The question is probably as old as humanity itself. Poets, philosophers, religious figures and, more recently, neuroscientists, have attemped to provide answers to this question. We all have had the experience of feeling our dreams were real, and of reality feeling unreal. On occasion I’ve even dreamt that I was asleep, dreaming. How do you convince yourselves that you’re not dreaming and that the shared world has an external, objective existence?
Who is keeping me alive while I dream if that’s all I’m doing?
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That’s a reasonable question, but what if dreaming is all you’re doing, and you’re not ‘alive’ in the everyday sense?
Maybe The Universe is dreaming us all up at once. Perhaps the Universe is experiencing everything. We feel it individually, but God feels/perceives everything at once.
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Dreams have an odd looping quality. My day-to-day existence does not share this quality.
It’s different for me, my daily life does feel literally like a dream.
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Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou.
Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.
Zhuangzi, chapter 2
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As a rule of thumb, to feel like you’re dreaming is a good indication that you’re not.
What about lucid dreams?
I always dream that I’m me, which makes obtaining any clarity it even harder.
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I don’t think lucid dreamers have this feeling.
As I understand it lucid dreaming is about becoming aware you’re dreaming and even gaining some degree of control over your dream. But whether the lucid dreamer is not only aware that she’s dreaming but also feels she’s dreaming might a different question.
Yes that’s my understanding too. And ofcourse, even if such a feeling would be reported, we can only make sure that the dreamer dreamt to have had this feeling.
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But when you wake up from this reality. How do you know the new reality isn’t also a dream. And so on Ad infinitum.
It’s just a glossy version of the simulation theory which has the same dead end flaw.
Dream/reality…I don’t have 7 billion people and their greedy self interest in my dreams. I can’t dream consistently, like in my dreams I would dream the store I visited everyday would be different all the time. On the contrary, It’s consistent. My thoughts don’t change the physicality of reality. In my dreams I can change reality. I get tired then I sleep then I dream, I’m not always dreaming otherwise I would be asleep get tired of still sleeping and sleep some more; there’s differentiation in real life, so this isn’t the case. Plus, in your dreams thoughts can supersede consequences; if I do something bad I can dream my way out of it, I can’t do that in real life there are 7 billion people with 7 billion consequences. If I’m in jail I can’t dream my way out of a dream.
Perhaps we don’t, but the question of whether we live in a dream is worth asking even if it upsets our well-being. But by waking up we know at least that up to that point we’re dreaming, unless we only dreamed that we woke up, but even then we wouldn’t be wrong to believe that we had been dreaming all along.
I don’t see it as a “flaw”, just an epistemological constraint. You could make a similar point about predictions at a quantum level.
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Someone would have to be a complex dreamer to dream up 7 billion people, all of their interactions, every complicated college textbook, all forms of entertainment, all of nature and the animals interacting with nature, all of the architecture, all of outer space and its reactions, and to be aware of this but be stupid in their dreams just a mild understanding of reality and maybe one college degree laying in bed. It doesn’t make sense.
This is a classical objection to my question, the dream world having a logic of its own different from the one we experience in everyday life. I suppose I could reply, well, how do we know that we are not dreaming the fact that we are dreaming? As I mention above I’ve dreamt on occasion that I was dreaming, but of course to become in your dream an autonomous dreamer having a dream of its own is impossible. Of course, I don’t expect this counterargument to be very convincing.
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If reality would be a dream I would be a sex super hero wealthy guru who is immortal and smarter than everyone in the universe.
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