What Dreams Tell Us About Consciousness

When we dream, our thirst for rational explanations goes to sleep, freeing consciousness. Does it tell us something deeper, though?

The phenomenon of dreaming is familiar to us all, yet it is said to be the most cogent evidence that the mind controls reality in some way.

The world in our dreams is eerily real while we are in them. It often constructs a highly convincing world, one far beyond what we think we could conjure, but one that works very similar to our waking world. Yet how can this be, if we could never hope to create such a world as that consciously?

And it surprises us, too. It puts us in totally unfamiliar situations, confronted with people we have never met before, behaving in ways that we couldn’t predict. Where does this information come from? More to the point, when we awake, it all but vanishes from our memory - if we even remember it at all.

Yet the structure and substance of these dreams can teach us a lot about how consciousness works, and maybe even reality. Rather, it can teach us how the mind works, and give us some confidence that our mind is far greater than what we believe it to be in our waking hours.

One thing I have noticed personally, is that the part of my brain that rationally analyzes things isn’t just unused, but any attempt to tap it, to apply rational thought, produces a strong sense of aversion while I am half asleep. If it is forced, it wakes us up entirely, making it difficult to return to sleep. I’ve verified this on several occasions, and the same dynamic arises consistently.

What does this tell us? If we relate this to our work on the Map of the Mind, this desire for rationality, what we called “reduction” or “curiosity”, is actually what may well inhibit our freedom to manifest our wildest dreams in our day-to-day, waking life. It’s extremely interesting that this same mechanism seems to be disabled when we, quite literally, experience our dreams.

But the phenomenon of dreams during sleep in quite odd, even if it’s so common that we almost disregard it. Why do we dream? While we’re at it, why do we sleep?

Biologists think that we need to sleep in order for our body to heal itself. Neurologists believe that we sleep to allow our brain to cleanse and reorganize. We do know that when people are deprived of sleep, they quickly deteriorate mentally and physically. So it’s clearly needed to maintain a rational consciousness.

Where does the dream actually occur? In our brain, or does it occur elsewhere and just some trace memories of it get imputed into our brain?

The very fact that we forget dreams so readily suggests that this rational-reductive aspect is actually required to remember, to some degree, and so when it is absent we naturally do not remember.

In fact, it makes us wonder if there is a difference between being conscious and remembering, and remembering something is what requires our brain (physical storage?), and possibly even our rational thought is a mechanism of memory, yet consciousness can somehow work independently of both?

And how does this impact what we are conscious of and are not conscious of, in our waking hours? It seems that empirically we are conscious of what has continuity, what we remember, and what rationally makes sense. Yet it’s unclear whether this is a requirement because we make it a requirement, by emphasizing our expectation of rational thought, or because it must necessarily be.

Given that we know consciousness can exist without memory or rational thought in our dreams, it suggests the former. And that means our reliance on rational thought, and on memory, is what is limiting our every day existence.

So is it possible that we do need to sleep, in order for our physical memory that organizes and stores these rationalities to repair or prepare itself for the next day, and during this time consciousness can be freed in some way. But this raises big questions about the nature of consciousness, and about time itself.

Firstly, it would raise the question of whether consciousness is actually emergent in any way. What would it supervene on during this time that this rational aspect of the brain is disabled?

We discussed in other posts how consciousness is a bridge from one possible information model state to another. The information model finds a way to manifest from the multiverse of infinite possibilities. Identity is just the continuity that this series of bridges creates. Yet during those bridges, consciousness can supervene on entirely different material. So while at the beginning of our sleep, consciousness supervenes on our brain’s memory structures, as it transitions to more of an associative bridge (rather than rational), it must eventually disconnect entirely - possibly the time when we are considered to be in a deep sleep, where there is no apparent brain activity.

It’s possible that what we call the brain is actually a representation of what a rational state of consciousness must supervene upon. Just a temporary home, so to speak.

But then why does it “return” upon waking? I would presume that again it is because as it switches on, for there to be consciousness then the continuity must be found from the end of the dream to the beginning of rationalizing about it, and then waking into the fully rational world, imposed on by our memories.

What remains is just a fragment of that dream in our memory, that quickly disappears as its ability to integrate into our memory, as an irrational sequence of events, becomes evident.

But then in this multiverse of infinite possibilities, is there a branch of me that continues on in that dream? This hypothesis would suggest that is true. But in a reality that has no rationality, where moment to moment is only continuous through association, what does it even mean for me to be there? Is there even a continuous identity? Is it me?

We know that animals dream also. This is probably their disassociation not from rationality, which they barely have to begin with, but just their memory and integration into our own rational world.

But again, in the multiverse of infinite possibilities, there will always be a branch of me that wakes up back into this rational world. To maintain identity, it would seem to be a necessity (the basis of which, incidentally, Quantum Immortality arises from).

If our identity is questionable during dreams, and too mundane in the absolute rational world - is there an in-between, a “happy medium”? A world where rationality doesn’t drive everything, that allows for some degree of unquestioned magic, but not too much? A dream world, but not a dream world?

It seems that it’s largely a state of mind, and a matter of faith.