Thread: Is dreaming a product of the brain or are we in in an alternate reality?

Right. I guess my point is that neither reality necessarily takes any precedence over the other. For me, "other people agree on this one," doesn't make this place any more real to me than that one is. After all, dream characters tend to argue quite fervently for their own existence just as much as 'you people' (outside characters in my consensus dream) do.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Right. I guess my point is that neither reality necessarily takes any precedence over the other. For me, "other people agree on this one," doesn't make this place any more real to me than that one is. After all, dream characters tend to argue quite fervently for their own existence just as much as 'you people' (outside characters in my consensus dream) do.

I read something like this in a book by Robert Waggoner book "Lucid Dreams Gateway to the inner self" He explains that sometimes dream characters try to prove that they too are conscious beings and will defend this.

I've read that book myself, and I also have that experience. Every time I try to explain to DCs that 'this is my dream,' they either become disgusted with me and shun me, as though I'm being rude or juvenile, or they argue with me, offering personal histories and identities to counter my presumption.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

I've read that book myself, and I also have that experience. Every time I try to explain to DCs that 'this is my dream,' they either become disgusted with me and shun me, as though I'm being rude or juvenile, or they argue with me, offering personal histories and identities to counter my presumption.

Yeah, and thats what makes it seem like dreams are a world of their own. I mean if you think about it, if some random guy comes to you in waking life and says "You are not real you are just a figment of my imagination" you would probably do the same, and so would everyone else.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Every time I wake from a lucid dream, reality feels a little less "real" or concrete, because to me, there is no real way to distinguish the experiences between each other, and no real justification for granting this longer, more consistent dream as any more "real" than those we experience while asleep.

Here are two objective differences between the waking dream and the sleeping one: If you don't take care of your health in waking life, it will screw up both your waking life and your dream life. Both depend in some ways on your waking life physical body. Similarly, the consensus/persistent-physics aspect of waking life also dominates.

Since your waking life experience is a mental projection that incorporates real time sensate data, and the lucid dream is a projection in which your memory, emotions, and creative mind drives pretty much the same part of your sensory imagination, I don't think that the immediate picture and sound aspects of the experiences are a very good test of how similar the two things are. In both cases you're in an internally generated dream, but in waking life that dream is tightly coupled to an objective shared reality. To the extent that there's a hidden objective reality in the sleeping dream, that reality is also to a large extent the waking world, notwithstanding that there seems to be some extrasensory information coming in from that world also.

I'm not really disagreeing, I'm just pointing out that appreciating the differences requires understanding how things fit together, it doesn't just come from the immediate sensate impressions.

In some ways I agree with a lot of what shadowofwind is saying. My own personal belief is that there is, in the end, not much of a distinction between subjective and objective realities. Even the most subjective realities tend to feel very real for the person experiencing them. The main difference in definition seems to be how many other people can share in your experience. That said, waking life impacts your dreams just as shadowofwind says. However there's some feedback in the other direction, too. A good lucid dream can make you feel elated for the whole day, and some people get pretty shaken up by nightmares. I know, others simply take them as a challenge.

The other thing is that I tend to despise any book or methodology that tries to simplify dreams or even reality too much... especially when numbers are involved. Numbers are a purely human invention, and there's no reason for the world around us to care or abide by them. One book I read recently started to describe the seven stages of the afterlife, and that's where I lost interest. Even our own world isn't that simple, so why do we assume that the afterlife is? I guess what I mean to say here is that I don't think there's just one reality when it comes to dreams, or waking life for that matter. There are uncountable, sometimes intersecting realities, with varying gradients of objectivity or subjectivity. There's no reason an experience has to be just one or the other. Even "consensus" reality is rarely so... just ask anyone who tries to pull eyewitness testimony from several people. But I think shadowofwind largely agrees on this point by the way he calls waking life a dream as well... so that's enough rambling from me. I have to get to work.

What do you mean when you say your health in waking life affects your dream life?

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

What do you mean when you say your health in waking life affects your dream life?

I'm not shadowofwind, but I think I can answer this one. Simply enough, if you're not healthy, your dream recall, and dream content are effected. If someone goes to bed drunk or high, for example, they're probably going to have poor dream recall that night. Similarly, I've heard some people have seriously crazy dreams when they're sick with something. And getting more or less sleep, of course, affects dream recall as well. Being overtired can go either way, I suppose. Either you sink into deep sleep and don't remember anything, or you have REM rebound and remember many dreams.

I agree with you singularity. Reality in my opinion is entirely subjective experience. You see the only reason why it is considered 'objective' is because most people perceive the world a certain way so everyone 'agrees' with each other what the nature of reality is. Reality is agreement. Since most of us are 'normals' and perceive the world a certain way we all 'agree' that this is how it is and thus it is considered by the 'normals' as an objective fact. But if you take a psychedelic and start seeing colors and stuff most will just say "that is just a hallucination, it isn't real" In my opinion saying it was just a "hallucination" is a big cop out. The psychedelic simply alters your state of consciousness which allows you to perceive the world in a different manner. The brain is like one big filter, taking a drug alters the filter and lets you perceive different things, I believe the colors that someone tripping out see are all around us but our brains are filtering it out right now. So lets switch this around, what if our natural state of perception was that of a psychedelic? if it was a normal thing to see trippy colors then everyone will agree that these trippy colors are "real" because that is what most people see and they all agree apon it and thus they consider it to be 'objective'. Then someone is born and they see the world the way we do right now, no trippy colors. That person will be considered to have a disorder or hallucinating, but he isn't, he is just perceiving the world differently. This is why I strongly believe that reality is just a subjective experience but it is mistaken to be objective simply because most people perceive the world in a very similar manner. So in the end, I believe reality is the consensus agreement on what everything 'should' look like. And anyone that doesn't perceive what 'normal' folks see are considered to have a brain disorder, hallucinating, etc.

Another example is our senses. Our senses can be altered with the right mental conditioning. You can use hypnosis to reduce something that is normally perceive to be painful. You can make lemons taste less sour or even sweet with hypnosis. Lemons are considered to be objectively sour because most people perceive them to be that way and thus most of them agree that lemon is sour so they consider it a 'fact' that lemon is sour. And those that perceive lemon to be sweet will be considered to have probably be considered to have a 'taste disorder'. Once again, reality isn't an objective thing, it is simply the consensus agreement of everyones idea of what something should be.

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to get this out of my head.

Originally Posted by Singularity125

I'm not shadowofwind, but I think I can answer this one. Simply enough, if you're not healthy, your dream recall, and dream content are effected. If someone goes to bed drunk or high, for example, they're probably going to have poor dream recall that night. Similarly, I've heard some people have seriously crazy dreams when they're sick with something. And getting more or less sleep, of course, affects dream recall as well. Being overtired can go either way, I suppose. Either you sink into deep sleep and don't remember anything, or you have REM rebound and remember many dreams.

Right, see, your physical health is affecting your physical connection TO your dreams, not the dreams itself. Your dream recall is part of this world, not the dream world. In dreams your consciousness experiences this or that, but you forget it upon returning here. Therefore your physical health isn't affecting your dream but your waking life. As for dream CONTENT being changed based on physical state, I could argue that your dream content is largely affected by what your consciousness experiences in waking life, and since being ill affects your consciousness in X, Y, or Z, way, that, again, you're only affecting the CONNECTION between the two worlds, rather than the other world itself.

EDIT: And, see, because we tend to perceive that this world is more 'real' than the other world, our consciousness would be more likely to be affected long-term by the things that happen in this world rather than the things that happen in the other, but this isn't a basis for weighing the value of the two worlds, it's only a matter of our perception that makes it so. If you begin to look at this world as a long dream, the events in this world affect your consciousness less than they otherwise would. I don't take this life very seriously, and I generally find it humorous that people here do so with such pomposity. Reality is just a game we play.

This comes off more pissy than I want it to, so I apologize for that. These are my thoughts on this topic, and I don't know a better way to express them, ineffective as this way may be.

If by physical world we mean the world that's described by physical science, there are no colors in that world. Light has frequency but no color. Bands of frequencies are approximately detected by structures in the eye, and those are processed by nerve structures in the eyes and brain, but nothing is known about color itself. Hence the subjectivity of color doesn't say anything about the objective reality of the physical world. It seems to me that the 'world' you're thinking about when you conclude that it is subjective based on the drug experience, is not the physical world. Its your subjective interpretation of the physical world. The extent to which the physical world itself is an objective reality is as I see it almost an entirely different question. Once you recognize that distinction, and start asking the other question, then it seems likely to me that you discover that there are definite and understandable reasons for the asymmetry between the 'waking' experience and the 'sleeping' experience. Both experiences are dreams. But underpinning both is a physical reality that both dreams depend on, in slightly different ways. Its not just the recollection of dream that the physical body affects, it is involved with the dream itself. Its not that you dream vividly when your brain is not active, then can't remember it. Your brain is involved with the dream, at least partially. Destroy the brain, and you can't do that. Impair it, and you can't do it in the same way. For instance, if you shoot yourself in the visual processing part of your head with a .22, you won't be able to dream the same way. It won't just be that memory will be reduced or blocked, the dream itself will be different, broken, altered. (We don't have to do this of course, we can talk to other people who have, or can pay attention to other less extreme ways our dreaming, and not just our ability to remember dreams, depends on food, exercise, etc.) You can argue that its still a matter of translation, that something else, maybe more subtle and spiritual, is being translated by the brain into a memory. I don't disagree with that. But the dream itself is the translation. Alter the translation and you are altering the dream. Alter the physical body and you alter the capacity to do that. The dream has an effect on the physical body too, but its a very different kind of effect. Getting shot in the head with a .22 in a dream will have a very small effect on your waking life, or on your ability to remember events from your waking life while dreaming. Damage your body seriously in waking life, go to sleep, wake up, and more often than not its still damaged. Damage your body in a dream, and as often as not it will affect the next dream not at all. That's because the 'dream body' is just a picture. Your most immediate sight and sound knowledge of your waking life body is just a picture also. Hallucinate getting shot while awake, and your physical body will likely still be OK. But there is an objective reality behind the image, which is why if you get shot, your body is really shot. There is no equivalent to that in a dream. You can experience real emotional injury in a dream, but that's something that partially transcends both states. There are also other subtleties with the waking life objective reality, involving quantum physics and parallel worlds, which are only very incompletely recognized. But this is another issue, it doesn't change the fact that your dream body is a visual/tactile cartoon of a physical body, and your waking life experience of your body is a cartoon of your physical body, and your actual physical body is something else.

Like I've said I understand that waking life is a dream, and I experience it that way. And like a lot of other people, I experience ideas as being considerably more real than physical objects. I am conscious pretty much the entire time I am asleep, and have a volume of lucid dream memories that rivals the size of my waking life memory. But waking life is clearly in some sense the tip of existence where everything comes together, the fulcrum that everything else rests on. I can share these thoughts with someone in a dream, but I can not develop them in a clear and coherent manner without actively thinking about them, and waking or sleeping that means using my brain. And if we can communicate by mind-reading in a dream, we can do that while we read and write these words here also. The subtle stuff that's sometimes more obvious in sleep doesn't go away when we're awake, even though our attention is qualified differently.

This is a criticism I have of drug experimentation. It gives you experiences that are outside the range of experiences you had without the drugs. But it doesn't give you the ability to understand those experiences. To the contrary, it significantly distorts and degrades that ability. You could have had exotic experiences eventually without the drugs - astral projection, timelessness, ocean of collective identity, whatever. But the drugs give you an amplified version of some narrow aspects of these things. And it seems that version does not include the ability to recognize things such as that falling to your death in a dream and falling to your death in waking life are very different, in an objective way, notwithstanding that there are similarities also.

Earlier I made definite statements about color, without qualifying it by saying something like "from my perspective". I imagine it may come across as being a subjective and somewhat arbitrary opinion, or a matter of faith, with other views being just as valid. I want to say that its actually possible to understand things with some degree of confidence, that this understanding can be self contained, complete, not dependent on trust in revealed knowledge or any other authority. I can say with confidence, for instance, that axioms of arithmetic do not depend on physics. Some sets of axioms are no doubt inconceivable in many universes, unknown in those universes, but wherever a specific one is known it is the same. But it seems futile to say it to someone who from drug use has a heightened awareness of the subjective aspect of experience, if they haven't explored the other side of things also. It just looks like another assertion. To know something like this usually requires a lot of effort to create that understanding, tripping won't do the job. If you do get it from tripping, odds are you're psychically sponging off of someone else who has done the thinking, which limits you to the same old pool of ideas. You can never see that until you go beyond that though, if you still can. The drugs don't show you how small the pool of thought is, in the long run they make you smaller so that it seems expansive.

I realize my anti-drug diatribe seems personal and off-topic. But I don't see how to separate it from the other question, since the answer to that depends on how we approach learning about it, and no amount of debate will amount to much without considering that. I actually don't think that drug use or non-use is the crux of it either, its another symptom, a result of something else. Likewise for motive, which I used to think was central, but now I think it too is largely a result of other more subtle things.

If you want to talk about this further I've got some time, or if you just want to let it go I'm up for that too. Its looking like I may have only a couple of more weeks where I'll be able to post here, and it frustrates me some that I've been posting for two years and don't seem to have either learned or communicated what I came here for due to deeper obstacles in these other areas.

I am definitely up for a discussion. I want to hear more of your viewpoint on things like this. I'll pm you with more info.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Its not just the recollection of dream that the physical body affects, it is involved with the dream itself. Its not that you dream vividly when your brain is not active, then can't remember it. Your brain is involved with the dream, at least partially. Destroy the brain, and you can't do that. Impair it, and you can't do it in the same way. For instance, if you shoot yourself in the visual processing part of your head with a .22, you won't be able to dream the same way. It won't just be that memory will be reduced or blocked, the dream itself will be different, broken, altered. (We don't have to do this of course, we can talk to other people who have, or can pay attention to other less extreme ways our dreaming, and not just our ability to remember dreams, depends on food, exercise, etc.) You can argue that its still a matter of translation, that something else, maybe more subtle and spiritual, is being translated by the brain into a memory. I don't disagree with that. But the dream itself is the translation. Alter the translation and you are altering the dream. Alter the physical body and you alter the capacity to do that.

'The dream itself is the translation,' precisely! The dream itself is the TRANSLATION, and altering your brain or physical body only alters that translation. Just like you claim there is an objective reality BEHIND the dream of consensus reality (something I am not wholly sure of, personally, as I tend to believe that that so-called objective reality is not as objective or real as it seems or is believed to be), there could be an equivalent 'objective dream space', and your dreams are translations of your consciousness's experiences in that space to your consciousness's experience in this space. It seems you're claiming that if you shot out the visual processing part of your brain and became blind, then in your dreams *there would be no existence whatsoever of visual stimuli*. I suspect that the stimuli remains, the dream remains whole, but your EXPERIENCE of it is lessened or lost. At least, that is how I would interpret it to fit in this model. In other words, this space in which we experience 'dreams' could very well be another plane of existence equal to this one in terms of "realness" (whatever the hell that even means), and that our DREAMS of that are, like our 'dreams' of this world, entirely subjective experiences of a relatively "objective" space. That's not necessarily what I believe, though. As I said, I'm uncomfortable with the notion of objectivity in a pretty general sense.

But there is an objective reality behind the image, which is why if you get shot, your body is really shot. There is no equivalent to that in a dream. You can experience real emotional injury in a dream, but that's something that partially transcends both states. There are also other subtleties with the waking life objective reality, involving quantum physics and parallel worlds, which are only very incompletely recognized. But this is another issue, it doesn't change the fact that your dream body is a visual/tactile cartoon of a physical body, and your waking life experience of your body is a cartoon of your physical body, and your actual physical body is something else.

I suppose I'm getting deep into speculative territory here, but why not? Presume that the reality in which we dream and the reality in which we live are both separate planes of existence, rather than the former being a simulation generated by a computer that exists solely in the latter. There is no reason why given planes must have the same rules, yes? If our consciousness exists outside of both planes, as I believe it does and you maybe have hinted that it does when you say mention emotional injury "transcending both states." If our consciousness exists outside both planes, then the methods for which it must "tune in" these other planes, given their unique rules, could very well be drastically different. It does not seem terribly far-fetched to me that perhaps different planes have different scales of "objectivity," or ontological permanence, or stability/regularity/predictability. Perhaps to exist in this plane requires a great deal more stable, predictable, rote processing (evolution from stellar gas to star system to planet to life to intelligent life to sentience to a body being born to contain you) than the dream plane. The dream plane could be a place where none of this is necessary, and your consciousness can simply project into and out of it at will, without the need for a permanent vessel to remain intact while it is experiencing other (consensus reality) planes? Your dream body only exists when you LOOK for it. I only see my hands if I make an attempt to look at my hands. If I tried to look at my tentacles or my grasping claws, I'd probably look down and see those instead. Otherwise, for me at least, I exist quite nebulously within dreams, and quite often find myself controlling someone who is very obviously NOT me from a 3rd person perspective.

But waking life is clearly in some sense the tip of existence where everything comes together, the fulcrum that everything else rests on. I can share these thoughts with someone in a dream, but I can not develop them in a clear and coherent manner without actively thinking about them, and waking or sleeping that means using my brain.

Can you be so sure about this? I don't think we know enough about the brain to simply conclude that all ideation and thought occurs WITHIN the brain and arises FROM the brain. As I said, I tend more towards the idea that it is a transceiver for things going on elsewhere. When I am deep within meditation, and I observe the process of thought, it becomes ABUNDANTLY clear and quite undeniable, for me anyways, that my thoughts are not "mine" and that there is no active 'thought process'. They simply pop into and out of my head. I do not choose what comes, it simply comes to my consciousness from an external source over which I have no control. When I try to answer a problem, there is no conscious processing. I ask myself the question, and the answer is just GIVEN to me. You can argue it is being given to my by my brain, which itself has created/processed/determined the answer, but I am not convinced of this. It seems to me that thoughts and ideas, too, are separate entities that are tuned in by each person's consciousness.

This is a criticism I have of drug experimentation. It gives you experiences that are outside the range of experiences you had without the drugs. But it doesn't give you the ability to understand those experiences. To the contrary, it significantly distorts and degrades that ability. You could have had exotic experiences eventually without the drugs - astral projection, timelessness, ocean of collective identity, whatever. But the drugs give you an amplified version of some narrow aspects of these things. And it seems that version does not include the ability to recognize things such as that falling to your death in a dream and falling to your death in waking life are very different, in an objective way, notwithstanding that there are similarities also.

I'm not sure if you meant this to, but it comes off as somewhat condescending and ignorant. It sounds like you have not yourself experimented with these drugs, so I'm not sure you can reliably comment on them at all if that is the case. LSD and other hallucinogens are so beyond the normal ken of human conscious experience that you cannot simply theorize and make conjecture, they can only be understood from a first person perspective. Specifically, your comment that we are somehow incapable of differentiating falling to one's death in a dream versus in waking life seems to suggest a complete misunderstanding of where we are coming from. Falling to your death in this world obviously has more persistent consequences than falling to your death in the dream world, but that's only because this world is DEFINED by persistent consequence. If you die in the dream world, you can very easily reconnect to that world because you don't need any vessel to connect to, you just GO. Here, you need a vessel to connect to, and if it is damaged beyond function, your connection is lost. Possibly, anyways. Have you ever fallen to your death in waking life? I have not. Other people have, but that's from MY perspective. How can I be sure they have experienced the same thing from a first person perspective?

Incidentally, I never would have experienced or explored any of those things without having first done the drugs because prior to the drugs I was an extremely closed-minded skeptic and never would have spent one second humoring such ideas.

I want to say that its actually possible to understand things with some degree of confidence, that this understanding can be self contained, complete, not dependent on trust in revealed knowledge or any other authority. I can say with confidence, for instance, that axioms of arithmetic do not depend on physics. Some sets of axioms are no doubt inconceivable in many universes, unknown in those universes, but wherever a specific one is known it is the same. But it seems futile to say it to someone who from drug use has a heightened awareness of the subjective aspect of experience, if they haven't explored the other side of things also. It just looks like another assertion. To know something like this usually requires a lot of effort to create that understanding, tripping won't do the job. If you do get it from tripping, odds are you're psychically sponging off of someone else who has done the thinking, which limits you to the same old pool of ideas. You can never see that until you go beyond that though, if you still can. The drugs don't show you how small the pool of thought is, in the long run they make you smaller so that it seems expansive.

To be honest I'm not sure what you're driving at here, could you elaborate on this one?

I'm going to start at the bottom and work my way up.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

To be honest I'm not sure what you're driving at here, could you elaborate on this one?

I guess we agree there exists something like a collective world of thought, and also that 'thought' isn't the right word for it, but we don't have adequate words in our vocabulary. As I experience this, its not like a homogenous ocean of awareness, its more like a big fractal. Each one of us has a tangle of thoughts which relate us to other people who have connected thoughts. These thoughts also connect us to experiences, including future experiences.

I guess you might also agree that if you read a book or watch a video by an accomplished mystic, it can put you in their mental space, let you experience something akin to what they experience. And moreover you can do this kind of empathy a little bit with anyone. I owe quite a large portion of my own development to this process. Everyone knows something.

If you take a drug, one of the things that is happening, besides the physiological effects of the drug molecule on your body, is it puts you more in harmony, so to speak, with other people who have used that drug. So to some extent the experience that results isn't directly from the change to the body, its by enabling a kind of mind meld with other people who know how to do the altered mental state.

When you talk to someone on a topic like this, you have to do some of that same kind of telepathetic empathy just to understand what they're talking about, since the words aren't adequate. Of course its hard to know fully how much you're really understanding them, the sense you get of their experience is still colored by who you are.

My allegation was that a lot of drug users think that they're tapping into things that are possible specially through drugs, when actually they're tapping into things that are accessible through other means also. It seems to me that as you get more practice with this, you become aware of the complexity of minds in the shared world, which includes both drug users and non drug users. My sense of this mental world, which admittedly is distorted and incomplete, is that drug users are drawing from it but actually contributing something of much lower quality than they realize. My assertion about drugs is that they distort a person's perceptions on exactly this point. Though this is a less than completely reasonable way for me to think about it, I wish some of them would clean up a bit and start contributing more, since many are quite intelligent in some ways, and everyone has something to offer.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Incidentally, I never would have experienced or explored any of those things without having first done the drugs because prior to the drugs I was an extremely closed-minded skeptic and never would have spent one second humoring such ideas.

Maybe drug use was a necessary part of your process. The world is a complex place. I'm not ignorant enough to suppose that just because something has some objectively bad effects means that on balance its always a bad idea.

Did your closed-mindedness go away completely as a result of drug use, or did it weaken from the shift in perspective, but also change so that you were still making assumptions about other types of things and people, such as right-wing Christians, or people who speak against drugs? It appears to me this kind of trait is hard to change completely, it tends to keep re-qualify itself into new blindnesses, even though progress is being made also.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

I'm not sure if you meant this to, but it comes off as somewhat condescending and ignorant.

I plead guilty of being condescending. Partially its a defense mechanism. Its a fault that I can't entirely turn off, so I just have to roll with it.

I think I seem much less condescending to people who understand me better though: a lot of my obnoxious directness is motivated by a kind of respect for the other person.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

It sounds like you have not yourself experimented with these drugs, so I'm not sure you can reliably comment on them at all if that is the case.

If I "can't reliably comment on them at all", then it also follows that you can't can comment on what a middle-aged non-drug using mystic possibly can or can't know about drug experience. Your drug use came first, so beyond that you have personal experience only with the youthful skepticism.

Of course, I'm the one who started with the criticism, not you, so the burden is more on me to justify it.

No I haven't done any drugs at all, I don't even do caffeine. In addition to the shared mental awareness I do know a lot of current and former drug users though, of a wide variety of ages, and I listen to what they tell me. When you're 20, drugs may seem like a great thing. In my experience, by the time you're 40 most of the people you know are in some way damaged or diminished by them, often seriously.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

LSD and other hallucinogens are so beyond the normal ken of human conscious experience that you cannot simply theorize and make conjecture, they can only be understood from a first person perspective.

I have first person perspective from moving to the part of my mind that is the other person, and experiencing something what they experience, as them. Granted this is limited and distorted, its a long way from nothing also. I can also listen to and think about what drug users describe. I've never heard described any insight or oneness of being or awareness of the transitory nature of things that seems to contain anything that I haven't experienced through sober meditation. Though granted I may be psychically sponging off of the experience of drug users to some extent, that dynamic cuts both ways, and its impossible to separate completely.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Specifically, your comment that we are somehow incapable of differentiating falling to one's death in a dream versus in waking life seems to suggest a complete misunderstanding of where we are coming from.

OK. Maybe I read too much into the equivalences you have drawn between waking life and dream life. Maybe you also missed what I was trying to point to with the falling example. More on that in a moment.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Falling to your death in this world obviously has more persistent consequences than falling to your death in the dream world, but that's only because this world is DEFINED by persistent consequence.

I agree that "persistent consequence" isn't a bad synonym for matter. Maybe I'll start using that.

There is an interrelation between waking world and dreaming world though that isn't captured by this observation. And that interrelation and interdependence is what I was trying to point to. Furthermore, I think that improved understanding of this interrelation requires a lot of observation and thinking in addition to mystic experience, drug induced or otherwise.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

If you die in the dream world, you can very easily reconnect to that world because you don't need any vessel to connect to, you just GO. Here, you need a vessel to connect to, and if it is damaged beyond function, your connection is lost. Possibly, anyways.

I think this 'vessel' thought is a good illustration of the limitations of what can be shown by mystic experience. The body is more than a container. I guess you know that, but it seems to me that its also more than what you're trying to point to with the inadequate words.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Have you ever fallen to your death in waking life? I have not. Other people have, but that's from MY perspective. How can I be sure they have experienced the same thing from a first person perspective?

Since I can transcend my first person perspective a little bit, I have some limited sense of its relationship to my body, and to the mental model through which I engage with my body. Enough I think to know that dying in a dream is qualitatively different from dying in waking life. Though maybe this point isn't worth disputing. An easier example might be falling and wrecking your back. I haven't done that either, but I know someone who has and can ask him questions. How do I know that my experience of his answers isn't entirely a product of my own personal mind, that his subjective experience isn't entirely different? Aside from presuming it, because of things that are apparently common between people, I think we can know a little bit because inside ourselves we are also each other partially.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Can you be so sure about this? I don't think we know enough about the brain to simply conclude that all ideation and thought occurs WITHIN the brain and arises FROM the brain.

A thought has structure. This amounts to a kind of matter, "persistent consequence". Whether this is the matter described in the Standard Model that interacts with light, or something more exotic and astral, to a large extent it amounts to the same sort of thing. Alter the structure that you process thoughts through, and you change the thoughts. Its not as if they have some other structure independent of structure, so that you're merely changing your receptivity to the thought. Even if that structure is someone else's physical brain, and not yours, there is still a 'physical' (persistent consequence) process of some sort that creates and supports the thought.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

As I said, I tend more towards the idea that it is a transceiver for things going on elsewhere.

Yeah. Part of that "elsewhere" is other people. That's half of my point about the drugs.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

When I am deep within meditation, and I observe the process of thought, it becomes ABUNDANTLY clear and quite undeniable, for me anyways, that my thoughts are not "mine" and that there is no active 'thought process'. They simply pop into and out of my head.

Stuff magically pops onto your computer screen without you knowing where it comes from also, and a lot of that stuff is generated right on your computer. It says something about the limits of your awareness, but nothing about the involvement of your brain.

I agree that the "thought process" is to some extent an executive-level simulation of more complex things that go on subconsciously. I also agree that the subconscious stuff is not confined to the individual brain, since I have a lot of other objective evidence of that.

I think that most of the reason our thoughts seem to be "in our heads" is our heads happen to be halfway between our ears. Its exactly the same reason music seems to come from inside your head when wearing headphones. The fact that the brain is also in the head is incidental. This doesn't imply the brain isn't involved though, just that the map of experienced location is imagined.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

When I try to answer a problem, there is no conscious processing. I ask myself the question, and the answer is just GIVEN to me.

This leads back to my criticism of mystics in general, and drug mystics in particular. Yes I am quite intuitive like that also, and could give endless examples. But when something springs into your mind, somebody or something somewhere came up with that shit, it wasn't just born whole out of a vacuum. And there are a lot of things that can be understood that can't be understood through flashes of inspiration. Things have to be worked out in relation to other things, complex connections have to be made. This is why Vedics can't say why prakrti comes to be for instance, or why. Their knowledge-through-contemplation practice doesn't tell them that. So in vanity they say its a question without meaning, since its not an answer they have. Not much different from how some scientists use the anthropic principle or 'randomness' to dismiss anything they don't understand.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

You can argue it is being given to my by my brain, which itself has created/processed/determined the answer, but I am not convinced of this. It seems to me that thoughts and ideas, too, are separate entities that are tuned in by each person's consciousness.

I'd argue that its partially given by your brain, and partially by other people, and partially something else besides that.

In an analogy that someone else used on this site, we're like the away team down on the planet, and the subconscious or higher self is like the mothership that has lots of useful maps and charts in it. I'd extend that analogy by saying the useful maps and charts in the ship were painstakenly assembled by other away teams, and people who use them without caring about that are freeloaders. Moreover, most of those charts and maps are at least partially wrong, people made mistakes when creating them, or distorted them on purpose for personal gain or for psychological reasons. Most people of a mystic persuasion assume that when a thought springs into their head, and it feels like it has some kind of transcendent authority, and its not obviously hateful or false, then in must be true. Very, very often its not true, at best a half truth. One illustration of this is how people are repeatedly wrong with their Armageddon prophecies. They're just recycling the same thoughts over and over, updating them every few years. I read yesterday that the big catastrophe will be in 2018. This applies to all thoughts though. Even our meditative experiences of thought are themselves a subtle thought, a kind of model.

Almost all mystics distinguish between different classes of thoughts, and have preferred and particularly abstract thoughts which they say transcend thought. But I think those experiences of 'pure consciousness' or whatever are thoughts too, even though the word thought is not adequate here. Of course my knowledge here is not complete, this is just how it looks from where I am currently. I'm quite sure about the first part of what I said here though, with the mother-ship analogy, even if its not the entire picture. And it illustrates my main point from yesterday.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

I suppose I'm getting deep into speculative territory here, but why not? Presume that the reality in which we dream and the reality in which we live are both separate planes of existence, rather than the former being a simulation generated by a computer that exists solely in the latter.

Like I said earlier, wherever the computer exists, experience seems to prove to me that its distributed, that its not confined exclusively to my own body. I also see that the thoughts have real, objective effects on the physical world, not just because of people acting through their physical bodies. I think that we know for sure that its at least partially in the 'physical' world though, even if there's more to it than that.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

There is no reason why given planes must have the same rules, yes?

Certainly they have different rules. Irrespective of whether or not the 'plane' label is appropriate, clearly something exists that's not contained within the world of known physics, so we can call that a different realm even if its in some sense just some radically unknown behavior of the same realm. Clearly in some sense its just one realm also, or there wouldn't even be an interaction, we wouldn't be able to bring information from one to the other.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

If our consciousness exists outside of both planes, as I believe it does and you maybe have hinted that it does when you say mention emotional injury "transcending both states." If our consciousness exists outside both planes, then the methods for which it must "tune in" these other planes, given their unique rules, could very well be drastically different.

I agree the methods are obviously different. I don't think that consciousness exists outside of anything, I think that this is a limitation of the vessel metaphor. But I agree that we can be conscious in both ways, which maybe satisfies what you meant.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

It does not seem terribly far-fetched to me that perhaps different planes have different scales of "objectivity," or ontological permanence, or stability/regularity/predictability. Perhaps to exist in this plane requires a great deal more stable, predictable, rote processing (evolution from stellar gas to star system to planet to life to intelligent life to sentience to a body being born to contain you) than the dream plane. The dream plane could be a place where none of this is necessary, and your consciousness can simply project into and out of it at will, without the need for a permanent vessel to remain intact while it is experiencing other (consensus reality) planes?

My personal experience seems to confirm that its not necessary to have an individual permanent vessel in order to be conscious and intelligent, that identity is more fluid than that. Maybe such entities still depend on our relatively permanent world though, moving through it like how a current (or any other wave) moves a long distance through a wire even though the electrons don't actually move very far. The thoughts in the dream world seem to be quite strongly connected to conditions in our physical world though. Some of them connect to future experiences rather than past experiences, which is remarkable, but there's still a connection. So it does seem that the dream plane doesn't exist without the physical plane. I'm not saying its subsidiary to it, just that they're very strongly related. Maybe there are other 'planes' not discussed that are unlike and so far removed from the physical plane that they don't have that correspondence, but we're talking about the dream plane, as defined by the kinds of experiences that people have which they call dreams.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

Your dream body only exists when you LOOK for it. I only see my hands if I make an attempt to look at my hands. If I tried to look at my tentacles or my grasping claws, I'd probably look down and see those instead. Otherwise, for me at least, I exist quite nebulously within dreams, and quite often find myself controlling someone who is very obviously NOT me from a 3rd person perspective.

I rarely have a body in a dream, and much if not most of the time I don't even project sounds or pictures. Identity is very fluid also, the people seem real but they're not discrete and fixed like people may seem to be in waking life. Those fluid, branch-like people are intimately connected to the people in real life though. I guess the 'plane' metaphor mostly doesn't work for me in that sense, even my waking experience doesn't have that topology.

I also noticed a while back that my dream experiences aren't dependent just on me, that other people's minds are involved also. This was first most apparent with precognitive experiences, but I think its true in general. So there is a common or consensus element there also, even if its not as strong in the same way.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

'The dream itself is the translation,' precisely! The dream itself is the TRANSLATION, and altering your brain or physical body only alters that translation. Just like you claim there is an objective reality BEHIND the dream of consensus reality (something I am not wholly sure of, personally, as I tend to believe that that so-called objective reality is not as objective or real as it seems or is believed to be), there could be an equivalent 'objective dream space', and your dreams are translations of your consciousness's experiences in that space to your consciousness's experience in this space.

Maybe its worth repeating that my understanding of "objective reality" is probably quite a bit more subtle than the "so called objective reality" that you're contrasting your thought with. The Schrodinger cat illustration, for example, isn't just a metaphor, that's really how things work for macroscopic objects. And its not a matter of branches between 'alternative' or 'parallel' concrete worlds. There is no concrete world, only a tangled fog of closely related astral worlds, so to speak. I'm not saying anything radical here, this is just standard early 20th century physics, which unfortunately is almost never described very well. Based on personal experience I also don't believe that objective reality has to be globally consistent. Though clearly there is a strong tendency towards consistancy, or else all kinds of things wouldn't work the way they do.

I'm not sure what this objective reality behind the dream of consensus reality is that you refer to, maybe a misunderstanding. Waking visual/audial/tactile experience is indisputably quite literally a dream, no different from a sleeping dream, except for the way it reflects a persistent/consensus reality, which you agreed exists in some sense. Since the waking dream is an extension of the persistent world, its more persistent too, unless you disengage it by hallucinating. Since you recognize both some degree of consensus and some degree of persistence in waking life reality, that amounts to a kind of objectivity, I'm not saying that there's anything else besides that. There's a way that the persistence works which can to some extent be understood from first principles if you study physics, but if I had to summarize that dynamic with two words persistence and consensus might not be a bad choice. As long as consensus is thought of more as a kind of qualified coherence or wholeness and less like something that a committee of people agrees on.

Maybe a point worth making here is the extent to which things in our 'persistent' dream persist without our turning our attention on how they persist. Clocks don't generally lose track of time when we stop paying attention to them, or when you personally stop believing in them. (When I say "don't generally", I'm not being sarcastic, exceptions are possible.) There really is a way that this works that can to a significant extent be understood. This reiterates what I tried to say earlier, that mystic intuition, where reality is measured by one's immediate, momentary conscious perception, doesn't lead to this awareness very effectively.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

It seems you're claiming that if you shot out the visual processing part of your brain and became blind, then in your dreams *there would be no existence whatsoever of visual stimuli*.

No, that's very much not my claim. If that were the case, I would have no way of knowing that my brain has a role in the formation of thought, and isn't just an antenna or thought magnet or relay of some sort.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

I suspect that the stimuli remains, the dream remains whole, but your EXPERIENCE of it is lessened or lost.

Other kinds of changes are possible besides amplification or subtraction.

Originally Posted by ThisWitheredMan

At least, that is how I would interpret it to fit in this model. In other words, this space in which we experience 'dreams' could very well be another plane of existence equal to this one in terms of "realness" (whatever the hell that even means), and that our DREAMS of that are, like our 'dreams' of this world, entirely subjective experiences of a relatively "objective" space. That's not necessarily what I believe, though. As I said, I'm uncomfortable with the notion of objectivity in a pretty general sense.

Which reiterates my point about mystic experience. Certainly its clear by now that my way of thinking accommodates a very high degree of subjectivity. My point is that there is more to it than that which a person can become aware of and work into the same picture without ignoring the subjectivity. But drug experience doesn't help very much with that, and furthermore it appears to me to diminish the psychic foundation that the drug experience comes from.

I'll close with an example of a thought out of nowhere, not developed from a 'conscious thought process'. I dreamed of the word 'biter'. I looked that up, and it says "someone who can't formulate any of their own good ideas, so they steal ideas from those around them". Psychically that's what I was claiming drug users tend to do more than they realize, even though its not completely clear cut. We're all in the same boat there in one way or another, even though there may be small differences which I perceive as significant. I'm not trying to claim that I've done more real thinking than you or understand more overall, maybe I haven't and maybe I don't. My point was to express something of what I do see about the nature of understanding and where it comes from.

I went over every point since sometimes its possible to inadvertently ignore what people see to be their main arguments. I'm probably not going to have time for another big post though, this is probably close to it for me. Not because you're not worth talking to, but because of rapidly changing family obligations. Anyway, thanks for the thoughts.

ThisWitheredMan:

Though I tend to agree with almost everything Shadowofwind says above (and where I don't, he is already aware, I think, and that doesn't matter here), and in no way can improve on his quality and detail, I'd like to complement his excellent post with another thought, perhaps a caveat:

I grew up in the '60's and '70's, when use of halluncinagenic drugs was relatively common, socially accepted on a "fringe-use" sort of basis, and thoroughly, thoroughly investigated and experimented upon by many people, one of them being me.

Though your "You've never done it so you can't possibly know about it" argument is fallacious on several levels, condescending in it's own right, and real annoying (I hate it especially when young mothers scorn my suggestion that a pizza-bites-only diet is not good for their child by saying, "You've never had kids, so what do you know?"), I'll ignore all that and speak as someone who has been there:

They don't call LSD an hallucinagenic drug for nothing. Hallucinagens by definition create an illusory experience that does nothing to truly expand your mind or show you alternate reality. Yes, acid certainly "heightens" your senses to the point where you notice everything -- even things which were never there. Yes, while on it you feel like you're being shown new levels of existence and enlightenment. But you're not. You're only shifting chemicals in that brain which you yourself concluded above is only a vessel and not the source of your Self (which I'm fine with, BTW). Those chemical shifts fire up lots of brain bits that shouldn't be working together in normal life, and you "see" things that seem incredible, deep, and meaningful. But they're not. They're just so much electrical noise produced by your short-circuiting brain.

Yes, I agree with Shadowofwind that using hallucinagens might indeed be helpful to building your personal reference system to reality -- but they cannot be the only tool. This is because their high is based on illusion, not on truth, and worse, that high compels you to believe it is the truth, especially during the experience (this is much worse with heroine, BTW). So I suggest that you value their "input," if you must, but don't bank on it, because it will always be wrong.

Why? Because drugs, hallucinagens in particular, remove your consciousness from your Self, rather than unite them. By literally grounding your spiritual experience in the random chemical whims of an LSD-fueled brain, you are missing out on pretty much all the lofty spiritual stuff you discuss up there. In a sense, you are building a chemical wall that prevents you from peeking over the horizon of your soul, locking yourself into a self-serving little room, full of pretty lights and "deep" thoughts that ring hollow upon sober examination. That wall might be very cool, very exciting, and very sparkly-shiny; but it is still a wall.

Want to know how hollow? Sit soberly in a room for a couple hours with people who are tripping. Better yet, to avoid that experience by osmosis that Shadowofwind mentions above, try recording what they say and do, and watch it later, alone. I don't think you will be too terribly impressed, after the fact. If you are, then I suggest that you save that recording for a decade, and watch it again with a few more miles behind you. You seem pretty bright, so I can almost guarantee that you will not only be unimpressed, but a little sheepish. I think you'll see, eventually, that the "philosophy" and "metaphysics" that people discuss and discover while tripping is sophomoric at best, and idiotic as a norm.

And therein lies the caveat. Hallucinagenics offer the illusion of depth, but never depth. As I said, I grew up among all this, and knew many, many people who used drugs as a lifestyle -- several who died from that lifestyle. I can confirm categorically that not one of them, not one, found success later in life, spiritually, mentally, or materially, because of their drug use. It was usually the other way around. About the only growth that heavy drug use promises is that which comes from the maturity gained during through the effort to get off them and leave them behind.

Also, think about this: is there anyone, any great philosopher, mystic, scientist, or even artist who attributes his success to the use of LSD? Think carefully, and be careful how you answer if you do, because some of us old people keep track of this stuff. I think you will find no one (and no, Castaneda was neither great nor a mystic, so don't go there). Shouldn't that tell you something? After all, hallucinagenic drug use has likely been around about as long as fire use -- you'd think by now there would be whole library sections dedicated to their contribution to history. Yet there is not.

My warning is this -- take it or leave it as you will -- LSD might seem enlightening, but it is not. Indeed, it is anti-enlightening, by your own definition, because it heightens brain function. Is the water really improved when it rests in a more colorful vessel? Learn what you can from it. I did. Have fun with it. I did. Above all, be careful with it, because drugs have a nasty ability to enslave rather than enlighten.

Okay, enough preaching. I just thought someone who'd been there ought to post.

And closer to topic, I have a question:

Someone once said "Reality is what remains after everyone leaves the room." Are you saying above that the room actually disappears once its occupants are gone?

If I am not wrong I believe Einstein said something like that. He said somethinh like "Is the moon really there when nobody looks?"

"Einstein maintained that quantum metaphysics entails spooky actions at a distance;
experiments have now shown that what bothered Einstein is not a debatable point
but the observed behaviour of the real world."

Pretty cool

... Well, experiments show it as an observed behavior of the real world of subatomic particles; macro objects, like the moon, still behave pretty much as they ever did.

After all thinking creatures and their "consensus realities" are long gone, I have a feeling the moon, and the rest of the universe(s), will still be there. Just as it was all here long before we came to notice it.

Originally Posted by Sageous

And closer to topic, I have a question:

Someone once said "Reality is what remains after everyone leaves the room." Are you saying above that the room actually disappears once its occupants are gone?

According to physics theory and experiment....the reality of the room is independent of conscious observation. Furthermore, since the room is composed of matter that is in a gazillion different phases, it's defined relative to itself by that dense substance of phases, so to speak. A person in the room is part of that. So leave and it will continue as it was while you're gone, and come back and you'll find it defined in the same way it was. The whole system doesn't have a defined state relative to something outside of the system though. The whole world is one unified system, for the most part, with countless, mostly microscopic branch points. The cat in a box example illustrates a branch with macroscopic implications though. Inside the unopened 'box', it has a definite state, but both states are equally unreal from the outside.

It is generally assumed that when systems interact, all inconsistencies are completely eliminated. I think they're not, that reality is more like a crystal with flaws in it, grains that can reorient themselves relative to other grains with weird consequences. But this would be difficult if not impossible to prove in a controlled experiment.

Reiterating a couple of points for people who haven't read this before:

Initially, scientists thought in terms of 'observer' and 'observed' because that was their standpoint during experiment. And those words seem to imply something zen-like having to do with the content of awareness. But the physics theory, which I think is understood and tested well enough to be called 'true', as far as it goes, is a theory of physical interactions. The presence or absence of a 'conscious observer' is irrelevant to those interactions, except insofar as that observer is also a physical interaction. The moon is as objectively real when we aren't looking at it as it is when we do, because it's always in electromagnetic (light) contact with itself and with the earth. At the same time, nothing is completely solidly real even while it's being observed. It's more like a densely packed substance of almost identical unrealities. And there are other branches, as real and unreal as ours, which are too different from ours for us to experience them as part of ours.

[I'm replacing the last paragraph with two more. I typed it on my phone, which means I can't back up and edit, and it got more confused than usual.]

In the 'Copenhagen interpretation', wherever interactions between particles cause a branch between two possible histories, both histories exist. The negation of that is that only the version we experience exists. In other words, quantum mechanics doesn't say anything about the other branches, they're outside of the theory. So these are not really alternative 'interpretations', they're alternative wild guesses about something that there is no scientific evidence on.

I think that conscious will does influence this branching, and the branch not taken is not real in the same sense as the chosen one is. I don't think that conscious will is confined to just one branch though, I think its more complicated than that.

Is there any true way to reason about objective reality?

Whenever I think about this topic, I always become stuck in a cycle of expectations. The truth seems to be that we must step outside the expected process in order to truly observe objectively. Otherwise, we will be continually confined within the cycle of subjectivity.

My initial thought is to conceptualize reality without time or space. This perception seems best accomplished through dreams. Although, through practice, the same mindset can be found in waking life. This is the trick with any psychedelic. They simply change the way the brain perceives, but it is still up to the person/user to modify their personal perspective under any particular influence. Within dreams, it seems much easier to free ourselves from the binds of space-time. Ironically, science is sensory based practice, and completely subject to that individual space-time perception. These restrictions exist in dreams of course but instead of developing technology to expand our awareness, we develop our own "mind tools" in order to navigate the dream world.

I think observation is so important because of the basic principles of interaction. Everything is connected in many ways. It has been said many times that willpower and intention are essential mind tools for dreaming. They are the basic sources of awareness in my view. So when you focus on something with that willpower/intent, it must react in some way. Whether the effect is immediately recognizable is a question, but the bigger question is the significance of the connection. Whatever we focus on becomes part of our whirlpool of reality and is affected as such.

I think at a very deep level, reality is a unity. There are many divisions, illusions, and perceptions; however, we are able to experience that basic energy for ourselves and in my view that is the guiding light to truth.

Originally Posted by Daredevilpwn

Yeah, and thats what makes it seem like dreams are a world of their own. I mean if you think about it, if some random guy comes to you in waking life and says "You are not real you are just a figment of my imagination" you would probably do the same, and so would everyone else.

Perhaps our expectation that everyone would do the same is what makes the dream characters act this way.

^^ And for what it's worth:

Having spent years in Manhattan, I was able to see first hand and far too many times what people do when a stranger walks up to them and says something like "You are not real." Reactions are actually quite varied, but almost always ultimately include simply walking away, and not speaking to or reasoning with the accuser. So it would indeed make sense, on that level, that DC's would do the same.

^-^True Sageous. Wouldn't it be cool if you asked them to tell something that you didn't previously knew.
Because if they now are real and perhaps another dreamer (this is just a hypothetic test if the dreaming world is real) this should be possible.

For example they might be a little girl who have listened to the latest Justin Bieber song that was released the day before, but you never head it before and didn't even knew about, then she tells you the lyrics. You wake up and google the lyrics and see that it is true. And that would not only be a proof of shared dreaming, but also be the first time in history you actually become happy for a new Justin Bieber song xD

Worth a try =)

Hey mastermind. You gave me an idea. How about instead of talking to dream characters why not talk to the awareness that is responsible for creating the dream scene? You see when creating a dream scene one does not think of every last detail of every object that is within the dream scene. It is very automatic. Since you are not thinking of every last detail of the dream scene then WHAT is? I have read more of 'Gateway to the inner self" by Robert Wagonner and he speaks of an 'hidden observer' and the only way to communicate with this hidden observer is to stop addressing the dream characters and instead address the dream its self. Ask the dream its self the questions you seek NOT the dream characters. Robert Wagonner states that this hidden observer is like an entity of its own, it is smart, it can give you coherent answers to what you ask, etc. Though I can't testify that this is true, I am sure other Ld'ers more experienced than me can do it. I believe it because it makes sense. You don't think of all the small details in a dream scene. This hidden awareness is like a master artist and YOU the waking ego gives it an idea of what it should create.