Article #720

Author: John Prytz

Your reality tells you that in the normal day-to-day course of events, you are either asleep or awake and you alternate between the two. When asleep you dream and when awake you (probably) daydream. When you dream (or daydream), then you yourself will probably feature within that dream. You are usually a participant or at least a bystander or first person observer within your own dreams. So normally in your dreams you dream of yourself as being in an awakened state as opposed to being asleep, even though the dreaming version you is asleep.

Now the question is, when you are really awake, how do you know that you are really awake for an absolute fact? How could you prove, if only to yourself, you are really awake and again not just dreaming that you were awake? I can’t see any way that you could do this (and no, pinching yourself isn’t an answer since you could just as easily dream you were pinching yourself). Any scenario that happens while you think you are awake could also be a scenario that plays out in your dreams. Taking that concept to extremes, could it be possible therefore that your entire ‘life’ and those seemingly really awake and really asleep cycles are all just one very long and continuous dream state?

If, to date, your entire ‘life’ has been but a dream, you might really awake to find yourself in a world that has no real parallel with your ‘life’ in that ‘lifelong’ dream state that has incorporated what you thought were real awake and real sleep cycles. Your ‘life’ has been but a dream, with or without a boat to row and you really awake to find nothing in common between your three score and ten dream ‘life’ and your real life. But there’s nothing different in principle between that scenario and the normal scenario you’re already used to that a nightly dream landscape bears no relationship to your awake landscape (i.e. – you might dream your 007 who beds the girls but you nevertheless awake to face your boring job as a forever bachelor and sales clerk).

Now consider you cyclic transition between being normally asleep and dreaming and normally waking up. If you appear in what you would term a normal everyday night’s dream, then when you (apparently) awake, that you in your dream(s) must obviously ‘die’ since that dream landscape containing that dream version of you that you were in now goes poof. Now in the scenario postulated above, the possibility might be that your transition from your ‘life’ as a ‘lifelong’ ongoing dream state to really waking up (in that brave new world) might be what the transition is between death (your dream ‘life’ finishes as you begin to wake up) and the ‘afterlife’ (you wake up into your real brave new world reality). You have passed from a dream reality back into an awake reality – you could call that a form of resurrection if you wish. A ‘near death experience’ (NDE) is when you nearly wake up into that brave new world reality, your real home world, but not quite and you return back to dreaming your ‘life’.

When you go to sleep at night and have a dream, you are creating a simulated universe / world / landscape with virtual characters, which as noted above all go poof when you awaken. So in that sense you can liken yourself to a god, a creator and destroyer of worlds (even if by accident and not by design) which might also assist in accounting for why we invented creator deities – if we create dream landscapes then maybe it’s logical that a ‘deity’ created our landscape . Whatever floats your boat!

Within your normal asleep period, there’s an inner ‘awake-asleep’ cycle where dreaming is akin to being ‘awake’ and ‘asleep’ are those intervals between dreams. Within what you would call your normal awake period, there’s also an inner activity cycle as well. You have peaks and troughs of varying degrees of ‘get-up-and-go-ness’. From waking up through to falling asleep again you’re not at one constant level of alertness or creativity. These smaller cycles (biorhythms?) occurring within your larger asleep-awake cycle are akin to your daily asleep-awake cycle as a parallel to something occurring within the larger ‘life’ (asleep) to ‘afterlife’ (awake) scenario discussed above. It’s all a bit like those identical Russian dolls, identical except for their size – one doll fits inside another and both fit inside a third, and those three inside a fourth and so on.

Here’s an apparent snag. When your dreams conclude, the characters and landscape as noted above go poof and appear to disappear into – well into something, but a something that allows you to occasionally and consciously recall. Once in a while we remember, if only briefly, snippets of our dreams, but still, for all intents and purposes they go poof. However, when in my scenario your asleep/dream ‘life’ ends and you awake and pass into the ‘afterlife’, your remains don’t go poof but stick around for others to deal with. So does that put the shaft up the scenario? Not really, because as far as the now awake you in the brave new world ‘afterlife’ is concerned, your ‘dream’ body, as well as those ‘dream’ bodies left to deal with your ‘dream’ body (bury it, cremate it, whatever), have passed by the boards and are no longer part of your former ‘dream’ life. They have, and your body has, gone poof. You’ve crossed over into another dimension, the Twilight Zone, whatever and left your dead ‘dream’ body behind.

Here’s another apparent snag. Your dreams can have unreal / fantasy elements that have no parallel with the real wide awake world (i.e. – you dream you have wings and can fly). Does the fact that fantasy elements can appear in your dreams and only in your dreams but never in your apparently awake state give the game away that your asleep and awake intervals, the yin and yang of your daily cycle, are indeed separate and apart aspects of your day-to-day existence? While that appears logical, IMHO that’s probably not all that convincing. Anomalies abound in what we term the real world, including reports of winged humanoids like Mothman. Then there are those allegedly mythological winged humans / humanoids like Maat, Nike, Eros and the Biblical Cherubim and Seraphim (but note, not angels who aren’t winged contrary to popular perceptions). Who can really say how much myth is really in mythology. The gap between fantasy and reality is not as clear-cut as one would normally believe. It’s not called the “paranormal” for no reason at all!

But unless yours is the only mind in all of creation, there arises another slight snag. If there’s more than one mind (more like over seven billion minds and counting) and there’s a common landscape, then there has to be some guiding hand or intelligence doing the synchronization. If I ‘dream’ I’m at the bank depositing some money (say $100) with a female bank teller, and that other mind, that female bank teller is ‘dreaming’ simultaneously that there’s a customer in front of her depositing $100, then how is that dual scenario being molded or synchronized into one overall scenario?

The obvious answer is that someone else, a third party, is conjuring up the both of you (bank teller and customer) in their dream landscape. Or, perhaps, better still, they have created and synchronized you both (bank teller and customer) as a kind of simulation, as a kind of virtual reality, as a kind of avatar, or as a kind of video game.

That dual landscape, by the way, has to extend into the animal kingdom since animals, or at least the higher animals dream too. I may dream about playing with my cat while my cat is dreaming that its ‘owner’ is entertaining it. Or the cat might dream of chasing a mouse while the mouse is having a nightmare about being chased by the cat.

Now the question must be asked, do I personally believe the above scenario? No, I can’t say that I accept the premise, albeit it is a very interesting one, it’s just that I can’t think of any way of disproving it.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/philosophy-articles/from-here-to-eternity-you-only-live-twice-6968984.html

About the Author

Science librarian; retired.