You spend a third of your life sleeping. What if your dreams are real? Perhaps our dismissal of dreams as "just dreams" is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness and physical reality.
"I am real" said Alice (in Wonderland). "If I wasn't real, I shouldn't be able to cry."
"I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?" Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
We take for granted how our mind puts everything together. Everything we experience is a whirl of information occurring in our heads. Biocentrism -- a new "theory of everything" -- tells us that space and time aren't the hard objects we think, but rather tools our mind uses to put everything together. They're the key to consciousness, and why in experiments with particles, space and time -- and indeed the properties of matter itself -- are relative to the observer. During both dreams and waking hours, your mind collapses probability waves to generate a physical reality, replete with a functioning body. You're able to think and experience sensations in a 3D world.
We dismiss dreams because they end when we wake up. However, the duration of the experience doesn't mean it has any less basis in physical reality. Certainly we don't think day-to-day life is less real because we fall asleep or die. It's true we don't remember events in our dreams as well as in waking hours, but the fact that Alzheimer's patients may have little memory of events doesn't mean their life is any less real. Or that individuals who take psychedelic drugs don't experience physical reality, even if the spatio-temporal events they experience are distorted or they don't remember all of the events when the drugs wear off (certainly, anyone they had sex with would confirm this).
We also dismiss dreams as unreal because they're associated with brain activity during sleep. But are our waking hours unreal because they're associated with the neural activity in our brain? Certainly, the bio-physical logic of consciousness -- whether during a dream or waking hours -- can always be traced backwards, whether to neurons or the Big Bang. But according to biocentrism, reality is a process that involves our consciousness.
In contrast to dreams, we assume the everyday world is just "out there" and that we play no role in its appearance. We think they're different. Yet experiments show just the opposite: day-to-day reality is no more objective or observer-independent than dreams. The most vivid illustration of this is the famous two-hole experiment. When you watch a particle go through the holes, it behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave and can pass through both holes at the same time. This and other experiments tell us that unobserved particles exist only as waves of probability.
Critics claim this behavior is limited to the microscopic world. But this "two-world" view (that is, one set of physical laws for small objects, and another for the rest of the universe) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in labs around the world. Last year (Nature 459, 683, 2009), researchers showed that quantum behavior extends into the everyday realm. Pairs of vibrating ions were coaxed to entangle so their physical properties remained bound together when separated by large distances ("spooky action at a distance," as Einstein put it). "Such situations are not observed in nature," stated the authors. "This may be simply due to our inability to sufficiently isolate the system of interest from the surrounding environment -- a technical limitation." Other experiments with huge molecules called "Buckyballs" also show that quantum reality extends beyond the microscopic world. And in 2005, KHC03 crystals exhibited entanglement ridges one-half inch high, quantum behavior nudging into the ordinary world of human-scale objects.
Whether awake or dreaming, you're experiencing the same bio-physical process. True, they're qualitatively different realities, but if you're thinking and feeling, it's real. Thus, René Descartes' famous statement Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").
Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out the full scientific explanation of Lanza's theory of everything.
Follow Robert Lanza, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertLanza
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Robert Lanza - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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suggests that matter is here nor there. When we dream, who is really dreaming? Are we the dream?
Why are we trapped in our routine. If emotions are chemical reactions in our brains, then what is real?
Lanza is a genious that asks the hard questions.
I remember distinctly the moment I decided to include Jewel’s album, Goodbye Alice in Wonderland, in The Real Alice in Wonderland book. “It’s four in the afternoon” and I am leaving the beautiful Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. The museum is the best kept secret in Philadelphia. It houses one of the most significant Carrollian collections in the world. I had spent a long day reading Alice Liddell’s letters. I was deeply moved and inspired by those letters. They were written by an accomplished and worldly woman, not by the dreamy child Alice for whom Carroll had so lovingly hand crafted and hand illustrated his original Alice in Wonderland book. They were written by the Alice who had overcome harsh tragedies and survived to tell the tale. On the car radio, Jewel’s voice sang out the poetic lyrics of the album’s title song:
Fame is filled with spoiled children
They grow fat on fantasy
I guess that's why I'm leaving
I crave reality.
Read more at www.cmrubinworld.tumblr.com
From The Path of Awakening (2007) by James Wood:
“Let your dreams wake you up. Let them show you patterns hidden beneath the surface of your awareness or illuminate ongoing issues… Life is like a dream…The foundation of the dream is a lie of independent existence. Your dream is the one you are having now, a dream of life and death, parading in an endless cycle.”
but our dreams know our could be from our as we are.
A finite number approaches zero in value only when compared to successively larger finite numbers, but it does not ever equal zero. If a finite number can be said to equal zero, then the concept of numbers loses meaning.
Consciousness is a function of the evolution of biological organisms (with the proviso that we may see technological creations achieve consciousness someday). There are as many consciousnesses in a room as there are higher organisms, so one can indeed speak of the plural of consciousness. Another way to look at it is in relation to the parent-child relationship. If there were only one consciousness, children would not need to be taught by adults.
To say that reality derives from information is similar to asserting that the universe exists only because we imagine it to exist. If that is so, then every time an individual dies, the entire universe ceases to exist, but if that is the case, then what is it that the other 7 billion souls are experiencing?
It is all well and fine to attempt to think about the universe, but one also needs to be open to the potential for learning and growth. To that end, there are books and courses available in logic, philosophy, and the various sciences.
http://scidiv.bellevuecollege.edu/math/infinity.html
Here's a quick riff on the arithmetic of infinity (set theory) which was finally put on a logical basis by Gregor Cantor (1840-1920). 1/∞ = 0 and 1 can be any finite number. That is: any finite number is always a subset of the infinite which cancels out leaving only the infinite. Zeno had a problem with this. ∞ was actually a Roman number = 1000 which was a very large number to them. ∞ was proposed as the symbol of infinity in the 17th century.
I like the how to at: http://www.lucidipedia.com/learning/index.php?section=introduction
"Dreams are a more accurate and honest representations of ourselves."
Maybe there are multiple realities all generated by simple shifts of consciousness. Waking, dreaming, sleeping, the transcendental '4th state, or shamanic travelling in different worlds ... I am sure the list is endless. Isn't it all just an expression of pure awareness, manifesting in unlimited forms?
Look at what the shamans get up to, for example: http://blog.soul-therapy.com/2010/09/ayahuasca-vine-of-soul.html
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Soul-Therapy/278635488830
http://www.soul-therapy.com/
But to extrapolate that death is somehow similar to dreaming ... naw, I have to disagree. Dreams and perception are brain activity. After the brain dies, how could it dream?
Showing us that dreams follow the same criteria as waking nudges us to disect the notion of reality. But there's better proof than optical delay. Quantum mechanics will rock anyone's world.
For example, I once had a dream that I lived in a different town, and my life was completely different, I had a room-mate(I was married at that time). When I woke, I thought, what a funny dream- I would never do that. But a few years later I divorced, moved to the town that I dreamed about, and had the room-mate that I had dreamed about.
Also, I often dream that I can fly- levitate actually. Maybe in an alternate universe I can.
There is so much that we could learn from our dream-life if we could understand it.
I find it frustrating to read learned authors write that this sort of thing is impossible. It may not be reproducible in the laboratory, but that does not mean that it didn't or doesn't happen.
My personal theory is that animal life is evolving in a direction of greater and greater sensory capabilities, including sensing "the future", and manipulating objects in ways that scientific theory says it is impossible to do.
There is no reason for someone who has never experienced extreme sensory perception, or "the paranormal", to accept it, but there are an increasing number of people who are willing to testify to things that are very unusual.