Dream-Based Autonomy

By Marie Vanourny

Abstract
Contemporary awakening, mindfulness, and self-regulation frameworks frequently assume that increased awareness is inherently liberating. Across spiritual, therapeutic, and cultural contexts, vigilance is treated as both method and moral good, while suffering is interpreted as evidence of insufficient awareness or incomplete practice. This thesis challenges that assumption. Drawing on conceptual analyses, comparative posture analyses, dream phenomenology, and cultural analyses, it argues that vigilance-based models systematically conflate awareness with control and underestimate the costs of sustained attentional engagement.
The thesis identifies predictable failure modes of vigilance, including rumination, anxiety, dissociation, moral pressure, and silent attrition, and shows how these outcomes are structurally obscured through non-falsifiable frameworks that shift responsibility onto practitioners. In response, it proposes an alternative model termed Dream-Based Autonomy, which reframes agency as the capacity for voluntary attentional withdrawal, arousal reduction, and returnability. Rather than locating autonomy in heightened awareness, DBA emphasizes downshift-based regulation and jurisdiction over participation.
Dream logic, particularly as observed in lucid dreaming, is examined as a cognitive model of autonomy within constraint, illustrating how control emerges through tone modulation and disengagement rather than effort or vigilance. Comparative analyses of major contemplative traditions and contemporary awakening discourse reveal a recurring tendency to redirect downshift insights toward vigilance or metaphysical escape. Cultural representations in film further demonstrate intuitive recognition of agency grounded in disengagement rather than domination.
By separating awareness from control, this thesis offers a non-metaphysical framework for understanding agency, suffering reduction, and ethical participation, and challenges the moral imperative of permanent wakefulness that characterizes many modern liberation narratives.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GGBGH59J
• ISBN13: 9798243593830
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"