Jonathan Ichikawa: Do Dreams deceive?

Dreaming is traditionally thought to be a source of skeptical worries because dreaming involves misleading sensory experiences which result in false beliefs. On an externalist conception of justification, dream skepticism appears particularly worrying, compared to other, more distant possibilities like a 'brain in a vat' scenario. But is it true that dreams involve misleading experiences and false beliefs? I argue, both on broadly philosophical and broadly psychological grounds, that they do not; engaging with a dream is more like engaging with a fiction than it is like hallucinating. Dreams, then, do not typically deceive dreamers while they are dreaming. I go on to consider the epistemological upshot. On one way of thinking about the skeptical pressure, dream skepticism is refuted by this conception of dreaming; on another, it is made significantly deeper and more puzzling.