I am Awake: Husserl on Wakefulness and Attention

The article presents Husserl’s account of wakefulness and shows that, according to Husserl, only a phenomenology of attention is capable of elucidating what characterizes the state of wakefulness. That is, the article shows, from a Husserlian point of view, that attention introduces a distinction between theme and background in our experience and that this accounts for why we are never fully awake when we are awake (section 1 and 2), how the sleep within wakefulness is different from genuine sleep (section 3), and, finally, in what way the intentionality that occurs when genuinely asleep, such as dreaming, is radically different from any awareness that occurs while awake.