reality??????

Well my sister and I discuss this a lot and i want to know what other people think about it as well. This mighnt not make sense but i will try my best. What we want to know is what makes the things that go on every dayinour waking life real and what makes the things that go on in our dreams or espacially our LD’s fake or not “real”. My sister also thinks that since the LD population is growing that in the futurre people will begin to start living through there dreams. Tell me what you think about all this i am interested to know!!

I think that we cannot really tell the difference between reality and the dream world. There is no evidense either way the this reality is real. Since we have only experienced two different types of thought (maybe there is a better word like planes of existense or something) we can say that there is a 50% that the reality we call reality is not real and only a dream in a dream.
We just consider reality to be real partly because its what we’ve grown up with. If we all grew up thinking that our dreams were real then we would call them reality and this a dream.
This might all just be my dream… there is nothing that you can show me to prove that it isn’t. I have said these arguments to my friends and they just say that this is reality with no backing. I ask them how they know and they say ‘because it just is’. These types of responses are the type of responses that can only come from childhood and instinct. (instinct being subject to reality also has no basis that reality is real)

Also an interesting thought is that life- and time for that matter- may have only started a second ago. Using the idea that someone/something may have just implanted a whole lot of memories into us and our past is not real.

I would like to know more about what your sister says about living through your dreams and what she means by this.

Well, I think both can be true, why aren’t both the living world and the dream world reality? Only in this world you are stuck with gravity and that sort of things, in the dream world you are not. Maybe if we would have grown up with dreaming, the dreaming world would be as comon to us as the non dreaming world.

In “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”, LaBerge argues that one’s perception of the waking world is based on sensory input from external sources (what you see, hear, etc is “created” by your mind, but those sensory perceptions are based on objects around you). This is different from perception in the dream world, in which the senses of sight, hearing, taste, etc are suppressed, and sensory perception is based purley on what the mind creates.

Waking life is a dream dependent on sensory input. Why don’t people take that for a fact?

Are you really sure about that?? The same thing can be said for dreams, unless you believe 100% that the gravity has no effect on you.

There are ppl who claim they can levitate, move things with their mind, maybe they just have 100% confidence that they can do it?

I personally think waking life is just some kind of dream. Or maybe this is some kind of VR device from the future? Like we have paied for a vecation from our regular life, to try out an alternative one, with false memories, identity and everything…

You never know… Maybe im in fact just some very rich spoiled person who got tired of my life? :wink:

Ha ha ha, I find your point of view very interesting! I always thought it would be funny that RL is actually a dream and that dream is actually our RL. We are actually a powerful magician already! :happy: Maybe this “RL” is actually our dream to learn the lesson of harsh reality? :happy:

Yeah, that’d be very wierd if we are in VR with false memory and everything. That made me wonder!

Alex i agree with alot of what your saying and think that what you said about our memory being injected is a very cool way to look at life…Well what i think my sister was saying when she said that in the future we will be livivng through our dreams is that people are going to realize that our dream world is just another reality without as many limitations. Also people are going to take adavntage of this other reality and have their own seperate lives in there dream worlds… At least thats how i interpreted what she was saying :cheesy:

Yeah, i think that as more and more people start to know about LD then more and more people will live through their dreams. I think that they will still consider reality as the main thing though.
But there will always be some percentage of the population opposed to LDs or people who just can’t get a LD no matter how much they try.

My point of view:

Most of us agree that the world, like we percept it, can´t be the “absolute reality” since we all percept something different.So, most of us say, there is a reality but we can see only parts of it, or we see it in a bit different way than it really is.
I for myself came to the conclusion that there is no reality at all, that everything is an illusion.It doesn´t make a difference if there is a reality that noone can see, or if there isn´t a reality at all, does it?
But I don´t like to say “everything is unreal”, I rather say “everything is real”.If there are only illusions, you got to accept the illusions as real…
But I am not consequent with this, of course I am not, it is just some kind of model.

The really big question when it comes to reality isn´t “Is this ston real or not”.The big question is “Do the people around me have a counciousness like I do, or haven´t they?”

And that´s what is the most important point for most people to decide between dream and reality:
In reality, we claim that our loved ones are also able to love us, in a dream we claim that we are the only one with a counciousness.

Well, noone will ever know if this is right.Perhaps our DCs are also sad or happy.Or perhaps you are alone on this world, and you only think that there is a guy who calls himself traumgänger

Traumgänger

PS: I know this doesn´t make sense, but unfortunately I only got human language to think about it and write it down, so it can´t ever make sense :wink:

I agree with what Cosmic Charlie said about whats in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming.
The mind creates the reality for us, based on sensory input. What your seeing isn’t really whats going on. Scince the mind creates our reality for us in this way, you could say that either dreams or life are both real, or you could say they are both unreal, because this is only a model based on sensory input, with cannaot be the same as the brain interprets it.
Does anyone else get this? Cause I sometimes dont. :eh:

This discussion boils down to this question: In our ‘waking’ life, how can we be sure of a definate reality?

And the answer to that comes in a form of another question: How can you be sure that your color red is the same as the other persons, and that you’ve only been conditioned to recognize it with the same word, since colors are impossible to describe with words.

The idea that your experience in ‘this reality’ arises from sensory input is a deduction you are making while ‘in here’, and isn’t actually an observable fact. You can’t really observe that your senses are observing. As an explanation, doesn’t actually explain anything, I don’t think.

I wonder: if we spent more time in our lucid dreams than in ‘this’ experience, how would we explain the difference between the two ‘worlds’? Since our form in lucid dreaming tends to be a little less stable than it is in this environment, where our body is a fairly reliable shape and so on, would we then talk about ‘awareness’ and the environment without assuming the body is part of ‘you’?

So when thinking about the non-dreaming world, we wouldn’t think of the body as being our interface to the world, but rather we’d look upon it as a part of the surrounding ‘stuff’ which happened to be most responsive to our will, and the part we tended to be most aware of.

Oops, not very well put, sorry.

Actually, sensory input is observable by a third party. Current scanning technology is capable of showing that our sense organs generate signals and send them to the brain. The brain then processes these signals and formulates a response, if necessary. Senses don’t “observe” anything, they only pass on information. Observation is left to what we call consciousness.

The theory that Cosmic Charlie and Josh Redstone are referring to suggests that sensory input is used to create an “inner reality”, and it is this version of reality that we actually operate from and refer to as real. This reality continues to exist in our minds when we sleep, but because there is no sensory input available to give boundaries to the reality, the mind can construct its reality in whatever way it wishes. This leads to the postulation that the reality we experience in dreams is exactly the same as the one we perceive in the awake state, but it is free from the limitations of our senses.

Yes but it takes some patience to get your head around it :content: I’ve found discussing it with people really helps!

Our senses are only limited due to there physical composition. Our thoughts, dreams, bodies, and everything around us is composed of a chemical makeup. Our sense of smell is merely a chemical response in our brain and the same goes for what humans describe as love. It’s all simply a chemical response. So whether or not we become emerged in debating or discussing our belief in what “is or isn’t real” is almost irrelevant.

We can all agree as does the administrator of this website and researchers around the world, our brain emits electricity. Our body conducts it quite well and is comprised of mostly water (H20… chemicals that promote electrical impulses). The brain of any living thing and even the basic functions of single cellular organisms are built on the foundation of electricity. With that in mind, let me call attention to the ability of dolphins (a mammal) to use one of its ‘senses’ to locate objects hundreds of yards away. Or the ability of a homing pigeon to find its way back to its place of origin. How is this possible? The brain.

We consider both of these animals to be of relative or minimal intelligence. At least we accept our mental superiority over them. So why don’t we have these abilities… or do we? This concept is more or less a subtopic of LD and is almost embedded in the basic LD discussion.

Like previously discussed in this Thread, in LD are we the only being with a consciousness? Given the uncertain nature of dreams and how little we actually understand about them… who are we to judge. Consider this…. Falling down, falling of a building and falling over is not a good thing. The word ‘falling’ is basically a negative word or is only used in a derogatory context. However, FALLING asleep is okay. And FALLING in love (chemical response) is okay. Why is this? No offense, we understand so little about sleep and yet we all seem so ready to declare such definitive experiences, which is okay. Let me explain.

Please take this post for what it’s worth. I propose we use only one small piece of our brain. If you sleep beside another person, like I do, you may have an experience something like I had a few months back. Were drifting off to sleep my partner and I carried out a conversation. . . into our dream. I’m not proposing we ‘shared’ a dream exactly. Nevertheless, we awoke having the same dream. The details and the basic frightening/startling reality our brains continued communicating beyond our consciousness leads me to believe the following…

Our brains can communicate with one another without fundamental forms of communication. We may not be aware of it… but it happens. Have you known what someone was going to say before they said it? Remember the saying… “If you’re ears are ringing, someone’s talking about you?” Where did this come from. Quite possibly from people who have experienced what I call a ‘relative brain connectivity.’ Not telepathy… nowhere anything near it. But just like LD, our brains subconsciously continue activity well beyond our knowing. And maybe something near telepathy could be possible… but it’s a tad far fetched. Who knows?

All this said… if the general human experience is merely comprised of many chemical responses (our brains interpretation of sensory input), when our heart discontinues supplying the brain with blood…. the electricity in our brains dissipates, brain function stops and … we drift off into a ‘sleep.’

People who have had near death experiences say it’s as if they fell asleep and had a dream. Moreover, to bring someone back to life… (pardon the expression) doctors electrocute the crap out of you. Electrical impulses surge back through your brain…. and those “near deathers” report they come back to their physical bodies.

I feel the concepts described are an extension or LD or at least is connected in some way.

By the way…. never have I understood or even heard of LD until today… 1/12/02. I now understand I’ve experienced LD in some way shape or form in the past… but didn’t know it. The things described have been floating through my brain for many years. It’s all becoming clear now.

Let me know what you think.

" to cultivate a decisive perception of this or any reality one must question existence in itself…" — Levi