What are dreams? Cynics will say that they are just random sequences of fragmented memories, and that they really do not have any significance as far as reality is concerned. Psychoanalysts will probably say they are manifestations of your subconscious or unconscious desires; a sort of communication you might say. They might be, but then I have always wondered if it is so, why do they have to be so cryptic. If my subconscious or unconscious mind wants to communicate with me, why does it have to be in a way that would not be understood by me! (Unless of course I decide to devote 10 years of my life in trying to learn enough whereby I can guess on what they probably mean) Anyway, what I want to do is share an experience which got me thinking of a possible relative relationship between Dreams and Reality.
I was in one of my afternoon comatose states, and somewhere down the line I went off to sleep. (something else which also has fascinated me for quite some time is sleep just suddenly creeps up. I mean one moment you are awake, a hundred thoughts swirling in your mind, and suddenly, without your realizing your are asleep. Is it possible to ever be conscious when sleep comes? Its obviously not possible to be conscious after sleep has come...sleep after all is defined as a state when you are not conscious. But is it possible to be conscious, just for that one moment, when sleep just comes? Anyway...enough digression!). Now it so happens that whenever I sleep during the day, the frequency of dreams is much higher. So, even if I doze off for 20 minutes, there is a good chance I'll have a dream. So on this particular afternoon, I sleep for around 4 hours, and the I experience the following:
I go to sleep for around 30 minutes, I have some dream and then I wake up for around 5 minutes, still lying down and staring at the white ceiling, and then again I go off to sleep for 30 minutes and the same sequence follows for the next 4 hours. Some of the dreams were actually, in a way, continuations of the previous ones, not precise continuations, but continuations in the sense of having the same 'story line' and 'characters'.
So after 4 hours of almost continuously going into, and coming out of dreams, at the end, when I woke up, for a good 15 minutes I was not sure about anything - Who was I? Where was I ? Is this a Dream? Is this Reality?
After some more time, things started sinking in. I had a faint memory of the dreams I had had (why can't we ever completely remember our dreams? ). Needless to say, they did not make much sense at all. But what I had experienced, gave birth to the following thought experiment:
We are awake for 18 hours a day, and hence we experience Reality for 18 hours a day (for the time being let us forget about the time in Reality lost to daydreams, arbitrary thoughts etc; let us also forget the possibility that Reality itself is an illusion!) and are asleep for 6 hours, during which we experience Dreams (again, let us assume that for the entire duration of our sleep we Dream continuously...this of course is a very strong assumption). Now suppose for a sufficiently long period of time, the opposite happens, i.e. We are asleep for 18 hours a day (or would it be 18 hours a night ?), throughout which we Dream, and we are awake for 6 hours during which we experience Reality as is being experienced by someone who is following the original scheme. Also make the rather strong assumption your Dreams are continuations, and that in your Dreams, you can remember your previous Dreams. Now, after a sufficiently long period of time, a month, a year, 2 years, 10 years, wouldn't Reality for me become my 18 hour long Dreams? And would not my experience of Reality for 6 hours become my Dreams? If you modify the experiment for 12 + 12, instead of 18 + 6, would Dreams and Reality merge into one single, pseudo Reality, where they aren't any Dreams? or would I go completely insane by the pull of equally strong, but different states of existence?
It seems to me that the states of Reality and Dreams are relative to each other, with respect to the amount of time spent in those states.
I was in one of my afternoon comatose states, and somewhere down the line I went off to sleep. (something else which also has fascinated me for quite some time is sleep just suddenly creeps up. I mean one moment you are awake, a hundred thoughts swirling in your mind, and suddenly, without your realizing your are asleep. Is it possible to ever be conscious when sleep comes? Its obviously not possible to be conscious after sleep has come...sleep after all is defined as a state when you are not conscious. But is it possible to be conscious, just for that one moment, when sleep just comes? Anyway...enough digression!). Now it so happens that whenever I sleep during the day, the frequency of dreams is much higher. So, even if I doze off for 20 minutes, there is a good chance I'll have a dream. So on this particular afternoon, I sleep for around 4 hours, and the I experience the following:
I go to sleep for around 30 minutes, I have some dream and then I wake up for around 5 minutes, still lying down and staring at the white ceiling, and then again I go off to sleep for 30 minutes and the same sequence follows for the next 4 hours. Some of the dreams were actually, in a way, continuations of the previous ones, not precise continuations, but continuations in the sense of having the same 'story line' and 'characters'.
So after 4 hours of almost continuously going into, and coming out of dreams, at the end, when I woke up, for a good 15 minutes I was not sure about anything - Who was I? Where was I ? Is this a Dream? Is this Reality?
After some more time, things started sinking in. I had a faint memory of the dreams I had had (why can't we ever completely remember our dreams? ). Needless to say, they did not make much sense at all. But what I had experienced, gave birth to the following thought experiment:
We are awake for 18 hours a day, and hence we experience Reality for 18 hours a day (for the time being let us forget about the time in Reality lost to daydreams, arbitrary thoughts etc; let us also forget the possibility that Reality itself is an illusion!) and are asleep for 6 hours, during which we experience Dreams (again, let us assume that for the entire duration of our sleep we Dream continuously...this of course is a very strong assumption). Now suppose for a sufficiently long period of time, the opposite happens, i.e. We are asleep for 18 hours a day (or would it be 18 hours a night ?), throughout which we Dream, and we are awake for 6 hours during which we experience Reality as is being experienced by someone who is following the original scheme. Also make the rather strong assumption your Dreams are continuations, and that in your Dreams, you can remember your previous Dreams. Now, after a sufficiently long period of time, a month, a year, 2 years, 10 years, wouldn't Reality for me become my 18 hour long Dreams? And would not my experience of Reality for 6 hours become my Dreams? If you modify the experiment for 12 + 12, instead of 18 + 6, would Dreams and Reality merge into one single, pseudo Reality, where they aren't any Dreams? or would I go completely insane by the pull of equally strong, but different states of existence?
It seems to me that the states of Reality and Dreams are relative to each other, with respect to the amount of time spent in those states.
8 comments:
Dream is Destiny ... remember...? :)
well very interesting
dreams are very powerful that they tell us about ourselves and man is even more powerful as he turns dreams to reality .
read about the wakefulness-sleep transitions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
as for dreams becoming reality - dreams r for u only, but reality is shared by everyone around u and shaped bu things which "really" happen.
@Kaustubh
'Absolute Reality' might be what everyone around me 'shares', but Reality for me is how I perceive it; and how I perceive Reality is clearly not essentially the same as how everyone else around me perceives me.
*Perceives it (Reality)
hii !!
quite interesting .actually dreams are a big thing with me...
# Can we think of the dream world as another dimension???as they are outside the scope and power of space and time of the real world...
# Does it happen to u that when we sleep for a particular time the time elapsed in the dream world is longer than the time lapsed in the real world
e.g.most of the times when i sleep for say half hour i dream and feel that a couple of hours's events hav taken place in the dream but it turns out to be just half hour.!!!
Could this mean that the rate of passage of time is more in the dream world???
#i am such a strong dreamer that i dream even when i fall asleep for a couple of minutes but cannot remember a thing when i wake up...
#VERY INTERESTING-
there is a certain experience i hav had 4 to 5 times in the last one and half years...not sure if you hav had it....
many times when i was asleep i suddenly had a sensation of a sinking feeling of my body..sinking into the bed ..as if the gravity has increased 10 times ..it becomes very difficult to move your limbs...u know something negative is happening but still you are not
concious... after much struggle i manage to move a limb and wake up ...it always feels like a feeling of death....it may all be sounding wierd but recently my friend told me that a similar thing has happened to him 2....
oh another thing
hav u also noticed that whenever u r about to get hurt in your dream u wake up....
i dont think we can compare dreams with reality because dreams come very randomly, different, and unexpected.
As to reality where we act upon our daily routine (work, school, friends, relatives etc..) and always expect something tomorrow. In reality, we have some kind of idea of what is expected the next day.
In dreams, it quite hard to tell...
Post a Comment