An interesting thought.

[ichigo]

When you dream you create a complete physical reality capable of fooling our brain to think its real. furthermore when you dream you can create other people. in your dreams they seem to be separate and individual from you and perhaps if dream characters have conciousness they would believe they are separate from you. All they while, they are your creation and your are all just a product of the same dreamer (the you lying in bed which you are unaware of). Now imagine real life is a dream, and we are all the same dreamer.. all blissfully unaware and believing we are all separate entities. You could consider this dreamer to be God I guess. We would all be like drops of water taken from the ocean. we may appear separate but we are all one in the larger scale. I find this idea extremely intriguing because it supports many spiritual and metaphysical concepts. It explains how deep introspection during meditation can you bring you closer to God and a feeling of oneness with everything. It also explains how coincidences and significant events can orchestrate themselves throughout your lifes even involving other people in their plot. the theory of a collective unconciousness also makes perfect sense here. thoughts?

[juroara]

definitely an exploration of dreams is a platform for understanding spirituality I've used my understanding of dreams in the same way. It's also even more incredible that this simple realization goes over people's heads. I mean really, how many people consider what does it mean that the human consciousness can recreate a three dimensional existence, ever night, with life like characters, that TALK and interact with you? how many people really consider what this means? do you know what this means though? it's something that still boggles my mind. we all know that what you expect to happen in a dream, is supposed to happen right? right? because our minds are creating that world around us. we are TOLD at least, that dreams take place in our head. right? so... 1. what we think happens 2. what we think happens in the world around us 3. that world around us is in our head but that's not the whole story! every now and then in a dream I will catch myself imagining something. Day-dreaming. Or just thinking. Once I didn't like the dream scene I was in. So I closed my dream eyes and imagined an ocean. I opened my dream eyes and the scenery was unchanged. So I tried it again, and again, and again. And still the scenery around me was unchanged. When I closed my eyes and imagined the ocean, it was no different then were you to close your eyes and imagine it. It's a fuzzy image IN your mind. So here I have this dream with this scenery I don't like, AROUND me. And here I have this imagined fuzzy ocean, IN my minds eye. It just gets harder and harder to consider that dreams take place IN my mind, when I have thoughts and imagination residing IN my mind, while the dream plays OUTSIDE of it what does it mean? I don't know!

[KingCarnie]

I love how the topic of dreams gets so much more interesting as you get into the areas of it that are like this. You get a sense of mystery, and it gets difficult to stick to what seems the common outlook on dreams seems to be; that they are simply images created when your mind goes on holiday from the daily stresses of life. It often brings to my mind one of my favorite quotes, "He had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions."