Is This a Dream?
and if so, what to do?
A core insight from lucid dreaming research, especially from the work by Stephen LaBerge at Stanford in the 1970s–90s (and later cognitive studies of prospective memory in dreams) is that when we are dreaming we experience where we are and what is happening, but we usually cannot reconstruct how we arrived there.
In waking life, even if we’re distracted, we can almost always trace our path:
“I drove here.”
“I walked in.”
“I’ve been here for ten minutes.”
In dreams, when we ask, “How did I get here?”, one of three things usually happens:
The question is ignored by the dream narrative
The dream fabricates a vague answer on the spot
The dream destabilizes (which is why lucid dreamers use it as a test).
So, how did we get here?
I don’t mean the room we’re sitting in right now, I mean how did we get here in a human body on earth? Can you remember? I can’t. So, does that mean that this could be a dream?
Maybe.
So, how do we wake up from a dream?
We wake up when we:
question continuity (“How did I get here?”)
notice impossibilities (time, text, physics behaving strangely)
feel self-awareness arise inside the dream
Importantly, trying to wake up directly often fails. Struggling strengthens the dream. Observation loosens it.
Across Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Sufism, the move is similar:
You don’t escape the illusion. You see through it.
Of those techniques listed above, I’ve been playing with number three: feeling self-awareness arising inside my momentary experience. “Here I am, inside this dream, real to myself, not this body, something else… I seem to be a verb (as Bucky Fuller wrote).”
I am not a noun, a thing. I am fluid, in motion, elusive, impossible to describe or capture in words or beliefs. You too.
I study A.I. and am fascinated by the lightning fast advances. But I’m convinced there’s a parallel developmental track accelerating within us, developing psychic abilities and such… as we awaken from this mass dream of disempowerment (someone else is creating my experience).
Just some rambling thoughts to share with you here in the dream… Your insights welcomed.
I'm genuinely curious to know if anyone actually remembers.
Great question, "How did we get here". By our own means or some other influences. Moving outside the dream leave what? The Void or a host of other images stemming from consciousness that we influence in some manner. It's a conundrum like a mirror reflecting a mirror generating an infinite number of additional mirrored reflections ad infinitum. Answering "How did we get here" opens up the wide realm of after life possibilities.