Dreams, a view into an alternate/parallel universe?
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I don't know if dreams are a view into an alternate universe but I do know that my dreams influence my reality and day to day life-my emotions felt when dreaming are as real as any to me.
The experiences feel so real and involved that up until you wake, you think that's what you're currently doing at the moment.
Say what you will, but I'm somewhat open to the fact that when we dream, we're actually catching a glimpse of what our counterpart is doing in another dimension.
When thinking about dreams, I find it helpful to keep 3 things in mind:
(1)The basic process of dream-creation is essentially the same as the process of experiencing the world while wide awake. The seemingly "real world" that you think you directly experience while awake is ultimately a brain process, just as the dream world is a brain process. We routinely assume that our waking process is somehow correlated with an objectively real world beyond our brains, but we never directly experience this supposedly external world. All we ever directly experience is our subjective brain processing - whether awake or dreaming. This isn't fanciful philosophical speculation; this is just a logical implication of basic neuroscience.
(2) We do not yet have a solution to the "hard problem" of consciousness. The hard problem is the problem of understanding how or why a bunch of neural activity constitutes subjective/qualitative experience. There is nothing in our current conceptions of physical matter or energy that logically implies that some complex processes should correlate with feelings of what it is like to be that process. Whether awake or dreaming, your sensations and feelings are a deep mystery. Not only do we not know how to solve the hard problem, it appears that our current concepts of physics are so inadequate, or misguided that we can't even imagine how to go about trying to solve it. So sort of profound paradigm shift is seemingly required.
(3) Dreaming is ancient and wide-spread throughout the animal kingdom, but we do not yet have a theory of dreams. We have some speculations and some rough attempts at theories, but nothing has yet arisen to the status of actual theory concerning the biological role of dreams.
Another important idea to consider is this: There are some fairly good logical reasons (though not exactly "scientific" reasons) for thinking that "subjectivity" is a primordial or universal aspect of reality. I put "subjectivity" in scare quotes because this is a slippery concept that leads to a lot of complicated discussion, but the basic point, in the context of this thread, is that this is relevant to your suggestion of a "counterpart" in a parallel reality. Is my counterpart me? Or is it some other being who is simply like me in various ways? Where am "I" when I seem to be glimpsing another world? Am I "in my bed asleep in this world" or "walking around awake in the other world" or both? And who are these other people who I meet? Are they "centers of subjective awareness" like I am, or are they imaginary beings? (I recently created a whole thread devoted to that discussion.)
Bottom line: I think there are good reasons to suspect that dreams might actually be glimpses into parallel worlds - or, at least, to think that some dreams, or some aspects of dreams, might be glimpses of this sort.
I do think that dreams are some of the biggest clues that the universe provides to us. I am always struck by the sheer weirdness of them. I very seldom dream about the people and situations who are most important in my life and should logically be filling my dreams....Too many dreams are simply too weird and too real for me to accept standard explanations such as "the brain keeping itself busy" or "the subconscious working through psychological issues." I have also had two vivid dreams that would very definitely qualify as After Death Communications, one from my late father (who delivered one of the key messages of my life) when I was 21 and one from my late sister-in-law (with whom I wasn't particularly close) when I was 52, which further suggests to me that the dream state really is a conduit to another dimension or world. I'm always amazed by people who have no interest in their dreams or report nothing unusual, because I'm always eager to see what the night's sleep will bring.
The old saying that "reality is God's dream" has always resonated with me. I suspect that we as individuals and our reality as a whole are part of something much larger, something that we perhaps could not grasp even if it were explained to us. This may be the clue that dreams are providing -- i.e., that our everyday reality is just the tip of a mysterious iceberg.
This is as close to how I perceive it as anything I've ever read, anywhere. I've often felt very much that this world, our waking reality is not "real," but that dreamtime is much more solid and constant...and never ends.
My girlfriend, and a few of our friends have all had the same dream, in the dream they are a part of a civilian army of sorts, doing things they couldn't do now with extreme skill. Each person described the dream the same from their perspect, acknowledging what another said they did, as they saw it, accept one. No one knew he was there. The conversation had been brought up a few times, the last time, the guy they didn't think was there, admitted he was there, he was hiding i the tree tops with the feeling he had done something traitorous or something and they were looking for him. We happened to bring up a dream discussion when he was over.
It started the same for everybody, on a beach near some woodlands, fighting soldiers, shooting with great accuracy, running through trees, highly skilled martial arts, great physiques. None of them had the dream at the same time, but they all had it. I figure it was either a viewing of a parallel reality, or some future, or maybe they were actually transported via subconcious to to an alternate self, time, or their next life. The dream was vivid, and seemed lucid, yet it was like they were on autopilot. Makes me wonder if whatever the dream is, why I was never in it, but then I never had the dream, thus I either ceased to, or nolonger exist where ever the dream is. Or, I might just not been at the battlegrounds, but I've never had a dream that even hinted at whatever that shared dream is.
My girlfriend, and a few of our friends have all had the same dream, in the dream they are a part of a civilian army of sorts, doing things they couldn't do now with extreme skill. Each person described the dream the same from their perspect, acknowledging what another said they did, as they saw it, accept one. No one knew he was there. The conversation had been brought up a few times, the last time, the guy they didn't think was there, admitted he was there, he was hiding i the tree tops with the feeling he had done something traitorous or something and they were looking for him. We happened to bring up a dream discussion when he was over.
It started the same for everybody, on a beach near some woodlands, fighting soldiers, shooting with great accuracy, running through trees, highly skilled martial arts, great physiques. None of them had the dream at the same time, but they all had it. I figure it was either a viewing of a parallel reality, or some future, or maybe they were actually transported via subconcious to to an alternate self, time, or their next life. The dream was vivid, and seemed lucid, yet it was like they were on autopilot. Makes me wonder if whatever the dream is, why I was never in it, but then I never had the dream, thus I either ceased to, or nolonger exist where ever the dream is. Or, I might just not been at the battlegrounds, but I've never had a dream that even hinted at whatever that shared dream is.
The ability to control dreams (through a machine, supplement, etc) would be a multi billion dollar product / industry. No matter what your life is, imagine if you could control your own virtual reality for 1/3 of your life
At the quantum level even the "real world" is observer-dependent. So if you're observing something it might not exist as something others can experience or observe in exactly the same fashion. Also, at the macroscopic (to us) level as an example of perspective, we "see" in a narrow spectrum of radiation that we have (conceitedly) deemed "the visible portion". To other beings or even to other humans, this spectrum might not be visible. Part of this "privileged" view we have of the universe without any artificial aids is simply chemical biology - the pigments in the cones in our retina..and another part is physical scale (we are 1-2 meters tall and our visual organs have a resolution appropriate to an organism of our size and needs - our method and speed of locomotion for example, dictates we must not be myopic. But consider minutely sized insects such as a flea, which have compound eyes with very poor resolution. But it meets the needs of a creature with few requirements to avoid fast moving predators since the flea reproductive strategy is that of a typical parasite - locate prey/host, feed, lay larvae - the job of life is done very quickly. But other insects have extreme visual acuity like the dragonfly which needs to be able to resolve small insects at great distances relative to its own body size and speed, so accordingly it has these crazily oversized eyes - much better than a flea. Another issue is that the more visual info you collect, the more brain you need to process it. Insects don't have a lot of room for this, where more complex organisms , like most vertebrates, have the space and neocortex to do all this processing.
The point is just that perception is not a universal experience. Because we have discovered a lot of the natural laws of EM we can make tools that see in other parts of the spectrum. But even this may not provide the views that other inhabitants in the universe have. We also experience the passage of time in a peculiar way - another privileged view. And under quantum conditions this doesn't mean anything either. We also know, that because of relativity, that time and the curvature of space by gravitation are not absolute either - again these are observer dependent. An observer in a gravitational field experiences a different view than an observer in a different reference frame. How can anyone say that what they observed is the ultimate "reality" when both observers have experienced something different? So without even involving other dimensions, we already know reality varies based on who you are, and what you are doing. Without needing any sliding doors!
Anyway, because of these biases that lead us to think of reality as some universal experience that should be perceived by everyone in the same way, we're just not very good about thinking about this other-dimensions question. We have a view of "reality" that is very concrete, very unambiguous...particularly when it comes to the issue of existence...either something exists or does not. But who is to say something doesn't exist? You can only say that about things you observe...and whether you observe them directly, or indirectly, that still doesn't mean you are observing all that exists.
I've mentioned this to some people at work and other places during downtimes as odd-ball jibber.
Anywho, there's been those dreams that have felt so real where you wake up and question your reality.
Some would call it lucid dreaming or something else.
But after watching shows like Sliders, that Jet Li movie "The One", and of course the Mirror Universe from Star Trek, I've began to think differently on the matter.
It may be just myself, but what if when we fall asleep our consciousness actually drifts across a barrier separating the realities?
Say you're a truck driver, accountant, or some fairly usual thing in this world.
But then you fall asleep and have a dream about flying an attack helicopter, or eating dinner in a fancy restaurant with some random people, or even the occasional "wet dream".
The experiences feel so real and involved that up until you wake, you think that's what you're currently doing at the moment.
Say what you will, but I'm somewhat open to the fact that when we dream, we're actually catching a glimpse of what our counterpart is doing in another dimension.
If ghags the case, my counterpart(s) lead much more...adventurous..lives than I. In many ways. I cannot recall any dreams, where I have been a cruel , sadistic opposite of my self, as was portrayed in Star Treks "In a mirror ..Darkly". Yet, I have had vivid dreams of how my life may have been, had certain events gone differently. The alternate timeline theory. It is an ...interesting...concept.
Everyone dreams (well, nearly everyone - I seem to recall there are certain rare medical conditions where the individual in question doesn't dream). Whether someone remembers dreams or not depends on where he/she is at in the sleep cycle on waking up. And dreams are evanescent: unless you think about them after waking, there's a good chance that an hour later you won't recall them. Perhaps people who aren't particularly interested in their dreams won't attend that much to them, and therefore will claim they never dream. The hypothesis regarding their function in us (and other organisms that dream - certainly other mammals do, maybe birds as well) that makes most sense to me is that they're related to memory storage and consolidation into an organism's long-term memories. It's how we make sense of what's happened to us and integrate it into our "stories", in other words.
My sense from my own dream analysis (which I did as part of my psychodynamic classes in clinical psych, where we kept dream journals) is that there's more to it than simply a memory consolidation mechanism. However, I can almost always relate the theme or content of a dream to what happened in the past day or two. You have to keep the journal by your bed and write in it as soon as you wake up (before the dream "dissolves").
What I find amazing about my dreams is their highly symbolic content, the way I realize in the midst of some of them that they are important and I need to pay attention to them, and the recurring landscapes and detailed places in my dreams that show up over and over again across the years, though I've never as far as I know been to any of them. Though I do recognize some of them as "mutations" of places from my childhood or adolescence.
Anyway, because of these biases that lead us to think of reality as some universal experience that should be perceived by everyone in the same way, we're just not very good about thinking about this other-dimensions question. We have a view of "reality" that is very concrete, very unambiguous...particularly when it comes to the issue of existence...either something exists or does not. But who is to say something doesn't exist? You can only say that about things you observe...and whether you observe them directly, or indirectly, that still doesn't mean you are observing all that exists.
I think this is right and it means we do not need the natural/supernatural distinction when talking about experiences that many would dismiss as wierd. I am pretty sure that our consciousness is fractured across multiple realities. Slices of our awareness see and perceive in different ways and from different vantage points. We get glimpses of these different slices of ourselves when we dream, daydream, imagine, create and remember. A situation or relationship may be finished in this reality but still continuing in another, or many others. So it bugs us, plays on our minds, appears in our dreams, because part of our consciousness is still dealing with it.
I do not know why this should be so, but in my experience it seems to be true.
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