jcallinor

Just pinch yourself. As a prospect lucid dreamer I find my days becoming full of these Reality checks like this; I look twice at a digital clock to ensure the numbers have not changed to symbols, and the reassurance of a working light switch is enough to send me on my way knowing that what was happening around me was apart of my “reality.” I do these Reality checks in hopes that when I am dreaming I will remember to check for signs of Reality and in doing so realize that I am asleep and everything surrounding me is only a projection of my subconscious. But the questionable “reality” of our dreams raises another question in itself. How do we know what is real and what is false? For dreams feel real when you’re in them, its only when you wake up that you realize something was actually odd. This paper will be an investigation into finding Reality and if one can do so with absolute certainty.
When I first began exploring the topic my immediate reaction was one of disbelief. I thought back to the simple act of doing Reality checks and surmised that that was sufficient to determine the validity of the woken state. However on further examination I found the term “Reality check” was in itself and oxymoron. It relied on the assumption that the woken state is in fact Reality, as all checks designed to determine Reality essentially boil down to finding out how much our current state relates to the woken state. Which my preconceptions out of the way I was able to isolate the one process at our dispense for determining what is real: the senses. It seemed the most logical place to start as all Reality checks revolve around the senses and without them there is no other viable method. So I then was able to narrow this essay into a discussion of the validity of the senses.
In determining the validity of ones senses it is critical to understand their origin. Each one of the five senses is created through the process of outside stimuli sending signals through the body’s receptors (tongue, eyes, ears, nose, nervous system) that reach the brain cortex which then reproduces a response in a split second which forms one of the five senses. However this process raises the question of the validity of dreams; how is it that in so called “unreality” we can reproduce the senses without outside stimuli? While the stimulus that forms the dream senses seems organic it is actually a reproduction created absent outside influence and transmitted to the brain. In this way one can surmise that one determines real things by he recognition between outside and internal sensory stimuli. This narrows the debate to one question: how do we determine that stimuli are real. The lucid dream experience is best summarized by my friend Jon Sussman who has been a lucid dreamer for most of his life: “Waking up from smelling a rose to the smell of bread cooking in your kitchen is a revelation in and of itself, but shortly afterwards you are still asking yourself if the rose was more real than the bread,” (Jon Sussman). In his experience Sussman has been unable to distinguish between his senses in the dream and the senses of waking consciousness. Through this one is forced to come to the conclusion that the senses cannot determine between dreams and Reality as it is impossible to distinguish senses created though outside and internal stimuli.
So what conclusion can we come to? If we cannot determine between dreams and waking consciousness than how do we know that waking consciousness is real and not a series of internal stimuli created by an alternate state? The short answer is that we can’t; at our current level of knowledge our only method of determining reality is by its inter-subjective legitimacy. Thus I propose a redefinition of the word “reality:” reality n. – a state of mind believed to be valid and without fabrication. In arriving at this definition I do not require that waking consciousness is in fact entirely fabricated, just that it is impossible to tell if it is not. As Edgar Allen Poe put it: “All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream,” (Poe A Dream Within A Dream). In this way we can hope to approach the world with a thoughtfulness that is not bound by the limitations of woken consciousness, but transcends this state and searches for answers beyond our current comprehension. It is in this way that we are truly able to search for what’s real.