Waking, Dreaming, Being

Evan Thompson occupies a unique position in the consciousness conversation. His father collaborated with Robert Thurman on Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, and Thompson himself co-authored “The Embodied Mind” with Francisco Varela, one of the founders of neurophenomenology. So when he writes about the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, and contemplative practice, he’s not a tourist. He’s someone who has lived at that crossroads his entire intellectual life.

“Waking, Dreaming, Being” is structured around states of consciousness: waking, falling asleep, dreaming, lucid dreaming, deep dreamless sleep, and dying. This is not an arbitrary organizational scheme; it mirrors the classical Vedantic analysis of consciousness through its states, an approach that goes back to the Mandukya Upanishad. Thompson takes the claims of contemplative traditions seriously as philosophical positions, not merely as cultural artifacts to be explained away by neuroscience. Adam Frank, reviewing in the New York Times, called it “Thompson’s excellent book” and noted that it asks readers to “do something truly radical and withhold judgment on the big metaphysical questions.” That willingness to hold questions open rather than rushing to answers is one of the book’s great strengths.

Kerry Backstrom described Thompson’s intelligence as “sparklingly clear and lucid,” and that’s exactly right. He moves between Indian philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science, and meditation practice with remarkable fluency, making connections that feel illuminating rather than forced. His discussion of lucid dreaming as a form of metacognition, and his treatment of what yogic traditions say about consciousness in deep sleep, are genuinely original contributions to the literature.

But the book has drawn careful criticism. Miri Albahari, writing in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, called it “a ground-breaking philosophical exploration” while challenging Thompson’s redefinition of “self.” Thompson rejects both the idea of a fixed, unchanging self and the eliminativist claim that there is no self at all, arguing instead for a “self-specifying” process. This middle path is philosophically sophisticated, but some readers will feel he’s trying too hard to split the difference between Vedantic claims about pure awareness and Buddhist claims about no-self. Where you land on this probably depends on your own contemplative commitments.

What makes the book essential reading for anyone on a nondual path is its intellectual honesty. Thompson doesn’t flatten contemplative traditions into neuroscience, and he doesn’t dismiss neuroscience in favor of traditional claims. He holds the tension between them with genuine rigor. The sections on dying and near-death experience are particularly thoughtful, neither debunking nor credulously accepting the reports, but asking what they reveal about the nature of consciousness.