Thread: Who is the dreamer when you are not lucid?

Originally Posted by Summerlander

Who or what?

We seem to be a well-defined self when we are awake. Our waking life identities feel rigid and our perspectives make us cognisant of a sensible world. But there is a stream of thinking that runs parallel to waking perception which competes for our attention and can lead to daydreaming or rumination; if we are mindful, however, we become conscious of this mental chatter for its true nature and thus less liable to its mesmerism.

When we sleep, that very same incessant stream of thinking is given a stronger voice, as it were, in the form of dreams—and it's most vivid during the REM stage. Despite its disjointed and, at times, abstract quality, which is often at odds with real life, we are completely taken in by the mental illusions the unfolding narrative is composed of—unless, of course, the dreamer is lucid which is the equivalent of being mindful in the waking state.

This empirical basis suggests that the dreamer is part of the dream itself or made of the same fabric, so to speak, hence why our identities and memories in ordinary dreams can be as disjointed or erroneous. It stands to reason, then, that to be lucid is to possess an identity identical to the waking self where real life memories come to the fore, i.e., the dreamer recognises the environment to be a dream because it doesn't tally with the real world—such as those WILD instances where the bedroom is recognised to be inaccurate because memory of what the real bedroom looks like is present.

It seems to me that personal identity is nothing but a bundle of thoughts and memories which is illuminated by consciousness. It's not surprising, then, that entire personalities can be eradicated through severe physical trauma to the head—where acute amnesia is incurred by a violent accident and an almost empty awareness remains to be filled by an entirely new personality as the brain forms new connections henceforward. The dreamer is defined by the ever-dreaming, living brain. It is the witness with no intrinsic identity or definition other than that which it identifies with which arises in consciousness from the deep unconscious.

'Who is aware?' Stephen LaBerge once asked. Nobody. There is just the awareness of this and that.

Yes! This is exactly what I was trying to articulate but you said it much better

The dreamers expectations and beliefs also play heavily in the creation of dreams so really we’re more in control of how they form and play out then we may originally think.