Jonathan Chia

8/4/04
First Précis

Dreams and Reality: Consciousness v2.0?

Everyday, at any given moment there are people that are asleep and conversely

people that are awake. Bound to an enduring cycle of sleep and wakefulness, people

have come to accept with little or no question that we need sleep to survive. Whether

succumbing to the dream world for four hours or more than eight, slumber has become a

vital part of our existence. Always accompanying sleep, but not always remembered, is

the onset of dreams—a second reality woven out of our memory, senses, and

imagination. This state of dreaming is nothing new to the human experience and the

same goes for the state of wakefulness. The distinction between the two has always

assumed to be clear: what one experiences while awake is reality and what one

experiences during sleep is not. However, if humans are truly the sum of their

experiences and we experience so much in our dreams—can we simply ignore what we

think is unreal and discard one-third of our entire lives away?

Dreams often take place in locations that one has already been to or seen and with

people that one has already met or heard of in their waking lives. According to Freud,

the subject and setting of dreams can be influenced by certain factors that the dreamer

encounters in the waking state.

“The source of a dream may be:

(a) A recent and psychologically significant event which is directly represented in

the dream.
(b) Several recent and significant events which are combined by the dream into a
single whole.
(c) One or more recent and significant events which are represented in the dream-
content by allusion to a contemporary but indifferent event.
 (d) A subjectively significant experience, which is constantly represented in the
dream by an allusion to a recent but indifferent impression” (Brill, 84)

The dream that a person has, according to Freud, is a derivative of the experiences that

the person encountered while awake. But if dreams interconnect with our waking lives

so intimately and from a dreamer’s point of view, so realistically—it would become

impossible to ignore their effect on our daily lives. In fact, a nightmare can be powerful

enough to raise us from sleep and in severe instances cause distress and insomnia.

Everything real is perceived through the senses. A piece of candy to a person who is

awake, is seen in a wrapper, felt on the pallet, heard against the teeth, and tasted and

smelled, therefore it must be real. Now take that same piece of candy and put it into a

dream. A dreaming person who eats a piece of candy still perceives all those things.

Knowing that realness to us is simply an assessment of the senses—can we honestly say

that it is not real? If so, then the reality of everything that we perceive while conscious

comes into question too. How can one prove the existence or non-existence of something

if there is nothing else to base its existence on, other than the set of fallible human

senses? “He [Descartes] resolved ‘to assume that everything that ever entered into my

mind was no more true than the illusions of my dreams” (Straus, 108). Descartes

questions the very senses that we use to ascertain what is real and what is not. So

perhaps the assumption that dreams are false is false itself.

With this revelation that dreams are not as ghostly and immaterial as one would

like them to be, perhaps dreams serve a different purpose than the simple notion of

unconscious entertainment. Because dreams are a derivative and a product of the greater

state of being called the waking world, it plays very nicely into the views of Plato. “…

and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of on another, which the fire throws
on the opposite wall of the cave…” (Plato, 358) The viewing of dreams, much like the

viewing of shadows on the cave wall is simply a lesser form of experience and

perception. In dreams (synonymous with being inside the cave) the dreamer is exposed

to a very limited range of stimuli. A person can only dream about what he has previously

experienced, simply put: he is limited by his own memory. A person in a dream state

cannot dream about things outside his experience. For example, if a person has never

seen a television or heard of such a device, it would be logically impossible for him to

dream about one. Similarly, in the cave, the slaves cannot be expected to think or

converse about anything beyond that of the shadows that they see on the wall. What they

see is deemed as their reality since they know no more than what they perceive. In a

dream, the dream is perceived as reality, the dreamer never questions whether he is

conscious or not, it is simply assumed. Yet, rouse that person from sleep and only after

adjusting into a wakeful state does he realize that he had been dreaming all along. “To

distinguish between dream and wakefulness, one must be awake.” (Strauss, 103-4)

Likewise, in Plato’s allegory, the slave does not find distinction between his experience

in the caves and his enlightenment in the sun until he is actually brought out into the sun.

In a wakeful state—the enlightened state—one is able to look back upon the dream and

say “I was previously dreaming”; one cannot be in a dream and say with total

comprehension, “I was previously conscious.” While the awareness inherent while

awake is not essential to dream, it is essential to realize that one had been dreaming.

It is apparent that dreaming, a form of finite learning and experience, is only

permissible when one forgoes the trappings of his conscious mind. In the allegory, Plato

discusses that it would be impossible for the enlightened to be fully integrated back into
the pseudo-reality that he had once been a part of. (Plato, 360-1) With respect to dreams

this is true: a dreaming person will often find himself in impossible situations or

performing impossible tasks. Viewed by a conscious person, the entire dream would

seem ludicrous however from the viewpoint of the dreamer, nothing could be more

normal. “The dream world overwhelms the dreamer; it appears real not in opposition to

the unreal but in default of any unreality.” (Straus, 115) The human mind abhors the

absence of reality, so in the dream world, with the conscious mind and knowledge of the

“true” reality out of the picture, the dreamer accepts any reality—for any reality is better

than non-existence. This raises the question of whether the conscious world is actually

what people take it for granted: reality. Aforementioned was the fact that everything real

is perceived through a person’s senses, yet they can easily be tricked and confused. How

can one be so sure of the physical world if the medium that we experience it through is so

faulty; do we really know what we know? “Is there a third condition, besides, dreaming

and being awake, that enables us to judge both of them?” (Strauss, 110) Descartes

believed that there must be another level of consciousness beyond that of what one

experiences while awake. After all, just because one awakens from a dream does not

necessarily mean that he has completed the journey out of the cave. Romanticism

embraces the idea that there is some higher plane of existence beyond that of our current

scope. Unfortunately, the travel package to higher consciousness often comes with a one

way ticket to six feet underground.

“Has anyone supposed it luck to be born?

I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die and I know it.
[…]
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and
fathomless as myself,
 (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)” (Mack, 723)

Walt Whitman gives the impression that the essence of the individual is immortal. The

most important theme throughout “Song of Myself” is that one makes the most of the

time in his semi-enlightened state (i.e. human form). The individual’s soul has always

existed, and will forever continue to exist, but for one brief infinitesimal moment the soul

is trapped within finite bodies of finite understanding. In William Wordsworth’s poem,

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” he writes, “Our birth is but a sleep and a

forgetting:/The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,/Hath had elsewhere its setting,

[…]” (Mack, 585) Concurring with Whitman’s idea, the soul forgets about its journey

through the higher plane of reality and is re-born into a “sleep”. This sleep is the waking

world that people know now—everyone has forgotten what it was like existing as this

supreme entity. With this realization, all the things that apply to dreams apply to our real

waking lives. One does not realize that there is more to everything than what we can

simply see, touch, hear, smell, and taste. The higher truth that is out there remains

unacknowledged because one cannot perceive it; he simply believes that this world is real

because he cannot accept that it is unreal. Just as in a dreaming state, one assumes that he

is in a real environment; he does not question its absolute realness but simply takes

comfort in that it is there. Hence, our waking world may not be as real and absolute as

we would like it to be.

With that said, dreams may relate more to our waking lives than previously

thought. No longer are they simply images that come to us when we sleep or the

manifested desires of our unconscious. Dreams become an integral part of who we are,

providing not only a viewpoint for our daily experience but acting as an anchor—a
starting point from where we can mark the beginning of our conscious development.

Dreams even indirectly support the idea of life after death, they support the notion that

despite how rational and thinking we are, there are still levels of cognition that we have

yet to experience. By supporting the concept of the after life do dreams even begin to

prove the existence of Heaven, Hell, and the existence of God? Maybe not, but it is nice

to dream about.
 Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Random House, Inc., 1978

Mack, Maynard, ed 5. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Vol 2. New York:

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1985.

Plato. The Republic. New York: Dover Publications, 2000

Straus, Eriwin W. Phenomenological Psychology. New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1966.