​​Exploration of Dreams in Reality

Dreams are either completely regarded as meaningless or phenomena which provides insight into the world around us. There is no universal stance regarding the meaningfulness of dreams but we all have them. I contest that there is a meaningful universal depth in the human experience of dreams.

I find it interesting that dreams which bring us to scenes that host our deceased relatives or lovers evoke excitement, specifically in those who believe dreams are meaningless. The emotions sparked within the dream world establish a permissible truth; regardless of free will, in hopes of the reality being real in some way, the individual finds meaning in it.     

In “Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death” Fredric Myers writes, “Waking life implies a fixation of attention on one thread of thought running through a tangled skein.” To some, returning to our bodies is the awareness of what we just experienced was not real. The thought is clear as we open our eyes in the same setting we closed them in, It was a dream. Covertly, we denounce the experiences as a mere fabrication or fantasy. Our conscious thoughts of waking life are welded to the awareness that we are in control of what happens next. Human autonomy is the base of reality versus dream by this logic. 

When we dream we enter a scenery already set. We do not create it as we make decisions in our daily lives to create the world around us. We do not route ourselves to this location as we drive or fly ourselves to places in the physical world. We simply appear. The characters around us are in their own experience, living and interacting as if the place goes on with or without our arrival.  In the dream world, most of us (the non-lucid dreamers) are not consciously making decisions or directing what happens next. In our dreams, we are passengers to a version of life we are dropped into. We are at rest in the world of decisions.

While we are present in our dreams as the main character, we are also the observer. We are detached, witnessing the scenery as if we are readers. We are in two places at once. Still, we feel the emotions of ourselves as the experiencer. We are in an external-internal perspective. The emotions, thoughts, and interactions are very real. And when it decides to end, we return to our waking life with a recollection of what we encountered, if we find meaning in it.

Perhaps our ability to experience life in a way that is out of our control and evokes emotional sentiment is what creates the meaning. In some way, the emotional experience brings the disregarders to a sort of insighter. Your attention is brought to an emotional experience, you have no hand in consciously creating it yet it exasperates a certain meaning to you.

Reality is what you find meaning in, regardless of the way you experience it. It is your mind’s power in utilizing your free will to create meaning. Your dreams can take you to places you’ve never imagined and you may miss them if you find they do not mean anything.