Thread: What is the difference between a dream and reality?

Well, I'd say waking life rather than reality, because that implies that dreams aren't real. They may not have a material reality, but emotionally and experientially they're every bit as real as waking life and can mess you up all day or make you feel excellent depending. It's pretty hard to say something that has such a powerful effect on you isn't real!

But on to your question. Waking life has consistency and logic (even though sometimes the logic is buried pretty deep or impossible to understand). Dreams don't. In waking life you're interacting with other people in ways that can have lasting consequences, in dreams you're not. In waking life your senses are streaming real data from the world around you, in dreams the senses are shut down and your subconscious mind is just creating a simulation of a world built from your own personal thoughts, feelings and memories, with a lot of random stuff thrown in as well. In waking life everything is subject to the laws of physics - in dreams not so much.

That is an excellent question. It seems like there's really not much difference between dreams and reality. Both are just appearances to our mind. Some people live in a world where Americans are the good guys, while others live in a world where Americans are the bad guys. Which is true? Both worlds are true to those who experience them. The world we experience while we are awake is an appearance to our gross waking mind, and the world we experience while we are dreaming is an appearance to our subtle dreaming mind. While awake, the other beings we see have their own personal mental continuum, but while we are dreaming, we ourself are the only living being in our whole experience, everyone else we see does not have their own mind.

If you point to the laws of physics and things like that, someone else can point to monks and meditation masters who defy those laws of physics in waking life, so I don't think that one is really set in stone. But for a school paper I'm sure it would be a believable point one could argue.

Though Darkmatters and Schmaven already nailed it, here is another thought, in case you're looking for something a bit simpler:

I think the way to discern the difference between dreams and waking life is to simply turn around in the dream, then turn back. When you do this in waking life, you find that the world is pretty much the same behind you as it was in front of you, and that everything is where you left it when you turn back. Do this during a dream, and you may find a completely different world when you turn, and when you turn back, the place from which you started is gone. This of course won't always happen, but the point here is that it can.

Waking life imagery has a very high level of perceptual "permanence" to it. Real as it may seem to be, dreaming-life imagery is extremely impermanent. Sometimes it will shift right before your eyes.... what it shifts to might still seem real to you, but that it has changed. That your dreamworld can change completely, with no regard for anything but your perception, is what marks the difference between the two worlds.

I have a thread that examines the relationships between dreams and reality that you might want to check out.

http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...lly-dream.html

Hm, let's see. The biggest difference, like Darkmatters said, is that waking life has more consistency.
But also, in dreams, emotions are often stronger than in waking life. Memory doesn't work the same a lot of the time too. We may have false memories in a dream, or not remember things at all. And our expectations have more immediate effect on events in dreams. If I am dreaming and I fear something is going to happen (the car will crash, an animal will attack, etc.) it is likely to happen exactly because I thought it would.