is ultimately what is behind Schwitzgebel’s intuition, then it doesn’t undermine the case for reducing nightmares. I think it is actually pretty hard to come up with a compelling theory of value that would rule out the value of reducing nightmares.
For my own part I can’t relate very much because I rarely have nightmares and usually wake up from those I do have quickly, but I’m very sorry to hear the author does, and I can imagine this issue has gotten ignored for mostly very poor reasons. I’m excited to see more work done on it.
For what it’s worth, I think Schwitzgebel’s premise makes more sense in the case of good dreams than bad dreams. In particular, it is intuitive to many people that positive fulfillment requires not just positive feelings, but also the appropriate grounding for these feelings—i.e. if your child died and someone gives you a shot that causes you to be thrilled about it, intuitively this is not good for you. On the other hand negative experiences don’t seem to have this same requirement, if your child is alive, and someone gives you a shot that makes you miserable about this, that is still bad for you even if it is not properly grounded in this same way.
In the case of dreams you could imagine a more direct connection, for instance if you improve your “dream life” that might mean giving yourself a sense of accomplishment you re-evaluate the overall quality of your life through, a sense of how well your life is going that is actually hollow and will either be forgotten, or cause regret on waking. Personally I’m not compelled by this very much either and think it actually would be a good thing to enhance one’s dreams to be even more positive, but if this is ultimately what is behind Schwitzgebel’s intuition, then it doesn’t undermine the case for reducing nightmares. I think it is actually pretty hard to come up with a compelling theory of value that would rule out the value of reducing nightmares.
For my own part I can’t relate very much because I rarely have nightmares and usually wake up from those I do have quickly, but I’m very sorry to hear the author does, and I can imagine this issue has gotten ignored for mostly very poor reasons. I’m excited to see more work done on it.