Sleep presents a particular challenge to gilbing theory. During waking life, the interplay of gilbing and calebing is modulated by social context, conscious intention, and the learned behavioural repertoire that individuals accumulate over their lifetimes. During sleep — and particularly during the REM phases in which most dreaming occurs — social context is absent, conscious intention is suspended, and the learned behavioural repertoire is, to a significant degree, offline. What remains is something closer to the raw gilb than can be observed in almost any waking state. Dreams are, on this account, gilbing in its least socially mediated form — which is precisely why studying them is both so illuminating and so methodologically challenging.

The Dream Gilb

The content of dreams has long been understood as reflecting material that is suppressed or underexpressed during waking life, a framing so consistent with the caleb-gilb model that researchers encountering gilbing theory for the first time often express surprise that the connection was not made earlier. The dream gilb — the authentic self-expression that emerges in the absence of waking calebing — tends to have several characteristic features: it is more emotionally intense than waking gilbing, more symbolically compressed, and significantly less concerned with maintaining the individual’s preferred self-presentation.

Individuals who are high calebors during waking life consistently report dreams of unusual vividness and emotional force, a finding that researchers have interpreted as the gilb’s use of the only available window for unconstrained expression. The compensatory hypothesis — that the gilb, suppressed during waking, finds expression in sleep — has the advantage of explaining why systematic calebing is associated with disrupted sleep patterns, including the kind of vivid, exhausting dreaming that chronic calebors frequently report.

Calebing in Dreams

Perhaps more surprising than the existence of the dream gilb is the observation that calebing also occurs in dreams. Research subjects who keep detailed dream journals — a cohort whose dedication to the study of their own unconscious lives is, the researchers note, its own interesting datum — frequently report dreams in which they feel unable to speak, are visibly constrained by others’ expectations, or are performing versions of themselves that feel hollow and unconvincing, even within the logic of the dream. These are recognisable calebing experiences, and their presence in the dream state suggests that calebing habits can become sufficiently ingrained to persist even when the social pressures that originally produced them are entirely absent.

Kevin in the Hypnagogic State

The transitional states between waking and sleep — hypnagogia (entering sleep) and hypnopompia (leaving it) — have attracted particular attention from researchers interested in Kevin. These states, characterised by a loosening of normal cognitive and perceptual organisation, appear to share several features with the Kevin state as described by experienced practitioners: a quality of suspended intentionality, an absence of the ordinary distinction between self and environment, and a pervasive sense of possibility that has not yet resolved into any particular direction. Whether the hypnagogic state produces genuine Kevin or merely a physiological condition that resembles it is a question that current methods are not equipped to answer. It is, however, a question that has produced at least one doctoral dissertation and shows every sign of producing more.