I woke up very early this morning, as I usually do, had a cup of coffee and something to eat, read and replied to a few essays and comments here, and then again as I usually do, went back to bed and slept for an hour or so.
It’s become a habit for me to do this because I really enjoy the extremely lucid dreams I have while sleeping when I’m already rested and after eating.
The dreams I usually have at that time are so lucid they are literally worlds and realities indistinguishable in quality and “realness” from the world of daily life. I converse with people in them, can bang my knee against a wall, pet the cat, slam my fingers in a desk drawer, listen to music, in short they are 
experiential worlds as real as any other. As “this” one – the one we each find ourselves in at this moment.
Dreams, in other words, are real. They exist. They are as real as anything else.
So, “what is real”, or “what is reality”?
Who knows?
There I was trundling along in my dream talking to 4 people, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for a cab we had called to arrive. The sun was shining on a warm summer day, there was traffic driving by on the road outside the building we were in, the parking lot was about 70 percent full.
The cab finally arrived and I watched it turn off the street and come across the parking lot towards us as I also watched the 4 people I was with walk down the stairs and across the lot towards it.
I started down the stairs, went out the door and walked across the lot myself. A couple of birds flew through my field of vision and landed in the trees at the edge of the road. A dog wandered by crossing my path as I walked towards the cab that the other people were sitting in by this time.
I got to the car, walked around to the side of it, reached out my hand and grasped the door handle, opened the door……
And was lying in bed with my eyes closed listening to traffic noises from down the street and feeling the pillow under my head and and the bed covers on me and the cool morning breeze come through the open window beside my bed, and Magic stretching and meowing quietly in her sleep on the chair in my room.
The transition was that fast, and I thought to myself “what just happened?”
WHAT just happened? The traffic noises and the cat sounds and the breeze and everything else I was now aware of had been there all along while I existed in that other just as real world that we call a “dream”, but I was not aware of them until I suddenly was aware of them.
Did any of it exist? Most of us would I think say yes, but until I became suddenly aware of it it didn’t exist as far as I knew.
How much of life are we not aware of at all until we are suddenly aware of it?
What does it mean to be aware?
What does it mean to become aware?
How many “realities” are we unaware of?
Is physical “reality” dependent on “awareness”?
Who opened the car door? Did he get in?
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do we wake up out of a dream?
doesnt EVERYBODY think like this, ask these things, wonder in this way? experience the multiplicities?
No?
Really??
😉
I once had a dream walking on a beach with a red giant sun and a tsunami came and pulled the water back, and I was walking on beach sand with broken glass, my blood making trails in the wet sand as I waited for the water to return.
I had another when I was a project manager for gravitationally towing Europa to an orbit between Earth and Mars, and miscalculated, and I was watching from the near side of Europa as both it and Earth shattered in a million pieces. As I flew up into the air, I experienced a second of weightless euphoria until the planets crushed me between them.
And then I had a dream with a white clad me and a black clad me, in a stone maze, with a gray sky, and the black clad me was smoking, and telling the white clad me that life was a meaningless illusion.
I studied and practiced this in the late 1960s & early 70s when I lived in a Growth Center in the Human Potential movement called Kairos. It was similar to Esalen but located in Southern California, near Leucadia – Encinitas.
It’s fascinating stuff and very rewarding. Google “Senoi Dream Culture” and you’ll find a lot of interest. Here’s one tidbit:
Give it a look! And may you have some interesting trips!
Please approach with reverence. Thanks.
I don’t have a clue. When all is said and done, one just needs to be able to say, I did my best. Best at what? I don’t have a clue.
Sensory existence, direct or dreamed, is viewing phenomena through the pinhole of our feeble perceptive faculties. Calling the view through this pinhole “reality” is ludicrous, as is comparing it to an alternate realistic dream experience. The dream experience is just a mind-synthesized peep through another tiny pinhole.
The universe is vast and unknowable in sensory terms. It is, however, incrementally comprehensible by thought. Those who substitute constructive thought for sensory stimulation grow more human and more wise than those who chase perceptions. All sensory perception is ultimately false, since it can never show more than the surface of phenomena.
I dunno if they are really bad, but he will be making anxious, whimpering sounds as if he is in distress. I wake him up and tell him it’s alright, although he is quite calm and not thankful ;-(
He has a phobia about large kites, especially black ones. Three or four times I have had him ‘off the leash’ in a large Park; he sees a big kite swooping and spinning, he turns and runs as fast as he can in the opposite direction for several hundred yards, as if he is running for his life, till he feels safe.
Perhaps in his bad dream he is being pursued by this mythic dog- eating flying creature, my guess anyway.
When I do remember a dream, it is usually a nightmare.
because the properties of physics don’t apply. I can walk on the ceiling, I can fly, friction doesn’t work right, and all the women are porn stars, and I’m the only guy.
The old question is always are we the dreamers or the dreamed.
I have always lucid-dreamed. Even as a kid, I remembered dreams every night; never was plagues by bad dreams and enjoyed them as much as “reality.”
In my early 20’s I was introduced to Carlos Castaneda and actually worked to control my dreams to almost frightening success. I actually did physical things to the waking environment from the dream state, as well as visited distant people and gave them messages. I did experiments to see what/if what was possible.
Then I studied world religions, indigenous religions as well, and found that this is a fairly common thread among all of them, and most see alternative consciousnesses, lucid dream states as either god-given or the work of some devil.
I tend to think it is natural to us, or it would not manifest in so much literature and be the subject of so much superstition.
I don’t bother with “working” it anymore, I let my dreams go.
I have certain houses I revisit, I have never been to… places that are other homes to me that have popped up for years. My dead parents pop in and out of mine too, not in any dramatic way, just in some everyday normal scene. I usually am aware I am dreaming by then, and occasionally mention it to them, “You do know you’re dead, right?” They do, but just like to visit. I told them I’m ok.
But most of the time, my dreams are just other experiences, with sound, smell, taste, color. If I get awoken, I can go back and finish them too.
Its funny you mention it, but I too like to get up early, eat and then go back to bed, those dreams are always best.
Outer sounds from this plane will sometimes bleed into and influence the psyche of the dream state, too.
I try not to overthink it anymore, I just feel like I’m one of the lucky ones who gets to have 2 lives, the other as full and wonderful as this one, and hope the lessons from each bleed together to make me a better me.
You have to know the difference between fantasy and reality; but dreams are not fantasies – they are just alternate universes to me.
I once had a dream where Eric Clapton was giving me guitar lessons, never knew I had so much talent.