Originally Posted by braintrust
How do you know you aren’t dreaming right now? That might seem like a silly question, but I found a list of 5 different characteristics of dreams, and all of them can be applied to our lives right now. Does this mean we are dream? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but that isn’t for me to decide, because it is up to you. But if you think about it, so much of what is happening right now, only a few months would have seemed impossible and totally unlikely. The best argument against this being a dream, right now, is that if you trace your time back, you woke up. But if you are a lucid dreamer, then you know all about false awakenings. False awakenings are dreams where you feel like you are waking up, but actually, it is just another dream.
I understand what you're asking, but, on a practical note, it's real easy to know you're not dreaming, should you, of course, think to ask the question: walk out of the room you
are in, wait a moment, then walk back in; if the room is still there, and exactly as you left it, then you are probably not dreaming.
One thing to think about, especially in these times, is that waking-life will always be a greater purveyor of surprise and variety -- good or bad -- than an individual's dreams will ever be. That's because your dreams are created in their entirety by the actions and imaginings of an individual mind, while the real world is created by the actions and imaginings of over 7 billion unique minds, plus, the actions of an entire planet (i.e., weather, days & nights, millions of square miles of surface occupied by more living things than our small minds can imagine, etc.). The very nature of our ever-changing little planet and the humans who infest it promises that unbelievable stuff like we're experiencing right now can happen, and probably will -- the real trick is to come to accept that, and maybe salve the mayhem with the peace and private wonder of our dreams.
Of course, and sort of along the "beyond dreaming " note that Lang just rang, there's a member here named Sivason who might tell you that we're not dreaming the world; The World is dreaming us. In other words, what if we are all part of someone else's dream; just a bunch of sprites playing out the parts some cosmic mind (from our perspective) is inventing one night? If that were the case I sure wish that Great Dreamer would lay off the spicy pasta before bedtime!
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