Are Your Dreams Actually Reality?

Sep 13

In the 4th century BCE, a Chinese philosopher named Zhuang Zhou was said to have written a large book of text today known as the Zhuangzi, very creative title. But it makes sense to be less creative with the title since you were going to need all your brain power to help understand some of the concepts in the stories of this ancient text.

One of the most famous stories goes like this “Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou.”

“Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.”

Reading that short story leads me to two distinctly different thoughts, one, “wow, he really liked his name.” And two, and I cannot stress this enough, “what?”

Now Zhuang Zhou wasn’t the only thinker to debate these thoughts, Plato, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and thinkers from all around the world have once or twice thought about what is objective reality. Even most of you listening have definitely woken up one day and thought, “wait am I still dreaming?” making you question your own physical reality for a few fleeting moments.

And that’s where things get interesting because in order to call this our reality we have to first define what reality… is.

Merriam-Webster defines reality as “the quality or state of being real”. But when we dream sometimes it feels pretty real, does it not? And when it doesn’t, isn’t that just because we compare what we think is reality to the so-called dream?

Merriam Webster also states reality is “television programming that features videos of actual occurrences ie. reality tv”. I don’t think we need to watch a wedding ceremony on The Bachelorette to know reality television isn’t what anyone would call “real”.

But how do we know this universe is real? In Physicist David Deutsch’s book “The Fabric of Reality”, David makes the argument that our universe has a set of truths that include rules, laws, and theories, and we can look at how any object reacts to its environment and verify these universal truths.

Now if we take those truths and try to implement them into our dreams, do they match up? If you’ve ever dreamt that your teeth fall out, followed by another dream where you’re flying, and then another where you’re being chased by horror movie monsters through an endless wasteland, that continuously cycles to a point where it seems like the nightmare will never end, then you know you can’t attribute the same laws of physics to dreams.

In fact, they seem to change from dream to dream.

So what are dreams exactly?

Short answer: We don’t really know. Long answer: We have suspicions. Since the dawn of the awakening man, we have wondered and tried to interpret what those moving images and lands we saw in our head movies meant.

In ancient Egypt, priests were also dream interpreters. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was thought an interpreted dream could tell of events past, present, and even the future. Dream interpretation and trying to find the meaning continued for thousands of years, a lot of it wrong. Take neurologist Sigmund Freud’s book “The Interpretation of Dreams” wherein he essentially states dreams are like distorted wishes we have.

Now Sigmund Freud was wrong about a lot of things and in this case, he eventually realized he was wrong, later calling dreams “day residue” instead of wishes. But to be fair Freud was actually a tiny bit right- maybe… sometimes, it depends.

And honestly, that uncertainty we have with dreams is still prevalent today. Except we know dreams can’t tell the future nor are they conversations with a higher being, and they definitely don’t mean I wish to go prancing around naked in the middle of an empty parade while I hold a sheep in one hand and have a claw in the other… Do I have weird dreams?

What we do know about dreams is that while we sleep, our brains are still going and it’s during these times, usually during our REM sleep cycle, that we experience dreams. The most prevalent theory is that our brains are replaying all the bits of information we experienced during the day.

This forms memories and what we see in our dreams is an amalgamation of all the conscious and subconscious stimuli including the thoughts we’ve had, so not exactly wishes but in the same ballpark.

Another theory is dreams are just what's playing in our heads because of the random activity in our brains while we sleep. Yet another theory says our brain is cleaning itself and everything you see data pieces of the data your brain is interpreting while tossing it out.

No matter what the reason is for dreams, one thing is true, most of our dreams at some point are irrational and not subject to the laws of physics. Maybe your hand phases through a wall, maybe you blink and you’re in a new place, maybe you’re not you in your dream but someone else.

No matter what, at some point, you can clearly wake up and say “that wasn’t real”, and maybe that’s the answer to our question.

Perception.

We can wake up and perceive we are in a real world, our world, when we’re dreaming we can perceive, most of the time, that we are in a dream. The butterfly at the beginning of the article perceived itself to be in the real world and so it was.

When Zhuang Zhou awoke he perceived himself to be in the real world and so he was. Because we don’t know the universe the fictional story of the butterfly takes place in, we, the reader, can never answer the question.

For us, we can prove our physical reality because of what we have consistently perceived it to be. Our physical reality has a set of universal truths that shape it not just for one person but for everyone and everything.

That is our reality. But what about the simulation hypothesis or the brain in a jar thought experiment?

For those of you who don’t know the simulation hypothesis, it suggests we’re all linked up to a computer living in this fake world a la The Matrix, none the wiser of what the real world is like. The brain in the jar thought experiment is similar and suggests your brain is currently in a vat connected by wires to a supercomputer that is providing you electrical impulses to simulate reality.

I could dispute both of these by saying the required amount of energy and processing power needed for a computer or machine to put everyone or even just one brain into a vastly detailed world full of billions of people with full lives and thoughts would be nearly impossible.

But here’s the thing, saying that would be incorrect since that would be using our universal truths and laws of physics for this reality as a basis to verify a universe we have never known.

That new reality could be governed by a completely different set of truths that we don’t understand. It would be like if you went to the world of cartoons and expected them to follow the same rules of physics that are true in our world.

So it doesn’t matter if we’re in a computer linked up somewhere, or in a jar/vat, or any other science fiction idea because this, all of the universal truths we have perceived and proven true, is our reality. It’s true for you, your neighbor, the person a hundred miles away from you, and even across the world, this is our only reality.

And if by chance you’re a dreaming butterfly, then flitter and flutter around and most importantly, be happy.