These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
Of How Real Dreams Are and
How Dreamy Reality Is The experience of a dream
may feel so utterly bizarre for today's mind, but we have to go back millions
of years to realize that it is probably far less bizarre than it appears to us
today. It is likely that, millions of years ago, our waking life was not too
different from our dreaming life.
Consciousness in dreams is a series of flashes that are fragmented and
very emotional. It is likely that waking consciousness had exactly the same character: mostly
nothing would happen to our consciousness (no thinking, no emotions, just
mechanic, instinctive behavior) but situations would present themselves
suddenly that would arouse strong feelings and require immediate action. Our waking life "was" a series of
emotionally charged flashes, just like dreams. The difference between being
awake and dreaming was only the body movement. As we rehearsed the day's events
during dreams, we would feel that the sensations are perfectly normal. Today our consciousness has
acquired a different profile: it has evolved to a more or less smooth flow of
thoughts, in which strong emotions don't normally figure prominently. We think
when we are commuting on a bus or while we are shopping in the mall, and the
most violent emotion is being upset about the price of a shirt or suddenly
realizing we just missed our stop. They are peanuts compared with the emotion
of being attacked by a tiger or of being drawn by strong currents towards the
waterfall. Our waking consciousness has
changed and dreams have remained the same. The brain is still processing off-line,
during sleep, our day's events with the same cerebral circuits that we had
millions of years ago, and therefore it is still generating the same flow of
emotionally-charged flashes of reality. When the brain is awake, reality does
not impinge on those circuits in the same way it did in the hostile, primitive
environment of million of years ago. The world we live in is, by and large,
friendly (free of mortal foes and natural catastrophes). But when danger does appear (a mortal foe or
a natural catastrophe), then our waking life becomes just like a dream:
"it was a nightmare", "it didn't feel real", etc. In those
rare and unfortunate circumstances (that hopefully most of us will never
experience) our waking life feels just like a dream: flashes of reality,
violent emotions, apparent incoherence of events, etc. Because of the society that
we have built and the way we have tamed and harnessed nature's unpredictability
through civilization, our brain does not receive the sudden and violent stimuli
it used to. This is what makes most of the difference between being awake and
dreaming. It is not just a different functioning of the brain: it is a
different functioning of the world around us. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Dreams" | Back to the index of all chapters |