Owing to my shitty Internets I was unable to post about this last night when I had my dream. I was going through some academic studies and had to take a nap in between, though I only intended for a short rest. I was just too tired. Of course, it resulted in R.E.M. sleep and a dream, which means it was a pretty good nap…if not for the dream itself.

The dream had implications psychologically and philosophically for me, ones that are shaded with hidden implications of the fear of it becoming true. It was a simple dream, but in its simplicity and not actually being a nightmare, it becomes a nightmare upon awakening…or am I awake?

As dreams go, it might be fast. The one thing about my room and my bed is that currently my sleeping position faces my door. Through the narrow slit at the bottom (I have the door closed most of the time when someone else is in the house) I can see light filtering through if any lights are on in the house, and having lived in it for a long time now I can even tell what lights are on, or if only artificial lights (from the neighboring apartment block) are on from outside the house.
 

One would expect that, since I took the nap at around 9+ PM, when my mother was in the house, the living room would be lit for a long while. My dad usually returns late so the lights will be on for longer, though in between if my mom sleeps first the lights in the living room (which will then be very bright through the slit) will be off.

What transpired was me awakening (for real or not, even I do not know) and then going back to sleep, using only the lights outside as a reference to the time. The dream itself was the exact replica of the situation were I to wake up in reality. The chronography of the lights, for example, took place each “awakening” as though it happened in reality. As such, there was no way I could tell if what I saw was real, or in the dream itself. In other words, I had no sense of knowing whether or not I was dreaming and if what I was seeing was indeed reality as I know it. The dream only revealed itself as a dream at the end when something I knew could not happen in real life happened.
 

The delusional dream of a seriously mentally ill patient that later merges with reality in Paprika. Could something like this perhaps happen in our reality?

I have no idea you feel this about dreams, but when you are in a dream, you feel as though everything is real to you. The dream itself takes on a shape and feeling that your brain tells you is reality, even when your conscious real self knows it is not. Yet you wrap yourself in the dream, taking in everything that happens as though it were all real. Is this perhaps the power of the subconscious taking over the conscious in a realm of its own? No one knows for sure, though I do adhere to that. This feeling of everything being real in a dream however gets exponentially compounded into the simple dream I had – how was I to judge what was real or not?

You wake up each time from a dream, knowing that this is now reality. The reality that you know and are familiar with. The reality you can see, touch, smell, hear. What happens if that same reality occurs in the form of a dream that now your brain tells you is real? What we call our sense of reality is actually learned and accumulated through life’s experiences and both formal and informal teaching. How you see with your eyes, what you see with them, for example, is going to be different from someone else with a different background and upbringing, as well as social status among other factors.

And now I am presented with a reality that is in tandem with what I know as reality. What gives then? How am I to separate reality from fiction? Is the life I am living now actually reality, or actually fiction? Am I to believe that, what happens in my dream is actually reality and what I deem reality is actually a long long dream? How am I to know? How are any of us to know? How can I be sure that when I wake up, I am actually “waking up”? Each time I “woke up” in the dream, I had no sense of what was a dream or not. It all seemed to be fact.
 

The famous Chinese philosopher Lao Zi once had a dream, in which he became a butterfly, fluttering along from flower to flower, living the normal life of a butterfly. Yet the dream was so real to him in his experience that when he awoke, he asked himself, “Am I a philosopher dreaming as a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming as a philosopher?”

Further, if dreams can be distorted and the same as reality as when you slept, what happens if something similar to Paprika’s premise takes place? Or an even more famous example, the Matrix’s? Where then do we blur the line between reality and a dream?

I woke up at first unaware of the impact of the dream, till a little while later when I realized exactly what implications it had for me. Before this, I already had adhered to Lao Zi’s same musing, but never in such a strong form and never in such an experience.
 

Are we all just coded parts, serving our real lives as power sources under another alien race that drains us of our energy for their needs? Or are we something even more abstract, merely floating forms of what we call consciousness in the vast expanse of what we deem to be “thought”?

Is what you are dreaming truly a dream…or is your reality the dream? Are we all figments of our own imagination, intersecting monologues and illusions that take place in the same dimensions? Self-awareness and consciousness no longer helps, when you cannot even define the line between reality and fiction. As Lawrence Fishburne put it in the first movie of the Matrix, “What is reality? Is it something you can see, hear, smell and touch? If so, reality is a very simple thing.”
 

PS: I woke up later at 11+ PM, a mere 2 hours plus after I first napped. Dreams usually take place over just three seconds, that is how fast the brain works. Perhaps this one took longer, though in the dream, my “awakening” was sometime around 5-6 AM. On hindsight, it was truly eerie upon conscious awakening as I know it.

Related posts:

1. Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 08 – Onozawa Mirai
2. Perfect Blue (>9000)> Chaos;Head