Thread: From Puppetry To Personhood: Can Dcs Have A Will Of Their Own?

Please skip to the bold font if you don't want to hear my excruciatingly long exposition. This question spawned from discussions about dream characters, dream guides, the concept of loving a dream character, and my own recent experiences. I'll describe what's pertinent from the topics.

Dream Guides & DCs: There are those who insist that dream guides are entities above and beyond normal DCs, who've always been in our heads and who know more about us than we do. They can't be changed by us on a whim, and we interact with them very much on their own terms. This might suggest that dream guides have a presence, being, consciousness, however you'd like to call it, all their own, apart from us. There are other die-hards who insist though that dream guides are nothing more than DCs that we've allowed to take on a more knowledgable air and given a superficial sense of significance... to quench our thirst for companionship or knowledge or any other nebulous desire we have at the time we meet them, but who are still ultimately Things We Invented, and Things We Have Control Over. There's an overarching assumption and agreement, I think, that the standard issue dream character is nothing more than a lifeless, unconscious puppet being animated behind the scenes by your subconscious, and certainly nothing or nobody that can feel or think of their own accord.

Love in a dream: Lucid dreaming stands on its own merit in most categories: that is, you don't say "It's only a dream" to disparage most experiences that you have in them, like flying or having sex or running in a meadow. Those things can and do feel as good (if not better) than their equivalents in real life, and therefore have just as much worth being made manifest in a dream as they do in reality, since in those instances it's the experience and not its objective reality that's being counted. The distinction starts to fall apart when it comes to emotional involvement with other people, though; generally a relationship is only considered valid if all the members are actually conscious, living, thinking, willing entities. Emotions related to relationships necessitate that everyone involved be real; those emotions can't be properly realized without the assumption that the recipient is conscious of them. Talking specifically about love, it's impossible to love another who you know can't feel what you're sending out. As DCs, they might act like they appreciate your gesture, they might return the favor, and everything resulting from your mutual romance may appear to be the real deal, but there is always one factor that can't be the same as real life: the person you're dealing with is you, not another, you're loving a cleverly constructed hologram of another thinking, feeling being.


Choosing to love another person requires that they are another person, not just your mirror image. Otherwise, you can beam your emotions to that simulacrum all day, but with the knowledge that it's just a collection of indulgent, misrepresentative thoughts that can't truly feel what you're sending them, it's a hollow gesture, and it can't work. It might work on your end if you were fooled into believing, by a masterful show of DC verisimilitude, that this person is really, truly, another autonomous, conscious, living being, but after thinking about it and realizing that your DCs can't be anything but yourself in disguise, it has to collapse.

Closing in on the question, then: some people on this forum have experienced "deep connections" to individuals they've met in their dreams, who may or may not have real life counterparts. I've recently gotten inducted into that club myself, although the experience was a nonlucid one. Some have even gone so far as to proclaim a formal romance between them and their dream lovers. Isn't this a doomed relationship? How can your feelings ever hope to last or remain significant when you're piling them onto what in real life equates to a simple daydream, a lifeless mental mannequin? You would need a real person. Inside your head, no less, a conscious entity sharing headspace with you. Under those circumstances, a romantic relationship in your dreams could work: if your DC could really break free from your mental shackles and begin to think, see, feel, of his own accord. Then your love could have purpose, in actually enriching the life of another, and their love could have worth, in being sentiments given by another person to you.

I assert that all dream characters are at the end of the day a masturbatory phenomenon, as is everything else that goes on in a lucid dream. It's a solipsistic universe inside your head, where you live for yourself and feel for yourself, manipulate your environment and characters to suit your mood or desires. Everybody you see is just you in disguise, and everything everyone else says is really your own words, given a different voice. But...

Is it possible to make manifest (or have made manifest) in your dreams an entity who has their own consciousness, their own thoughts, and their own will? In a sense, such a process would be a sort of mental birth. We aren't talking about raising DCs to a whole new level of realism or just making them recurrent or seeming to have opinions or knowledge different or beyond our own, we're talking granting them personhood. Emancipating them from the shackles of our own will, whims, and desires.

Some might say that dream guides are already these people, while others will say that dream guides are just great at faking it, and yet others will say that they're actually spirits who weren't born in our minds at all. I'm trying to approach this from at least a marginally scientific viewpoint, so to me spirits and otherworldly powers are not at issue here, although you're free to discuss them. I'm also coming from a background that asserts the nonexistence of a soul, the essential meaninglessness of dream content (ie. this is your brain on defrag) and its lack of connection to "spirit worlds" or other planes of existence, so if you disagree with any of that, well... I still want to hear what you have to say. You could also say we already have a term for this sort of thing: it's called Dissociative Identity Disorder, and even then you could say that people who've got it are just faking their other characters or fooling themselves. But I'm not asking if we can fracture our personality, I'm asking if we can make a mental construct who, other than being made of thoughts and living in our heads, meets all the criteria for being an autonomous, sentient, sapient, conscious creature.

It would seem to me that such a circumstance is the only way in which an emotional involvement in a dream can have real worth. Maybe I'm wrong.

edit: I should have added an "I don't know" option to the poll. Can I change that?