Life is but a dream

[Dean Mullen]

I am developing an idea that all of reality is a dream, although it sounds crazy remember when you sleep you rarely doubt it as not real. I believe that this world is a sub-conscious created world. There is an infinite number of dream levels in my opinions and that you can only remember one level below the level you are currently in and each level you rise, events appear less likely in other words the world becomes more rational and more feasible.

 

So the above dream level would be even more rational than this world and events are less likely. So the conclusion is that the more & more you rise up the dream level ladder of reality and eventually you reach a point were every event is infinity/1 hence nothing exists. So in my opinion at the surface level of true reality nothing exists... literally! I don't have much observational evidence to it but I just wanted to explain my theory out of interest. I believe that when we awake to the above level we will act normal and not think of this life as important but we will remember it as no more than another dream.

[zapatos]

So the above dream level would be even more rational than this world and events are less likely. So the conclusion is that the more & more you rise up the dream level ladder of reality and eventually you reach a point were every event is infinity/1 hence nothing exists. So in my opinion at the surface level of true reality nothing exists... literally! I don't have much observational evidence to it but I just wanted to explain my theory out of interest. I believe that when we awake to the above level we will act normal and not think of this life as important but we will remember it as no more than another dream.

What is the observational evidence that you do have?

[PhDwannabe]

So, solipsism, essentially? You've invented the idea of solipsism? I'm going to have to alert Plato and the Arnofsky brothers immediately!

 

Also, how did I already know the word for it?

 

Damnit, nothing makes sense in this inescapable dream world of ours.

 

 

 

 

Edit: Aww shucks, I'm sorry, Dean. I now look at your profile and see that you're a teenager. I shouldn't have been so reflexively snarky. You have little intellectual responsibility at your age to have taken a philosophy class and learned about something like solipsism, or even Plato. I don't mean to crush your philosophical curiosity.

 

One of the great functions of a liberal education is to show you that 99% of your great ideas have been thought of already--chewed up, argued over, refined, dealt with, developed or discarded. Typically by people who know more than you'll ever dream about. The beautiful, liberating knowledge that you're more or less unimportant in the course of intellectual human events will come in time. Trust me. It's nicer than it sounds.

Edited February 14, 2011 by PhDwannabe

[Horza2002]

What evidence do you base this idea on? You can't just come up with an idea if there is nothing before it leading you to this new conclusion. Yes, while dreaming, you do think it is reality...until you wake up and realise it was a dream...

[Dean Mullen]

What evidence do you base this idea on? You can't just come up with an idea if there is nothing before it leading you to this new conclusion. Yes, while dreaming, you do think it is reality...until you wake up and realise it was a dream...

 

Well according to quantum physics, an atomic structure can only exist as a material and real object when been observed under the observation effect yet as I dream during the night I am not observing myself only an illusionary projection of myself developed by sub-conscious mind's dream world hence my atomic structure does not exist at such yet without myself and my brain there how can my dream even exist? the source of the dream is not the body as I see yet a body from the real world and hence the level of reality we are now is just a dream.

[Horza2002]

Yes, if a quantum system is unobserved it is a superpsoition of all its possible states......however, you are NOT a quantum system. Once you leave the atomic scale, quantum effects begin to become far less important until you get the microscopic level where they are no longer used as the effects are immeasurbly small. And just because you are not observing yourself, doesn't mean you are not being observed by something else.

 

And of course you atomic structure exists...if it didn't you'd cease to be at all! Your atomic structure can't just disappear!

[Mr Skeptic]

You are being observed. You are leaving your scent all over the place, for example. This leaves a record in your room that you were there, so you were observed by your room just as surely as if you took photographs of yourself.

[Marat]

The usual philosophical attack on the idea that the world is all a dream is to ask, 'A dream relative to what?' For the term 'dream' to make any sense, it has to demarcate a sphere of reality different from another kind of reality, and as far as we know, we have only one reality. As for dreaming, Bertrand Russell once quipped: "When I'm awake, I know that I'm not dreaming and that this is the real world, even though when I'm dreaming I may think I'm awake.' Later when you compare the two, the dream doesn't fool you.

 

Part of the distinction is explained by the greater coherence of objective reality, which imagined worlds do not usually have. Also, only if our sensations are organized into rule-like form so that the whole system of sensations appears as a unified object do we gain by reflection from that stable reality outside of us any motivation or capacity to recognize our own consciousness as a stable platform on which the world appears. Thus self-consciousness is parasitic on an external objective reality, whose stability and uniformity, and whose coherence when interpreted by other users of stable linguisitic rules, gives it sufficent substantiality that we can experience our own existence by reflection as a stability defined in opposition to it. But our own inner states would never have sufficient coherence on their own to constitute a sufficiently stable world for us to become conscious of it as an object unless it were first thrown into relief by its opposition to the stable world generated by other rule-obeying users of language around us.

 

This gives the outside world ontological primacy over the inner world, not the other way around, as solipsism assumes. Kant and Wittgenstein developed the disproof of solipsism, though not explicitly.

[Sorcerer]

I've never got stoned or drunk when I was dreaming.

[esspwebmaster]

hmm it sounds good

[dalemiller]

When you awake you will be someone else with no memories except all of his. Tomorrow you may wake up as that partner you are double-crossing today or a even Yappish-speaking mongrel's second-best cat.

 

When you awake you will be someone else with no memories except all of his.

Tomorrow you may wake up as that partner you are double-crossing today or a even Yappish-speaking mongrel's second-best cat.

 

Deja vu

Edited March 12, 2011 by dalemiller

[Dave49]

How prophetic was "Row, Row, Row Your Boat". Who knew?

[Edtharan]

When dreaming you are aware of the non dream world (even if at the time you can't distinguish them). This is evidenced by your awareness when dreaming that things are not quite right.

 

In other words, even though you might mistake certain parts of a dream as real, there are events that occur in dreams that don't fit with what you know of as reality.

 

This means that when dreaming, we can actually test if we are dreaming. It is not testing if something is weird, but testing if we have an awareness of an overlying reality (a non dreaming state).

 

When we are in what we call the waking world, we don't have this sense of another non-dreaming state. Thus it seams that our waking state is actually our waking state and life is not a dream.

[md65536]

I am developing an idea that all of reality is a dream, although it sounds crazy remember when you sleep you rarely doubt it as not real. I believe that this world is a sub-conscious created world. There is an infinite number of dream levels in my opinions and that you can only remember one level below the level you are currently in and each level you rise, events appear less likely in other words the world becomes more rational and more feasible.

 

I remember hearing about maybe a Native American or South American tribe that believed that reality is a dream, and that our dreams are an actual reality... or something.

 

I recently watched a Werner Herzog movie called Where the Green Ants Dream, involving indigenous Australians who believe that dreams influence reality or mix with it. To have children, they first have to dream of them. The dreams of certain animals affect nature and human existence, etc.

 

 

Personally I believe that most of what we consider to be reality is emergent, but I don't think it has anything to do with dreams, other than what we use to perceive reality is capable of "generating its own sensory data sets" let's say.

Edited March 23, 2011 by md65536

[Srilatha]

According to Hinduism, life IS an illusion--that could be a dream!!