For a Given Value of Real
As lucid dreamers, there are questions that pretty much all of us ask ourselves sooner or later: are the people, events, places and so on that appear in our dreams real in some sense? Are bad things that happen to us in dreams something we should be worried about in their own right?
What I’ll be writing here, then, is sort of metaphysics but sort of isn’t—the reason being that there’s usually no compelling reason to puzzle over that question unless puzzling over things is something you enjoy doing.
I’m coming at this from a Buddhist perspective—and, I should make clear, that of a student rather than a teacher. I’m drawing on thousands of years of others’ experiences—but through the lens of my own, which means that there’s a distinct possibility that I could be dead wrong about everything. But, for what it’s worth, I have been interested (read: obsessed) with dreams for about a decade now, and I do have some experience with how these questions are handled in Western philosophy.
Actually, if I were to sum up what I’m about to say in the words of a Western philosopher, it would be Montaigne: “Et au plus eslevé throne du monde, si ne sommes nous assis, que sus nostre cul.” Translated, that means: even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own…cul. Yeah. So consider that the tl;dr version.
Because I’m really trying to start from the ground up here, I’ll need to clear up some misconceptions first. From what I’ve observed—both in academic settings and on the internet— discussions of the causes of human behavior tend to center around whether we have free will or not. These discussions are almost guaranteed to derail into discussions about moral responsibility and selfhood at some point. Someone might claim, perhaps, that if the ultimate cause of your action was outside of yourself, you’re not responsible for your action. If it wasn’t, then you are responsible.
This is not the way a Buddhist would handle the question. First off, this is because there is no beginning you can trace everything back to. Everything just goes further and further back. There is no ultimate cause, nothing you can definitively pin the blame on, either inside or outside of yourself. Just patterns repeating themselves endlessly.
The second difference is that, in a Buddhist context, it doesn’t make sense to draw a hard line between “you” and rest of the world. The pattern isn’t just your pattern: it runs through everything. There is an important sense in which there is an “I”, an ego, but it’s a fluid entity, not a solid one—definitely not solid enough for blaming purposes.
So what does it mean to take responsibility for your mindset and your actions in such a worldview? Clearly, it does not have much to do with guilt or blame or anything of the sort. It’s forward-looking rather than backward-looking. it’s the intention to take responsibility rather than the admission that one was responsible for some particular incident in the past. You do it because taking responsibility gives you control over the patterns that would otherwise control you.
And I emphasize all of this upfront because a Buddhist account of causality is an account of karma, and everything you think you know about karma is wrong. Karma is not morality. It is not cosmic justice. It’s not destiny. It’s not deterministic—that is, not something like a physical force inevitably bringing about a certain result, like gravity causing an object to fall.
Possibly, these misunderstandings happen because they fit better with traditional Western ideas about the world than the Buddhist view does. Possibly it’s because the Hindu concept of karma—or so I’ve heard, anyway—actually is deterministic, and people figure that everybody must be using the word to mean the same thing. Or because you sometimes see Buddhists treating it as if it’s morality—which there are good reasons for, in some contexts. It’s a word that actually has a lot of different meanings, but what I’m talking about here—to put it in the least misleading terms—is conditioned perception.
And I apologize for taking so long in what is still essentially the prologue. It’s probably tedious, but what I’m going to say would be useless at best if I didn’t make that clear. Here are some emoticons to break up the giant wall of text.
:rockon::rockon::rockon::rockon::rockon:
So yes. Karma has to do with perception rather than morality. It’s a concept that does a lot within Buddhism. The reason we’re all able to agree to some degree about what the world is like—e.g., the sky is blue, sunsets are especially pretty— is shared karma. If you’re familiar with the term ‘intersubjectivity,’ that’s exactly what I’m talking about here. We don’t agree that the sky is blue because it is blue in some ultimate sense—it’s because we all have more or less the same biological equipment to work with, and we’re all inclined to interpret our experiences more or less the same way.
The common toolset we have to work with is our senses and our conceptual understanding, which is considered a sense within Buddhism. I’m not sure how to explain this without another massive digression except that it’s our mental processes when they’re acting like a sense organ: our eyes tell us that what we’re looking at is red, and our conceptual understanding tells us that it’s a ball. That’s simplifying a bit, but that’s basically it. And it makes the connection with conditioning clear: knowing that it’s a ball and not, say, an apple is something that comes through conditioning. It’s our past experiences shaping our experience of the present. That’s why it’s good not to take our own impressions too seriously.
Which brings me to dreams. Our perceptions don’t stop being conditioned when we’re asleep and dreaming. This is why we should also be cautious about taking things that we perceive in dreams too seriously, even if we don’t believe that they’re only regurgitated waking life impressions.
If there are other worlds/planes/whatever out there that we have the chance to experience in our dreams, we are seeing them through conditioned perception to the same degree to which we’re looking at our computer screens through conditioned perception. It’s true that we have a bit more perceptual freedom in dreams—everything is a bit more fluid, more malleable, and so it’s possible for conditioning to be a bit less restrictive there. But it’s also possible for conditioning to have much freer rein to shape everything to look like itself, and realistically, unless we’re deliberately trying to sabotage that conditioning, this is the likelier possibility.
This is why, for a Buddhist, there’s an important sense in which it doesn’t matter whether the threatening figures you encounter in your dreams are conscious entities in their own right. The more basic problem is that you’re still seeing them through conditioned perception. The reality could result in any number of equally valid perceptions, and so if the problematic side is the one you seize on, it’s something you need to recognize, and do something about—again, keeping in mind that this does not mean feeling guilty or even tracing out the history of how things got to be that way. That sort of thinking is a lot more likely to get you tangled up in your conditioning than it is to get you out of it.
Instead, the solution is—well, pretty much every Buddhist practice is a solution, one way or another, and there are literally thousands of them, ranging from intricate rituals to the basic silent sitting meditation that just about everybody is familiar with by now. But what it boils down to in the end is giving you the tools and the training to become more comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, change, boredom—basically, everything that comes along with being a human. We loosen the conditioning, we no longer automatically fit everything into our current conceptual framework— which, no matter how sophisticated it may be, is never equal to reality.
Perception is still a creative process, whether you’re awake or asleep—there’s no getting around that—but as we begin to perceive more, we notice we have a choice in how we react to things. Reality is—again, to put it in Western terms—underdetermined. Until we’re comfortable enough with uncertainty to notice this, we don’t have a real choice in how we react because we don’t see the situation as it is, in its full context, in all its complexity. We get the abridged version, so to speak, one that’s simplified enough not to threaten us or actually make us think.
Of course, there is a sense in which it does threaten us if it conjures up vicious dream monsters, for instance. But it seems that the idea of living in a world that isn’t divided into friends and enemies, into us and them, often strikes us as threatening on an even more basic level.
I think it’s likely that we sometimes encounter beings in lucid dream that aren’t just our own mental constructs, whether it be other dreamers or something else altogether. But until we achieve clarity, we’re just going to be projecting onto everyone else, whether it’s extra-dimensional beings or our next-door neighbors. It’s going to be just as if we thought them up—because, in a way, we did.
We could argue all day about the metaphysics. People have been arguing about metaphysics for thousands of years and are unlikely to stop anytime soon. But I think a lot of the stupider arguments could be avoided if people could admit one simple thing: that what they think influences what they perceive. This means not automatically dismissing someone else’s experiences because they don’t fit with your own view of what reality is and how it works—and it means not imagining that you’re the sole human being in the world whose experiences are an accurate reflection of reality. It’s amazing, the way it opens things up to genuine, interesting discussions.
So yeah, please feel free to ask questions or whatever. I’ll try to respond in a reasonable amount of time. (Which is more than I can say for this post, which I promised LighrkVader I’d write up—what, two months ago now? But, at any rate, here it is.)
