JoannaB,

Maybe I should read more carefully but....Since you believe in God, it seems to me almost axiomatic that the world is God's dream. Suppose it wasn't God's dream, what would that even mean?

I don't think we can make sense of it strictly as a collective human dream. No human has the awareness necessary to coordinate different aspects of it. I guess we can agree that there appears to be at least some degree of coordination. That seems to me to imply some type of mind on that scale. Even if its not even conscious in a human sense, it still seems to me to amount to a kind of intelligence.

The 'depth' of the collective dream is clearly in some sense deeper than sleeping dreams. In our sleeping dreams, we deal with images that represent objects. We may dream of a phone for instance, but its just a symbol of a phone that looks like a phone, internally it doesn't have a design. Unless you build cell phones for a living you'd have no idea how to dream that, and even then you'd only be able to dream it in an incomplete manner. And if you analyzed it you'd likely find a lot of mistakes or inconsistencies with the way you imagined it. Waking life, in contrast, seems to be mostly without such inconsistencies. If you examine something closely, the details generally become real in a way that doesn't contradict other details. (I don't think this is always true, but it seems to be built into the dream to a remarkably comprehensive extent.) And it seems to me that the objects in the waking dream, just like objects in sleeping dreams, are metaphors that represent things. What I mean to say is that the images represent objects which represent ideas, or something like that. I guess I don't really have a point in this paragraph, just expressing some thoughts.

OK, maybe this does meander towards a point. Sensate data isn't the only kind of awareness we have of the waking dream. I think you could actually distinguish a really comprehensive simulation from the actual thing. It wouldn't be aligned right with what you feel the dream should be, you would feel it to be missing something, that it was like a mask with nothing in it. I guess that part of this is because objects and events do represent something deeper, and if the story that the dream tells isn't right, you sense that, even if all the details seem quite perfectly done.

As it happens, I feel this way about the waking dream also, and maybe that's most of what what drives my obsessive quest to get to the bottom of it all. It feels to me like someone took the world and replaced it with a hollowed out caricature of itself, nothing seems to be the way it was or should have been. If the world were a body, it would be in shock. If it were a computer, it would be booted in recovery mode.

I guess I feel something else besides that too, that the zombie-corpse-of-a-cosmic-angel aspect of reality isn't the full extent of it, that there's something healthier sort of abiding in the background. That would be like your God I guess.