Dreams are "real".

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When people think of dreams, they naturally think of it as something that isn't "real" or "fake". I think lies and utter fabrications fall into the category of not being "real". However, a dream is a perception that phenomenologically exists as an experience. Everything about the waking world that we typically define as "real", too, ultimately amounts to multiple instances of direct experience that we weave into a commonly held model of consensus reality through symbolism and language. What, fundamentally, is different between what we directly perceive in dreams and directly perceive when awake? Is it that dreams don't have a bearing on "real" life? I could argue that while you can go on a shooting rampage in a dream without life long consequences in waking life, what we encounter in dreams, in the realm of the subconscious, does indeed have a bearing on what we do in the waking world. The assumptions, prejudices, tendencies, etc, we were programmed with in childhood, and arguably genetic memories inherited from our ancestors, does bleed though in virtually everything we do while awake, even though we tend not to be conscious of all of this outside of what we encounter while in bed at night.

When you hop on your Marshmellow throne in a castle made of smores, that really did happen, in the sense that you really did experience it. I don't really care about the material world, to be honest, other than that it serves as a challenge to consciousness. Thoughts aren't as easy to manifest, and mind is more limited, which serves as a kind of game. The realm of dreams, of unbridled psyche, may even be the true foundation of reality, where material reality may amount to nothing more than a place of limitation and restriction to the psyche.

Last edited by JNathanK on 26 Oct 2012, 10:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I had a dream about a large (probably about twice my size) black spider/scorpion that trapped me in my car and walked over it denting it in around me and then of course it had the ability to morph to regular spider/scorpion size and crawl through the shattered windshield. And I could hear it coming for me. And then I woke up.

You can learn to control your dreams through sheer expectation. One time some aliens tried to abduct me, and through willed expectation, I was able to transform their bodies into a spaceship, which I flew threw hyperspace. Sheer expectation works to a more limited degree on the material plane, but it works nonetheless. You can learn to conquer your most inner fears through expectation. So, next time you see a big spider trying to kill you in a dream, and you, from the farthest, most sincere depths of your soul. expect it to turn into a friendly puppy dog, it'll happen.

Hmm but I'm never really aware during the dream, I'm a passive observer with things happening to me.

Well yah, they are, including Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny, since these ideals really do affect what we do from the farthest, most primordial depths of what we are. What we need to realize though is they aren't something wholly separate from us, but rather inner reflections of us.

I don't know about sea bears. I haven't heard of any myths or dreams about them. However, fairytales are definitely real on the subconscious level, in that they affect how we perceive life from a very young age.

You'd better draw an anti sea-bear circle in the sand to protect yourself just in case then.

This is a rather facetious statement, My argument is that what we dream and the myths we adopt are real in the sense that they affect our actions in the waking world and that they stem from real experiences that people actually did dream. Go ahead and be condescending if you want, but it doesn't add anything of substance to the discussion.

If you have to physically act out drawing a circle through ritual to gain some control over your psyche, it has its use. However, ritual loses its value when people forget that its not the ritual that has the power but rather the intent and expectations that the ritual conjures up. Like if someone has to pray to stay out of an accident, maybe that's what preps them for being alert while on the road. For group cohesion, conjuring up commonly held religious imagery and ideals may help for meeting that end as well. The truth of the matter is that you could do this with Superman, just as well as Jesus Christ, if Superman had the same social and historical context that Jesus does,

Well, dreams most certainly occur--there is no argument that they are, in and of themselves, real.

But the substance of dreams fails a basic existential test.

Things are not real because I perceive them. Rather, they are real because I--and others--perceive them, and we can all describe them in a relatively consistent fashion. While the blind men and the elephant suggests that reality might be subjective--as soon as you move the blind men one place on, their experiences become consistent with the previous observer. Once all the blind men have touched all the different parts of the elephant, all have a relatively consistent impression of it.

But the substance of dreams can never be subject to external perception; and hence they never pass the "real" test.

How do you know that what you call "real" isn't just another dream that you haven't woken up from yet (or maybe you have but aren't aware of that fact anymore, similar how in a most dreams you aren't aware that you're dreaming). There can be no existential test because it all depends on your perception, anything that you posit to exist outside of it and any degree of "realness" is artificial and ultimately arbitrary / a matter of belief.

Dreams are imaginary, just like hallucinations. They are only the mind trying to make sense of random synaptic impulses during sleep, and while this process actually happens, the experiences they produce have no direct effect outside of the mind -- if I dream of my father apologizing to me, I will only wake up disappointed, because he died 8 years ago without apologizing or even admitting to me that he was wrong.

All characters and events appearing in your dreams are fictitious. Any resemblance to real events or to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

It's similar to the brain in the vat argument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_argument

If my dreams are real, then the Sun has devoured the Earth at least twice, I've slipped and fell into the wet concrete (and died) during the construction of the Hoover Dam, the nazis invaded Europe sometime in the mid 90's again, I've owned a Harley Davidson and I've turned into a devil like creature with one hoof, horns and a tail many times.

We do not "pereive" all the eleven dimensions, warps in time and space, oscillating strings and all that, but real life is still fundamentally different from a dream. The world around us is fairly orderly, governed by physical laws and can be explained by mathematics (and ultimately binary numbers); dreams are incredibly chaotic—you might go from driving the Bond car to looking for Santa Clause inside a black hole to suddenly be at the dentist who all of a sudden has two heads and a metal claw.

Five years of your life will be spent in dreams. That's a significant amount of time. Most people don't remember their dreams, so it's easy to disregard their impact. But thats like saying your childhood is unimportant because you can't remember it. It may very well be that dreams are a mere byproduct of neurons being reorganized while you sleep, but even then isn't being able to witness this interior brain activity a profound experience? These "byproducts", throughout history, have resulted in in very real changes in waking life. In this sense they are equally as real as any idea that comes to mind, the distinction between an idea when asleep or awake dissappears. So when does any thought become a reality? When I express it outside of myself, or in the very moment it is expressed within me?

dreams are real to me in a sense. not objective reality, but virtual. like a computer program. except that you cant download it by sticking a USB stick into your temple (i wish i could!). it happens in a real brain, you can measure the impulses in there. just because it is intangible doesnt mean its unreal. its all academic to me, all reality is virtual to me... what happens to me is less important than what happens within me. which has all probably all been said before, but better.

Once I dreamt that I was in front of a computer and I saw myself sleeping on the screen. Then I started to move the cursor over my face and I actually had the sensation that I could perceive the 'light' from the cursor moving over my face. And I was thinking in my dream that I should wake up myself, so I was more aware in the dream than I was aware of the fact that I was sleeping - even though I was able to experience the both 'realities' in the same time. When I woke up, I was so confused because I didn't know what to believe: if I actually woke up or I was dreaming that I woke up... This was the creepiest dream I've ever had.

And I had others like this one too, even though not so bizzare. For example, once I was dreaming that I was crossing over a jungle bridge when I suddenly realised that I was dreaming, so I was thinking that I should test the water with my foot to see if it feels like in reality. When I put my foot in the water, I was something like "s**t, this water is very cold!"

Brain is really amazing. I can reproduce things from reality so accurately.
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Btw, when I was 5 or 6 years old, I had a really strange dream. I dreamt that I was in a kind of village and I could see shapes of buildings, roads, fences, people but EVERYTHING was made of bilions of colors moving in waves! Nothing did moved except the colors that seemed to flow like a river in slow motion

It looked something like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... ations.jpg

Can somebody tell me why I dreamt such thing? I never took LSD. I know that people dream what they see in reality but I don't remember to have seen such representation anywhere. It is possible that my brain to have had some strange substances at that moment?