I had this in my mind for some time now and i need some answers. If we are in living in reality then how do we know its really reality? Are we dreaming or in another persons dream? If not then how do we know.
Let me tell you a story i have read in a book. “Lucy was having the most awful nightmare. She was dreaming that wolf-like monsters had burst through the windows in her bedroom while she was asleep and then started to tear her apart. she fought and screamed but se could feel their claws and teeth tear her apart.
Then she awoke, sweating and breathing heavily. She looked around her bedroom, just to be sure, and let out a sigh of relief that it had all, indeed, been a dream.
Then, with a heart-stopping crash, monsters burst through her window and started to attack her, just like in the dream. The terror was magnified by the remembrance of the nightmere she had just endured. Her screams we mixed with sobs as she felt the helplessness of her situation.
The she awoke, sweating even more, and breathing even faster. this was absurd. she had a dream within a dream, and so the first time she had apparently woken up she was in fact still in her dream. She looked around the room again. The windows where intact, there were no monsters. But how could she be sure she had really woken up this time? She waited terrified, for time to tell.”
Scource: “The pig that wants to be eaten”.
I looked at him and it really gave me the question, is this really a dream or not? what is real and what is not? How do i know if wake up in the morning and is still dreaming?
Do you conceive of anything that can happen in reality that cannot happen in a dream or vice-versa? If you can conceive of it, you should test for it. If you cannot, then you cannot know. The same is expressed in the concept of being in a simulation, which the movie series Matrix is based on.
Whatever is experienced is what is. What is experienced reinforces what is known. Knowledge per se does not create ‘reality,’ as much as it identifies the ‘self’ among other things and happenings in the world. Assumptions and beliefs about ’reality’ should be questioned, not what is experienced.
exactly my question, i mean there might be multiple answers.
Here is one thing i have in mind. In a dream lets say you live on a house on a hill you bought 5 years ago, the dream may be new but it seems you had a past in the dream a know of the past of your dream without ever living in that past.
I could be sitting here typing this reply at my house or you reading this and be in someon else’s dream or your own. Or in the past you may remember being a child but you really wasnt a child.
Do you notice in a dream that it is always from your reference point. You always find your self in situations that need guidance and direction and it’s all on your responsibility to guide your progress, or sometimes you lose control of the situation but still find yourself trying to understand so you can guide yourself with actions or conduct that aids the understanding necessary to realize what is going on and then place yourself in an sane position.
Actually this is what goes on even when you are awake as you live in a world of individuals with various outlooks on their own dealings with their own singular situations. Each individual knows what is good for him/her self. Since the individual does not know what is good intrinsically, let alone for all others, he/she struggles to maintain individual identity while simultaneously expected to be doing much of the same things others are doing for the purpose of sanity within society.
Imo, dreams display much of the individual’s struggling to find his/her identity within an arbitrarily accepted ‘reality.’ The arbitrariness creates a totally unstable ‘world’ where the individual that is dreaming is attempting to pin it down, but according to the individual’s knowledge about what he/she thinks it should be. Thought can never know anything as it is. It has to distort what is given according to its predilections as to what is pleasant and what is unpleasant, pursue what it sees as pleasant, avoid what it sees as unpleasant in experience, and perpetuate itself in this process of seeking.