It stands to reason that we have by now, by virtue of our great immersion in the waking experienced world, refined our senses and notions of what we experience as perceptions, and derived from these many “causes” and reasons for things we observe. Just as the dreamer will feel his world is normal until something drastically different happens, something that draws his attention because it is vastly different from the regular state of things, so too we must push our perceptions, which are habituated in such great manner to our waking life as that is our reality, in order to see these contradictions.
I am not claiming there is no qualitative different between dreams and waking experience. It stands to reason also that the information fed into the body-brain through sensation from the waking world is more consistent in the sense that we have become highly habituated to it, when compared to the probably more erratic and “random” impulses of sense information fed into the perceptive subjectivity when asleep. But my only real point here is that the process of constructing a mental model, an internal image of perception is the same in either case. There exists something to which the senses of the body react, producing electrical chemical signals. These travel through the body, change form numerous times, reconfigure, lose some information, new information is added to them, the run through filters in the brain, they continue to transform and then eventually generate a response somewhere in the perceptive cognitive mind, producing or contributing to the production of some internal experience that conforms always to the pre-established organization, structure and categories of experience that create how humans perceive and think about their worlds.
That standard can be used to “prove” the existence (outside of consciousness) of anything that may potentially cause organic dissolution and death. That is not my point here. I acknowledge the existence of a reality outside of the mind, and I acknowledge that consciousness is a conditional limited phenomenon that will end once the specific organisations which give rise to it encounter sufficient destabilization and decay.
That is an oversimplification of my statements. Cause and effect is a term we created to explain to ourselves how we observe things moving and corresponding in our worlds. That we reify this set of observations into an ontological category speaks to how humans construct their world. Everything experienced is a representation, or metaphor, for something else. To the greatest extent that which is represented exists in the human mind, at deeper layers, either unconsciously or structurally.
Again, I am not concerned here with comparing perceived phenomena to each other from within the perceptibility context itself. I acknowledge that there are causes which produce effects. I also acknowledge that there is a reality which exists outside the mind, and that our experience of consciousness and self is dependent upon our sufficiently acting within the laws and bounds of this existence. My point here is not to do away with or attempt at doing away with reality, or with human experience. My point is that where we assume we are experiencing the world outside of ourselves, this is not the case. Technically, only the body’s most initial and basic senses would contact this realtiy, via the absorbsion of information-as-energy. But as soon as this information is reconfigured, translated, encoded, decoded, recoded, added to, subtracted from, transformed more and more and then becomes ultimately a part in the overall human perceptive framework of imagined perceptions and subjective ideas, that higher experiences level of consciousness itself, perception, bears no resemblance in how it is experienced, in what we experience, to that reality from which those minutest of senses initially came.
In otherwords, the body-brain does almost all of the work of perception. This is why perceptions are ultimately representations of internal body-brain states, either unconscious or structural.
Because what we remember of dreams is just the last three seconds or so before we awaken, your description of dreams seems accurately ‘unreal’. I think that the narratives do only so much resemble any kind of conceptual cognitive material because they are the the transition of neurotic state of the ‘body without the head’ - i.e. the sleeper, to the body with the head, the waking body-mind. In other words, what we remember of a dream is not at all what goes on inside of us during our REM sleep, but the physical state of affairs in our brain which becomes our mind as it boots up.
I certainly respect that the idea of conceptual reality (for example cause-effect, strong-weak, positive-negative), is a product of a rawer, unutterable reality deeply underlying our capacity to formulate anything about it and its consequences. But this is to me not a sufficiently strong, compelling enough context to absolve such ideas as cause-effect, strong-weak and positive-negative of their absolute status relative to dreams. This is why ‘miracles’ and ‘magic’ are so important to humans as a species dependent on its evolution - it leads them to step beyond what they know reality is, because a miracle is an event which is caused through laws unknown to the observer.
As long as a new method is not understood as enabled by a law, it is magical, and it lends strange powers to the one who stumbled upon it. It is during such a period of limited knowledge that a method is most powerful - it does not have an objective status to it, there have been not enough permutations to really understand to what the law applies, ‘the law of what’ it is. Reality is flux and highly potent.
‘A dream’ is the reflection on the mirror of consciousness of the electrical state of our brain before it starts to organize itself by the quintuple sensory data allocated to it. This also explains why during distorted function of the body such as in infections of the organs, we sometimes ‘hallucinate’ - the nervous data is reflected on a broken mirror.
We do not wake up from a dream but into a dream. Or rather, the mind wakes up as a dream-image.
Well said, totally agreed. This explains why it is so extremely difficulty task to enact ones conceptualized will on reality, and why it needs to most cold hearted calculating minds to accomplish anything. And why it is that an it takes an accomplished and numb-drunk man like Winston Churchill to know that destiny can only be understood one step at a time.
Normal people can only if we imagine a product of yet undefined causes, effectively use the cause and effect theory. Only mathematicians and chess players have actual use for it as a constructive tool.