Dreams have utterly fascinated me for as long as I can remember. To this day I am proud of the fact that I read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams when I was only 17 years old. I have been blessed with the gift of incredibly vivid and immersive dreams. On several occasions I have become lucid while dreaming though never intentionally. I would like to develop the ability to trigger lucid dreams at will as this would undoubtedly allow for a greater range of subconscious exploration. That the brain is able to construct entire realities that are completely realistic and believable to the one experiencing them is truly one of the wonders of the human experience. As many philosophers have noted, the temporal nature of the dream experience calls into question the extent to which one’s “waking life” can be considered real. Since all of us experience complex realities that prove to be mere mental constructs on an almost nightly basis, how are we to know for sure that our “waking lives” are not of the same nature? I’ve often wondered if others experience their dreams as vividly as I do because it seems that if they did the topic would be discussed far more often. How can one experience a highly vivid dream and not be totally mesmerized by it? I suspect that dreams are so completely at odds with the consensus reality that most people choose to forget (or repress, rather) these nighttime journeys immediately upon waking.
To my mind, one of the most important questions is to what extent dreams are “real?” Also, are there degrees of reality and if so how do dreams compare to what I describe as my “waking life?” What is meant by “real” in the first place?
The illusory nature of the ego has been emphasized by several mystics and religious philosophers throughout history, but it is only as of late that I have personally been able to internalize and occasionally have direct experience of its truth. For instance, at this moment, there is an office, there is a desk and a chair, there is a computer on the desk and a young adult human male seated in the chair. The human is typing on the computer. Clearly there is no “self” involved in any of this. The human has a complex brain that allows it to experience sense perceptions including a sense of individual identity, but its immediate perception is merely what emanates from the natural functions of its living body. It experiences thoughts but these thoughts are not “real” in any tangible sense. They cannot be seen or felt or heard or experienced outside of the consciousness of the human in question. These thoughts are almost always in a human’s native language, in this case English. It is humbling to consider that to the majority of people on this planet, the English language is heard only as incoherent sounds, in the same indecipherable manner that the English-speaking human hears other languages in which he is not learned. But if thoughts are not real, then what are they exactly? What is the substance of thought? As I stated above it is evident that thoughts have no substance which can be identified with any traditional human senses, but they are nonetheless experienced by the mind (which I also believe to be a fiction). If selfhood is an illusion and phenomenological experience is merely the organic body’s conditioned responses to its immediate environment, then thought is likely an evolved mental process which serves to facilitate such responses, much in the same way that the pleasure derived from the sexual act serves as an incentive for reproduction, though not exactly.
As I have mentioned before, there is no time during which the absence of self is as abundantly clear as it is during dreamless sleep. Indeed, dreamless sleep is the complete absence of any sort of experience, one of the few known physiological states through which one can abstractly conceptualize nothingness. One has the experience of getting into bed, closing his eyes, and gradually becoming more tired and relaxed. His experience then resumes without any identifiable break at the moment that he wakes up in the same bed, though he is able to conclude that some amount of time has passed during which his body was sleeping. Is such a complete absence of experience possible for a living body or is one in fact dreaming every single time that his body sleeps and is that which he has traditionally thought of as “dreamless sleep” simply an occasion on which he has no memory of the dreams that he nevertheless did experience as it would be impossible for him not to have? This line of questioning leads us straight into another dilemma, however. “If a tree falls in the woods…” You know the drill. If one’s conscious experience resumes seamlessly at the moment of waking after laying down to sleep, and there is no memory of any dream state in between, it would be an unfounded assumption to suggest that there was any experience in between. With this in mind, there exists the possibility that by training one’s memory and strengthening dream recall so that it is more consistent, one can essentially expand the scope of his consciousness and uncover aspects of reality that were previously hidden.
Given that my “self,” my ego, my sense of being a unique individual is an illusion and not real, then my true identity is “life,” the force that animates all living beings. It is tempting at this point to say that I am everyone else (and many have made this mistake) but that would be to forget that there is no “I” or “me” to be anyone else in the first place. There is only life, and it is eternal and self-existent and unbound by the limits of space or time. Space and time can only occur within the confines of human perception; these measurements are imposed on reality, once again most likely as a survival mechanism like the “ego” itself. One follows from the other. Individual identity, space, and time, are all limits. LIFE is limitless. What then is the scope of the unconscious? I pose this question as an individual navigating the world through my immediate conscious perception of this body and its environment. I have always thought of the unconscious within the traditional Freudian framework; that it consists of the individual’s thoughts and psychic processes which are not immediately available to or present in consciousness as experienced through the lens of the ego. But is the unconscious limited to content related to the individual? In light of everything I have written up to this point it is blatantly obvious that it is of course NOT limited in this sense or in any other. Jung proposed the concept of the collective unconscious which is shared by all humans on this planet and is made up of various archetypes and symbols and instincts/impulses, among other things. Let’s define the unconscious as simply “that which is not conscious.” The process of preparing and eating food is one that I perform at least semi-consciously while the flow of blood through my circulatory system is of course something I have no control over; it occurs automatically. The same applies to the growth of my fingernails and hair and many of my body’s other natural functions. These latter processes occur within the domain of the unconscious. The same life force that causes my hair to grow causes dogs’ hair to grow and the blood to flow through the veins of all the living citizens of China and all of the other countries of the world.
Left Hand Rising 