they have different physiological respoonses you look at when you study them- brain waves, vs heart rates.

sleep tends to leave your body physically immobile, whereas different types of drugs have different effects.

memory- you have different memory processes- in sleep it is thought this is for memory consolidation, you tend to remember dreams right as you wake up.
drugs- a lot of drugs result in unclear or just no memories at all- especially alcohol, but there is some evidence that recall emerges when you are induced into that state again.

something that goes the other way on the Entropy scale. outside the critial period

the awakeness of your body, as sleep shuts down your body but on drugs you are still capable of moving around your surroundings.

sleep- with sleep it is because waking people up in the middle of their sleep stages throughout the night causes issues for validity as in real life you wouldnt be woken up multiple times in the night and asked what you are thinking

have to rely on self report for the most part (also in links to normal consciousness)

drugs are enduce a lot of emotions- also might help with self insight, do dreams?- Nir and Tononi 2010 foudn that theres stronger activation of visual memory and emotion areas and diminished activation of the frontal lobes (lack of inhibition) in REM sleep might be a way of dealing with underlying problems. Ullman method- useful for therapy (Ullman 1996). drugs have also have some successes in psychodelic therapy (something like that)

neurological effects- psilocybin creates many connections that with low stability that disappear after the drug use (petri et al 2014)

drugs- ego loss (Alanes 1964) , sleep may stabilise your sense of self?

sleep- poor memory, Walker says that sleep could be consolidating memory, we might forget so we dont interrupt our memories in real life.

dont have a proper agreed definition of consciousness, so how can there be a empirical testable definition of what constitutes altered state of consciousness

should it be defined objectively or subjectively, how can we compare experiences, what is normal? so how do we know whats not normal.

Evidence: For example, both states rely on self- report data for the most part, which is prone to memory, verbosity and reliability issues, for data collection on drugs especially, as it has to be collected after the fact, as while under the influence of some drugs there is no useful information about what they are experiencing that can be collected from participants. Dream studies experience the same problem, as their participants have to be woken up and asked quickly what they were dreaming about, as many dreams are forgotten quickly after entering waking consciousness. Wording of the question, and the nature of waking participants up at irregular times through the night, are also methodological problems for sleep studies, as slightly different questions can receive very different answers, and the methods of the study are very different to 'normal' sleep for most participants. There are also methodological concerns that encompass all forms of ASC, as there is no agreed upon definition for consciousness, so what constitutes an ASC is also vastly different for different researchers. closely following this, individual differences are likely to occur in this self report data as each participant's 'normal' experience is subjective, so as will their perceived change as a result of these ASC.

Explanation: many of these studies into ASC have strong methodological issues, meaning that their results may be flawed, and these studies may not tell us anything generalisable about these ASC.

Point: Memory acts as a buffer for the similarities and differences of dream and drug states, as it has both.

Evidence: They are similar as people report a poor memory for both states, drugs like alcohol temporarily disrupt the ability to form new long term memories, and there are a number of reports that give forgetting as a common side effect of prescribed psychotropic drugs (Cooper et al. 2007) Dreams are commonly quickly forgotten after waking up, potentially because the information in the dreams are not important, and this stops memories in dreams and reality from becoming muddled.

However, Sleep seems to have a function in memory consolidation, which is where sleep and drug states differ. Van Der Helm & Walker (2009) suggested that dreams are a by-product of memory consolidation, where emotions at the time of encoding are used to tag the memory so the important ones are more likely to be remembered. This hypothesis has been supported by Deliens et al (2013) who found that after sleep, participants recall was protected against emotional context interference. Drugs seem to have very little beneficial effect on memory however, and as discussed, seem to often result in the inability to form long term memories. There is evidence however that state dependent forgetting may occur, as Goodwin et al. (1975) and Carter and Cassaday (1998) found that retrieval of memories improved when participants were in the same state as they were at the time of encoding.

therefore, there seem to be both similarities and differences between the effects of ASC on memory.

Point: there seems to be neurological differences in the effects of both ASC.

evidence: Drugs such as Psilocybin create many connections within the brain that have low stability and last until the effects of the drug have worn off (Petri et al, 2014). However, research shows that the role of sleep can have many important functions such as memory consolidation, brain maturation (Marks et al. 1995) and some researchers have suggested that sleep is important for brain cells to repair and regain sensitivity, as Siegel (2003) discusses.