I've been thinking about Malcolm Godwin's hypothesis in The Lucid Dreamer that the world we see around us is about as substantial as our dreams are. The idea has been presented before that the way our relatively little brains store so much data is by creating holograms of the universe inside our heads. This conjecture can be used to explain many mysteries of the brain, and the workings of holograms oddly parallel dreams.
I've started to have dreams when I'm half-asleep and half-awake, drifting in and out of consciousness like when I'm on an airplane. I know everyone has these kinds of half-awake dreams, but I'm having a lot of them, and they seem to be as vivid as normal dreams. Like in normal dreams, I believe that what I'm experiencing is real reality, but the difference is that I am often experiencing the real world simultaneously, with the part of me that's awake.
Maybe what Dr. Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass, said is true: that we are all existing in multiple realities, only aware of one at a time. And traveling between the realities in which our consciousnesses exist is like changing the channels on a TV (On Lost, Desmond got caught between multiple channels several times).
It is interesting to entertain the idea that we could be living in multiple realities at once and only able to perceive one at those currently. Once you start entertaining that, there are so many possibilities for alternate realities, and I suppose one that we could most readily explore might be the dream world. But I guess that's why we're reading this book! haha
ReplyDeleteFun fact about myself: I can lucid dream! I've been able to do it for a long time, and I think my brain taught myself to do it when I was young because I had frequent nightmares. I think it's crazy how so many people study it now, when it comes to me so naturally.
ReplyDeletePS. I LOOOOVED your Twelfth Night project. But you know that.