Thread: Are Dreams the key to existence ?

I feel where your getting with this topic and I agree however my views are a little different... This is where I compare lucid dreaming with astral projection. I believe lucid dreaming is a complete creative journey that only you can manipulate and experience. Since whatever we expect while lucid dreaming always comes true, I find it harder to believe that LD is the medium as opposed to something like the astral realm. This is why I really want to learn both, to be able to prove the existence, or nonexistence, of the other. Your post really has me wondering though of the possibility because previously I believed LD to be solely in your own mind. Due to the fact that your dream will bend at your will, I don't see them as another realm or meaning of existence as much as I'd like to. But who knows? What if our minds really wander to another 'dimension' when we sleep? Not just 'your' dimension but a single plane of existence where everyones mind goes to dream there. In that sense we might be dreaming with other people and simply can't tell. We see what we want in an LD so you can want to see someone and your imagination will make them appear, but what if two people want the same thing? What if I dream of a girl who happens to be dreaming of me at the same time? How can I tell if she was a figment of mine or really another person dreaming? All questions I hope will one day be answered but probably never will. I'll just keep on dreaming for now xP

Originally Posted by Aether115

Does anyone else feel that dreams are linked to existence itself and are not merely mind forgeries but a experience that connects with a supernatural or higher energy, no one can experience dream like worlds in reality, what if dreams were the real reality, the perfect state of ethereal existence in time and space itself or possibly other dimensions.

One's perceptual experience of reality on a whole is their reality itself. That said, dreams result from an altered state of consciousness, meaning the act of dreaming and experiencing that dream are merely different modes of being or otherwise existing. To you, the reality you experience while in a dream is your reality--every bit as much as your waking reality is, as a matter of fact. To describe dreams as forgeries of some kind implies that they are inauthentic as perceptual sensory experiences. Your internal model of reality is constructed by the mind and, while awake, typically is the result of the processing and interpretation of the sensory input you receive from the external world. When people hallucinate or are fooled by optical illusions or in some other manner, the model of reality your mind constructs is less accurate in regards to our external reality than it normally is, and a great deal of misinterpretation and misperceiving is going on. Dreams are generated and constructed in this same way and can be viewed as fundamental misinterpretations of one's external reality.

As a matter of fact, signals corresponding to perceptual experiences are always being internally generated, but these neural oscillations are eventually discarded (or rather, inhibited or forced to change more like) and oscillations at a specific frequency (can't remember what it is... I believe it's 40hz) in areas of the brain that process sensory signals are constrained to inbound sensory signals coming from the sensory organs. When input from the sensory organs is either blocked somehow or they are deprived of stimuli (a la sensory deprivation), these internally generated brain oscillatory states and patterns aren't prevented from reaching the parts of the brain that process and interpret the sensory stimuli, resulting in anything from the formation of patterned geometry becoming visible all the way up to the formation of an entire reality separate from one's external reality (of which, a dream would be an example).

I'm highly skeptical of us connecting to some supernatural force or whatever, but what you're saying about dreams being tied to existence or reality is pretty much the case. My real question for you is, even if we were connecting to some force like that, how exactly would dreams function as the key to existence? Actually, before that, what does being the key to existence even entail or mean? I'm not trying to be mean by asking this, I'm genuinely curious and confused about what exactly you mean by it.