Abstract
‘Dream consciousness’ describes how modern sleep science has contributed to the dramatic progress of the last decade in understanding the brain basis of consciousness, and how that understanding has caused us to shift our model of dreaming in the direction of altered states of consciousness that have been recognised since the 1960s. Consciousness may be defined as our awareness of the world, our bodies, and ourselves. The last quality, awareness of ourselves, includes awareness of awareness, the knowledge that we are conscious. The sequential processing model and the modular approach are considered along with the binding problem, qualia and the hard problem, lucid dreaming, and how dreaming affects consciousness.