Originally posted by Awhislyle
Alright, wasn't sure where to put this, so Im putting it here.
I know alot of the people in this forum believe that the waking life as we know it is really just a dream. So I have to ask this question, if you just woke up and and were suddenly in a different reality, would you believe you were still dreaming or would you think you finally woke up? How many times would you have to wake up before you thought you were really awake?
My take on this question is that no matter how many times you 'wake up' and confront a different reality, you are still dealing in terms of perception. The question becomes - [b]How do we know that what we are seeing or smelling or feeling or just intuitively knowing (whether in a dream or daydreaming or on a drug trip or in everyday reality) is actually objective reality ie how things actually are, the underlying 'true' reality?
While the experience of lucid dreams is fantastic, the most important feature of having them IMO is the implications they have for how we perceive everyday 'normal' reality. Most people seem to take the incredible act of dreaming (not just lucid) for granted.
They wake up after a particularly memorable dream that seemed so real and intense and emotional, look around their room and the 'normal' world and then lightly dismiss it as 'just a dream'. Just a dream? Your mind/brain/consciousness created this incredibly textured, 3d world, full of fasincating places and figures, that you were totally embedded in. Your pysche went along happily with this creation and was completely involved in it. You may have felt terrifying fear, or love, or amazement, or bewilderment as you flowed along with different events that occured to you just like the way you seem to flow along with life.
[i][size=18]~~Just a dream?~~
It doesn't seem to sink in for people what a powerful creator of reality is yr mind/brain. Not only that but the ONLY way to percieve any reality (including everyday reality) is to have it generated by this incredible reality-generating machine inside you. In the case of dreams, memories are used to generate the reality you experience (although sometimes some external noise like a banging door is incorporated into yr dream world).
But our waking life is created by the same virtual-reality to compile it. But we are still CREATING this reality. Colour doesn't exist, only different wave lengths of light captured by our eyeballs, sent via nerve connections to the neurons in our brain, where it is converted by our virtual-reality creating minds into what we 'see' as blue or green. Likewise sound doesn't exist, or shape, or form or depth or time. Einstein showed that space and time don't exist in their own right but but are part of one space-time continuum that can be divided up into different ways of viewing, each equally valid depending on the state of viewer.
[i][size=18]~~Just a dream?~~
So if we can' t directly percieve reality, what is the 'true' reality? What underlies all things? Can we ever know it? Or are we trapped in this virtual-reality world, unable to see the truth of what is behind all things?
The first step is too realise that what we are looking at is just as 'created' as that strange, pulsating, fluid world we inhabit at night when we close our eyes. From such a position comes a sense of calmness, of stillness, of dettachment and of creativity.
We now know the world to be 'just a dream' . And like our night-dreams, this then lets us become lucid. And we all know what is possible once we become lucid.
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