Where do you exist? In the world? In your body?
In your mind? A bit of a weird question, right? Well, I had an experience recently which may or may not be familiar to you, but it's still quite strange and quite revealing to what this existing thing really is.
It's a peculiar condition, isn't it? The fact that you are here now, or rather something is here now for no evident reason. Some call it the absurd, others the abyss one may not stare at for too long.
But the thing about this existence of yours is that it's quite closely related to consciousness, and this experience I've had is in fact an altered state of consciousness. You might know it as lucid dreaming. Oh yeah, this video is about dreams and reality, and about the dreamness of reality.
What is this place? What is this? What are those?
Let's investigate the neurological machinery of your mind and see if we can find who are you and where are you. It all starts with one simple question. It's a common idea that dreams are somewhat evidently less real than our waking lives.
You know, they're kind of blurry, low resolution. In fact a popular notion for a long time was that we dream in black and white. Why would people even think that?
I know why. Because we base it not on the dreams themselves but on the recollection of them, and that's the problem. From the second you woke up this morning the dreams had already dissolved into this hazy, foggy, fragmented ghost.
This can happen so instantly that a lot of people believe they don't dream at all. That's how fast you forget it. Why?
As you may know, our sleep has stages. First we have N1, N2, N3, the so-called restorative stages where you properly rest, and then we have the famous REM stage, named that because your eyes go woo woo woo, and is when the most long, vivid, full dreams take place. During these stages you're bring to some things that make quite clear how remembering your dreams is not very important.
For example, the hippocampus, which is your main recorder of memories, starts doing something else. It begins processing the memories collected during the day in a process called memory consolidation. But even if part of the hippocampus was still available for memory creation, and it is, your brain is not a computer, things are not just on and off, it needs norepinephrine, which you can think of as a glue that allows the memories to stick, and when you sleep the brain stops making norepinephrine.
It just stops. The glue runs out. Too bad.
What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do? But what if that didn't happen, and you remembered your dreams like you remembered your life?
Well, narcolepsy is a condition in which the brain is unable to regulate sleep-wake cycles. The patients can, for example, suddenly fall asleep out of nowhere and go straight into REM stage, which is awful, but you see where I'm getting at. Since the brain can't properly regulate these transitions, there's an overlap.
The brain goes into REM, starts dreaming very vividly, while it's still doing wake things. This includes the amount of norepinephrine available, the hippocampal activity, and more. So what happens then?
Well, in a 2014 study among 46 narcoleptic patients, 83% reported instances in which they weren't sure whether something was real or from a dream, and 66%, two thirds, said it happened at least once a week. So imagine you dream one of our relatives passes away. You might wake up feeling sad, and at the same time very relieved that it was a dream.
But if you were narcoleptic, you might wake up, cry for two hours, and afterwards call the funeral home to arrange the funeral. And that's actually a real report from a patient in the study. This is not what you would expect if dreams were hazy or foggy or black and white, but it is exactly what you expect if dreams are, in a matter of sensory perception, just as real as this moment.
And that is the first thing every lucid dreamer realizes, and I can speak from experience that the very first thing to come out of my dream mouth after becoming lucid for the first time was, what the fuck? How do you know that things exist? The question sounds ridiculous because you feel the raw power by which reality imposes itself at every moment.
Before you think about it, before you think anything, it's just here. In the form of all these sensations, apparitions, the air, the floor, the walls, your body, the sound of my voice, your own emotions and judgments, your heartbeat, your breath, and I want to confide in you and say that dreaming is the same. The same.
The difference when you lucid dream is simply that as you become aware that you are in a dream, you start paying attention. The level of detail, the colors, textures, sounds, tastes, the vividness, I remember saying this is just like real life, it's absurd. How can that be?
How? Ennoseph is a famous neuroscientist that says the brain hallucinates reality. Reality is a controlled hallucination.
It's a very precise way of putting it, I really like this word, because it perfectly shatters the idea of the brain as a reproducer of the world, like a camera taking in these millions of inputs from our senses and shuffling them into this replica of what's outside. That's not what the brain does. It is not a reproducer, but a producer of the world.
It generates it. It gives birth to the world. And it doesn't need your senses to do that.
The brain is a self -contained prediction machine. It's always generating a predicted reality before receiving any sensory input. When it does, it simply adjusts the hallucination to it if it needs to.
David Eagleman describes this very scary type of blindness called Anton's syndrome, in which the patient denies their blindness. A group of doctors will stand around the bed and say, Mr. Johnson, how many of us are under bed?
And she'll confidently answer four, even though in fact there are seven. A doctor will say, Mr. Johnson, how many fingers am I holding up?
She'll say three, while he's holding none. You see, this patient had a stroke that seems to have damaged the path between her eyes and the visual cortex, but for her nothing's changed. Her visual reality is being generated, even if her eyes are simply not participating anymore.
Which is very scary, but also quite analogous to dreaming. Except dreaming involves all senses. We have clear evidence that, while in REM, all parts of the brain involved in the fabrication of physical experience, the visual, auditory, somatosensory cortex, the vestibular system, everything, is just as active as when you were awake, sometimes more active.
This is called paradoxical sleep, because if you simply look at your brain activity in a monitor, it would be quite hard to tell if you're awake or dreaming. It's not a surprise then that it feels the same when you're there. It is the same.
The reality is being created the same way. And once again, I can speak from experience. This recent lucid dream I had was very trippy, especially the end of it, because I had two false awakenings in a row, which is when it seems you woke up from the dream, but you're actually in another dream.
And in the last one, I was literally on my bed. In my bedroom. Like, exactly how I was in reality.
The same blankets, the same pajamas, the light from the window at my right, all my room rendered with molecular precision. Except that for some reason I had my wardrobe in front of my bed. Now, don't ask me why, but my wardrobe is actually not in my bedroom, it's in the next room.
So I went, hold on, that's kind of weird. Am I still dreaming? And sure enough, I did my reality test, which consists of looking at my hand and waving it really fast.
And then I stopped and I had six fingers. So I was like, okay, still dreaming. God damn it.
At this point I was kind of tired, right? I had been lucid for a while and I had done the main thing I planned to do if I managed to get lucid, because lucid dreaming can be so powerful therapeutically, right? To understand things about yourself, to talk directly to your subconscious, to plant suggestions and emotions you want to embody, and so much more.
But I didn't want to push my luck. I had already done the main thing I wanted and I was satisfied. I kind of just wanted to wake up.
And then I did. I woke up for real. And it was so weird, because there I was, in the same room, same bed, same blankets, same window, same everything.
And it was in those brief seconds, when the feeling of the dream hadn't yet completely dried, that it finally clocked into me so clearly. And I was like, yeah, this really is a hallucination, isn't it? It's all another kind of dream.
Because it's one thing to understand it intellectually. You can say, yeah, my brain is creating the whole world right now, whatever. Because you don't feel like that, you feel like you are in your body, and you identify with the body.
You are this small intruder in this vast, strange world. And I do too. It was just on that brief moment, and sometimes while I'm meditating, that I manage to break the spell, the illusion of separation between me and reality.
And it feels great. Which might come as a surprise for some, after all, if we put into other words, what I'm saying may also feel a bit claustrophobic, right? Like you are in fact forever trapped in this fake world, hallucinated by your mind, while the real world is forever out of reach.
But I don't think that's quite right. I think this is a very logical and yet confused intellectual account of what's happening. The truth is much more beautiful, and the conclusion is not that you are imprisoned, but the opposite.
You are much more free than you could ever imagine. Lucid dreams are a form of treatment for people who suffer from frequent nightmares. And a lot of recent studies show how effective it can be, though probably not for the reason you imagine.
You might think that learning how to become lucid gives you the ability to control and simply change every nightmare into a nice dream, but that's not it. The point of becoming lucid in a nightmare is not to change it, but to let it be. In a way that, if you're not lucid, you can't.
Say you have this persistent dream of being chased by a monster or demon. As you manage to become lucid, you may simply stop running, and let the monster come. Because you suddenly know that this monster, however terrible and scary, it's actually just you.
Like the whole dream, even this ugly, evil, monstrous being, is you. And if that's the case, what is it that it wants? What is it trying so desperately to tell you?
And you can ask that in the dream, and you can accept the monster, forgive him, maybe even hug him, and maybe even tell them that you love him. And I mention that because there's true power in this realization. A power that spreads far beyond the world of and can be felt in this dream as well.
Because much more important than lucid dreaming is lucid living. And most people go through their whole lives the same way they go through their dreams, unaware that they are dreaming. Are you aware?
Can you see it? That you're not in your head, or in your body, or in the world. You're everywhere.
You are this all-encompassing field where all this experience is being generated. This, here, every room, every street, every leaf of every tree, every star, every galaxy, every person you've seen, every person you love, or hate, or think nothing of. Still you.
Can't you see? You are not here. You are never here.
You are the here. How could you be trapped anywhere if you are everywhere? But this is not a dream your mind creates on its own, is it?
The most miraculous part of this reality is that, even though this is all you, you are not alone. I am here with you. How can that be?
If I'm here in my own dream and you are in yours, how is it that I exist here, but also here? It's a paradox, an unsolvable contradiction, and yet, here we are. I am me and I am you.
You are you and you are me at the same time. The way I see it, it's like I am the sea, forever mesmerized by all those waves flowing through me. They are very beautiful.
One of them believes it is me. Yet I am the sea, and the waves are not me. The waves are made of sea, but the sea does not make them.
They happen from above, they come from the wind. The wind wants to be wave, but alone it cannot be. The wind becomes wave only when it finds the sea.
The same wind travels through many seas and becomes many waves. Those waves create their own winds and those winds travel further still. It is a never-ending dance of waves, winds, and seas.
