J
Jake Watermelon
Guest
When you are experiencing a dream, you are almost never aware that you are in a dream. All your brain knows is the right here, right now. Strange situations are presented to you, but there is no questioning or reasoning behind it. However occasionally, every now and then when the conditions are just right, a brief moment of consciousness slips through and you are aware that you are in a dream. All of a sudden the strange situations become obviously abnormal, and the entire facade slips apart.
The difficulty with telling a dream apart from reality is that you need to be conscious in reality again before you can see what was wrong with it. While you are dreaming, the place you are in might suddenly change, or a person who should not be there might appear, yet your brain accepts both as a normal part of what is happening. Once you wake up, you can compare the dream to the world you know, and all of the inconsistencies become clear.
So why are our brains not able to tell when we are in a dream? And what separates a dream from reality? Could it be that the reality we experience is just another dream, and we are not aware of it?
One thing that separates our reality from the dream world is lucid dreaming. When dreaming, there are times where the awareness of the dream slips through, and the person is able to control the dream. Through techniques such as doing reality checks throughout the day a person can learn to eventually intentionally induce a lucid dream state.
Lucid dreaming as we know it cannot exist without a reality check suddenly spurring a moment of consciousness within the dream, whether it happens intentionally or not.
Think of the movie “The Matrix”, when Neo is finally able to understand that “there is no spoon”. This moment of realization comes from Neo checking his current reality, and realizing that it is fake. This then brings the question of, if our own reality is a simulation, then why hasn’t there been any “Neo’s” throughout history that would have been able to not only see through the facade but control it as well.
One possible explanation is that it is very difficult to check a reality in which you are not aware of what reality actually looks like. In The Matrix, Neo is able to successfully leave the simulation before later re-entering it. Therefore his brain has a context to what reality actually looks like. Our simulated minds on the other hand simply have no context to what the real world might possibly look like.
Imagine you took a video game character like Mario, and placed him into the real world. He would be able to interpret that this reality does not have giant mushrooms, dragons, or princesses to save but instead a more muted reality of taxes, biology, and physics. If he were able to jump back into his reality, he would possess knowledge that would be inexplicable in his reality. There would be no way for him to communicate what this world is like and for others to understand what he is saying. That is the same problem we are facing in our reality. Even if we were able to leave the simulation, the likely reality that exists would be so far abstracted from the world that we live in, it would be impossible to describe it.
Now take a look at dreams. Many dreams retold by individuals make absolutely no sense. The dreams seem to be detached from the reality that we live in, as though they are a part of their own “dream” reality world. Perhaps this difference in dreaming vs a conscious state comes from the brain disconnecting itself from a physical environment during dreaming.
When you enter a dream state, in order to prevent injuring yourself, your brain will knowingly silence your body's reaction to the dream in order to keep you asleep and safe. Sometimes consciousness slips through in this moment, and can lead to a moment like sleep walking, where a person is consciously asleep yet they are moving around their environment and interacting with it as though they are awake. It is almost as though there is a glitch in the brains system that can trigger this confusion between a waking and a sleep state.
This all now begs the question, if we are dreaming this reality, would we know? Or would we just accept all its weirdness as typical dream nonsense. When you are dreaming, there are very few times that you become aware of the dream, yet it does still happen. Maybe the similarity in our reality, is deja vu.
Deja Vu is a concept that has been studied relentlessly for decades, yet we still cannot confirm its origins. There are many different theories, but there is still not one definitive answer. The term itself is French, and means already seen, and its origins date back to at least the 1960s though it is likely humans have been experiencing this memory phenomenon for as long as we have been walking upright.
The leading theory behind Deja Vu involves a disconnect in the brain between the recollection and familiarity centers. Essentially part of your brain is saying that you remember this, and the other part is reassuring you that it feels familiar (you can read more on the study behind this here).
Another more interesting theory, is that Deja Vu evolves in part from dreams. This could be a time where you have dreamt already of the moment that you are living in, before you actually experience it. This sounds like time travel, but its the opposite. Your dreams have influence in your waking reality, whether you are fully aware of it or not. There are times where you may have dreamt of a scenario, and you unknowingly recreate it, thus bringing upon the feeling of Deja Vu.
For a brief moment it feels as though you are remembering something, but when you try to find that memory there is nothing there. If you had dreamed a similar conversation before, maybe the details of the dream were lost when you woke up, leaving only the feeling that the conversation had already happened. Or perhaps your brain is creating that feeling in the moment.
So in these instances of Deja Vu, maybe our brains are attempting to do the same reality check that it performs while we are lucid dreaming. Perhaps your brain subconsciously picks up on something not quite being right, a pattern, a texture, something that feels off, and quickly tries to see if it’s in real life or not. And there in lies the problem, even your brain does not know if this is reality or not. For all that humanity could be aware of, we are living in a real Plato’s cave situation, fed a false reality that leads us to believe it is real just like when we are dreaming.
None of this proves that we are living in a dream or a simulation. Deja Vu could simply be a strange issue with memory, and dreams feeling real does not mean that our waking reality is another dream. However, dreams do show how completely we can accept a world when we have nothing else to compare it to. In a lucid dream, something finally makes us question what is happening, but in this reality we have no outside point of reference like Neo did. We would not even know what to look for. Maybe Deja Vu is just a feeling that passes in a few seconds, or maybe it is one of the few moments that makes us stop and ask why we are so certain we are awake.
The difficulty with telling a dream apart from reality is that you need to be conscious in reality again before you can see what was wrong with it. While you are dreaming, the place you are in might suddenly change, or a person who should not be there might appear, yet your brain accepts both as a normal part of what is happening. Once you wake up, you can compare the dream to the world you know, and all of the inconsistencies become clear.
So why are our brains not able to tell when we are in a dream? And what separates a dream from reality? Could it be that the reality we experience is just another dream, and we are not aware of it?
One thing that separates our reality from the dream world is lucid dreaming. When dreaming, there are times where the awareness of the dream slips through, and the person is able to control the dream. Through techniques such as doing reality checks throughout the day a person can learn to eventually intentionally induce a lucid dream state.
Lucid dreaming as we know it cannot exist without a reality check suddenly spurring a moment of consciousness within the dream, whether it happens intentionally or not.
Think of the movie “The Matrix”, when Neo is finally able to understand that “there is no spoon”. This moment of realization comes from Neo checking his current reality, and realizing that it is fake. This then brings the question of, if our own reality is a simulation, then why hasn’t there been any “Neo’s” throughout history that would have been able to not only see through the facade but control it as well.
One possible explanation is that it is very difficult to check a reality in which you are not aware of what reality actually looks like. In The Matrix, Neo is able to successfully leave the simulation before later re-entering it. Therefore his brain has a context to what reality actually looks like. Our simulated minds on the other hand simply have no context to what the real world might possibly look like.
Imagine you took a video game character like Mario, and placed him into the real world. He would be able to interpret that this reality does not have giant mushrooms, dragons, or princesses to save but instead a more muted reality of taxes, biology, and physics. If he were able to jump back into his reality, he would possess knowledge that would be inexplicable in his reality. There would be no way for him to communicate what this world is like and for others to understand what he is saying. That is the same problem we are facing in our reality. Even if we were able to leave the simulation, the likely reality that exists would be so far abstracted from the world that we live in, it would be impossible to describe it.
Now take a look at dreams. Many dreams retold by individuals make absolutely no sense. The dreams seem to be detached from the reality that we live in, as though they are a part of their own “dream” reality world. Perhaps this difference in dreaming vs a conscious state comes from the brain disconnecting itself from a physical environment during dreaming.
When you enter a dream state, in order to prevent injuring yourself, your brain will knowingly silence your body's reaction to the dream in order to keep you asleep and safe. Sometimes consciousness slips through in this moment, and can lead to a moment like sleep walking, where a person is consciously asleep yet they are moving around their environment and interacting with it as though they are awake. It is almost as though there is a glitch in the brains system that can trigger this confusion between a waking and a sleep state.
This all now begs the question, if we are dreaming this reality, would we know? Or would we just accept all its weirdness as typical dream nonsense. When you are dreaming, there are very few times that you become aware of the dream, yet it does still happen. Maybe the similarity in our reality, is deja vu.
Deja Vu is a concept that has been studied relentlessly for decades, yet we still cannot confirm its origins. There are many different theories, but there is still not one definitive answer. The term itself is French, and means already seen, and its origins date back to at least the 1960s though it is likely humans have been experiencing this memory phenomenon for as long as we have been walking upright.
The leading theory behind Deja Vu involves a disconnect in the brain between the recollection and familiarity centers. Essentially part of your brain is saying that you remember this, and the other part is reassuring you that it feels familiar (you can read more on the study behind this here).
Another more interesting theory, is that Deja Vu evolves in part from dreams. This could be a time where you have dreamt already of the moment that you are living in, before you actually experience it. This sounds like time travel, but its the opposite. Your dreams have influence in your waking reality, whether you are fully aware of it or not. There are times where you may have dreamt of a scenario, and you unknowingly recreate it, thus bringing upon the feeling of Deja Vu.
For a brief moment it feels as though you are remembering something, but when you try to find that memory there is nothing there. If you had dreamed a similar conversation before, maybe the details of the dream were lost when you woke up, leaving only the feeling that the conversation had already happened. Or perhaps your brain is creating that feeling in the moment.
So in these instances of Deja Vu, maybe our brains are attempting to do the same reality check that it performs while we are lucid dreaming. Perhaps your brain subconsciously picks up on something not quite being right, a pattern, a texture, something that feels off, and quickly tries to see if it’s in real life or not. And there in lies the problem, even your brain does not know if this is reality or not. For all that humanity could be aware of, we are living in a real Plato’s cave situation, fed a false reality that leads us to believe it is real just like when we are dreaming.
None of this proves that we are living in a dream or a simulation. Deja Vu could simply be a strange issue with memory, and dreams feeling real does not mean that our waking reality is another dream. However, dreams do show how completely we can accept a world when we have nothing else to compare it to. In a lucid dream, something finally makes us question what is happening, but in this reality we have no outside point of reference like Neo did. We would not even know what to look for. Maybe Deja Vu is just a feeling that passes in a few seconds, or maybe it is one of the few moments that makes us stop and ask why we are so certain we are awake.