The Hub of the Cosmos

The proof of any pudding, I’m assured, is in the eating. And if science and magic can hope to convince us of the validity of their now joint premise regarding dreams they must be expected to furnish some proof. Magicians claimed that dreams were part of an independent reality. They were either part of the spirit world, or a variation of our world. In either case, they considered the dream world as distinct and separate from ours; concrete in its own way, and theorised that it could be entered only through voluntary or involuntary action by man (and his mind). This means that though not every dream qualified, to magicians, dreams were very real.

Science now also shares the belief that there’s more to dreams than mere moving images held in the mind which, like so many sensationalist films, are projected there simply to entertain or titillate us.

Finding the evidence to corroborate this belief however, presents a few problems. After all, while we all dream, we also all get up in the morning to carry out our daily routine in a predetermined world that seems a lot more concrete and ‘real’ than the dreamworld we inhabit at night. And though dreams are vivid and ‘life-like’ for most people, not everybody remembers what they dreamt in bed at night.

The same cannot however, be said for the everyday world which commands itself to our attention at every opportunity. But the concreteness that the world we live in presents, physicists assure us, is illusory. We feel that the world is real and dependable for three basic and distinct reasons:

1. While no one else seems to share our dreams other people seem to corroborate our experience of the world thus giving it instant, independent, credibility. Like fish need a sea in order to function as fish, the world becomes the medium in which we spend our lives and carry out our existence with some semblance of orderly progress.

2. Our world is ruled by time. To all intents and purposes, there does appear to be some sort of temporal orderly sequence running through our world. The mail in the morning arrives after the postman has been and we have to leave our house in order to arrive at our place of employment.

3. Finally, our world can hurt us. This point is indisputable. To fail to stop crossing the road when the pedestrian crossing light is on red can have deleterious consequences for our general well-being, to say the least.

These three points sum up any waking transaction of ours we may care to engage in, for they implicitly contain within their statements the seeds of the axioms that give our lives a sense of meaning and a sense of time. They furthermore imbue our every action with the sense of self-preservation and a measure of self-worth.It is naturally difficult to argue with any of them, but to each of these points physicists can produce a valid rebuttal: First, other people ‘seem’ to corroborate our experience of the world. We have no objective way of knowing what goes on inside their heads and so we must accept on faith that their perception of the world is the same as ours. The clearest example of the validity of this statement is given if you enter a clothes store that specialises in luminous green Hawaiian shirts. Now, without wanting to disparage the dress code of tourists on holiday to Hawaii, most people would balk at such sartorial excess, unless that is, you were accompanied by a person who is colour-blind to the colour green. Then your experience of distaste at the luminous green shirts would not be corroborated by your companion and while you would argue that he is colour-blind he may equally well argue that his brain is different from, and better than, yours and what he sees is the ‘true’ colour of the shirts and you are the one who sees an odd version of the world. And, in a manner of speaking, he would be right. The validity of the external world, like that of colours, lies in the brain’s interpretation of what it perceives. Optical illusions have shown time and again that perception can be fooled.

What we see ‘out there’ then is just an internal model which has been built according to the brain’s interpretation. In the above example for instance, the colour green had no place in our friend’s internal model of the world. This, in no way marred his model in other ways and as a matter of fact, as far as he was concerned, there was no sense of anything being ‘wrong’ with his version of the world.

Even the general consensus we take for granted in the daily world we live in, is arrived by a largely unconscious process of constant negotiation and reappraisal. We continually absorb information through media services, alter our perception of events by talking to other people, convince others of the validity of our opinions and constantly modify our internal model of what’s ‘out there’ to the point that if we were to meet a modern-day Robinson Crusoe who’d spent the last twenty-four years marooned on a desert island, we would be unable to converse with him in any meaningful sort of way as there would be no “common ground of reference”. His internal model of the world would be totally different from ours.

General consensus then, despite its outward validity, does not constitute a guarantee for the objective existence of anything.Secondly, our sense of time is artificial. The temporal orderly sequence of events in our world is also illusory. The philosophical discussions of the nature of Time, these days, sound like the staff of science fiction. There is talk of parallel universes; bio-gravitational wormholes in space-Time; and points of singularity lying in wait in the hearts of Black Holes.

For our purposes though it is sufficient to say that something as mundane as three glasses of champagne or a strong sedative can put paid to the belief that a disjointed, jerky sequence of events is the exclusive property of our dreamworld.

Thirdly, dreams can hurt us too. This third argument is probably the hardest to prove. There do exist concrete figures reflecting the numbers of people who have died in wars, famine, car accidents and as the result of gun-shot wounds. On the other hand there do not seem to be any figures that would corroborate any dream-casualties. This does not mean to say that they don’t exist.

We all have, at one time or another, woken up from a ‘persecution’ dream where we had to run for our life from some unnameable terror that seemed to be gaining in on us and just as it was about to close in we woke up.

That’s a defence mechanism. It’s not unlike our stopping before a red light, or wearing a flak jacket as we go through a war zone. Neither action will totally guarantee our safety but each does improve our chances of survival.

People do pass away in their sleep. Often for reasons which are not clearly understood. I can only guess here, but if the unnameable horror did manage to catch up with us in our dream would we survive the experience?

It needn’t injure our ‘physical’ body. If we take the conventional view and regard dreams as fantasy, their very vividness that raises blood pressure and heart rate could easily mean that if we were ‘caught’ by the horror in our dream, we could die from ‘natural’ causes. A stroke or heart attack perhaps brought on by the intense excitement. It needn’t even kill us immediately. A ‘dream death’ may upset our emotional and psychological balance and affect our concentration so much that we then have a fatal accident on our way to work or crossing the street. Thus experiencing a sort of death by delayed reaction perhaps?

This would mean that our mind, when we’re asleep, may be able to bypass the censor of the sleeping part of the brain and interact directly with ‘reality’ and with whatever’s ‘out there’, in a way that will later, when we wake up, guide our (waking) consciousness along that path of existence and thus force us to readjust our internal representation of the world and accordingly shape our perception of what’s ‘real’. The Australian physicist Paul Davies says that for the dreamer at least, “Dream objects undeniably enjoy a kind of existence...” but he also makes a clear-cut distinction between dream objects and our waking world. Although he acknowledges that dreams are just as substantial as, say, our concept of valour, honour or even bankruptcy, he remarks, that at present, dreams exist in a mode of reality which we are not properly equipped to deal with.

This does not mean that dreams are not real. Merely that they exist in a mode as far removed from what we consider ‘normal’ as our everyday waking life is from our dreamstate.