Make your own reality are we really nothing more than a mass illusion?

I have been thinking about this for a little while and it's an interesting thought what if are lives are nothing more than a dream within a dream? do we really die? or simply begin anew in some other plane of existence.

That's just it. We can only wonder, and live on wondering. I've recently had some experiences with dreams that changed my view on certain things. If this life is a dream, which sometimes feels like its something other than life, how do we wake up? Like I said, we can only wonder.

Very good question... i sometimes feel as though I am not comfortable in my

body and that I am dreaming life... it actually annoys me when I

feel like I'm stuck in a dream!

reply to post by mike dangerously


You may like the analogy of 'mise-en-abime': picture within a picture, endlessly (like two opposite mirrors reflecting each others' 'reality').

But, if this 'mass-illusion' is a collectively dreamed up reality/dream, it still is our reality, and not an illusion. So full circle to the basic questions: what is life and how to live and understand it.

Originally posted by mike dangerously
I have been thinking about this for a little while and it's an interesting thought what if are lives are nothing more than a dream within a dream? do we really die? or simply begin anew in some other plane of existence.

Ah, but what is a dream? With all the scientific advancements and technologies available these days, why haven't dreams been explained adequately?

I've been dreaming all night, every night of my life (with little exception) for as long as I can remember. Very vivid, lucid dreams that often seemed more real than waking life. There were even times when I would get a bit confused about whether an event I remembered happened in the dream or waking world.

The dream world is as real to me as this waking one. The only difference between the two are universal laws. In the waking world, laws of nature and of man govern our reality. In the dream world, nothing is impossible, anything can happen, nothing is beyond imagination and none of the laws we are inhibited by exist.

So, with all of the study into the mind, why haven't scientists been able to understand and/or explain dreams? I think its because it is the "afterlife". Or could be.

So, with all of the study into the mind, why haven't scientists been able to understand and/or explain dreams? I think its because it is the "afterlife". Or could be.

I think that we go into a different dimension where we dont need our physical

bodies. Do you mean that dreams are visions of the afterlife??

reply to post by halfmanhalfamazing


They could be visions of the afterlife, or they are actually the afterlife. We don't cease to exist just because we sleep and because we are able to dream while sleeping suggests that there is more to life and living than our physical realm. Its interesting, but so far no one has been able to adequately explain dreams, their meanings or what causes them.

With all of the scientific study into the brain, thoughts, behaviour, etc. why can't they figure out what dreams are and why we have them?

Within the last three years five people close to me died. Four of the five (one was my dog) came to my dreams between a week to one month after they died. The fifth, my mother, has come to my dreams three times. In each one, she died again. The other four were happy and excited, they wanted me to know they were ok.

reply to post by Hazelnut


WOW!

Thats cool but scary at the same time, Im sorry to hear about your losses...

About 2 years ago my cousin suddenly shot up and said that my grandfather is

dead, not even 2 mins later we got a call from the police confirming what she

said. Maybe the dead have some sort of connection with us in our "dreams"??

The reason why I asked if they could be visions is because of Deja Vu... it

still freaks me out when i have deja vu, and I have always felt that we go

into the future in our dreams

Originally posted by halfmanhalfamazing
reply to post by Hazelnut

 

WOW!

Thats cool but scary at the same time, Im sorry to hear about your losses...

About 2 years ago my cousin suddenly shot up and said that my grandfather is

dead, not even 2 mins later we got a call from the police confirming what she

said. Maybe the dead have some sort of connection with us in our "dreams"??

The reason why I asked if they could be visions is because of Deja Vu... it

still freaks me out when i have deja vu, and I have always felt that we go

into the future in our dreams

WOW! Back at cha

I'll bet that freaked your cousin out too. But you may be on to something with your idea on deja Vu...it seems like people who are avid dreamers have more deja vu than people who either don't dream or can't remember them. I never thought of deja vu as future dreams...but I will now!

Do people who dream often exhibit more creativity and imagination than those who don't? My hubby is one of those even-keeled, level-headed, color-blind, logic oriented people who does not dream (or does not remember them). I am the opposite and dream frequently, to excess even.

I only remember bits a pieces of my dreams and it's usually not enough to make any sense of what the dream was about. When I practice, I get better at recalling them but its hard to keep that habit.

I have taken trips to places where I thought "this or here is why we sleep, this is the very core of where we dream and why we go to sleep every night, our reset, if you will." I feel refreshed after wards like I just woke up. Others say we contact our higher selves, guardians, whatever definition you want to put on it. I think by remembering our dreams we can start to decode the language of the subconscious and tap into something beneficial.

reply to post by SeeingBlue


My mom used to interpret my dreams for me every morning. She had some awesome ideas about what they meant. Sometimes she would make me think, other times I just knew she was dead wrong.

Seriously though, why hasn't technology and science been able to definitively prove what dreams are?

reply to post by Hazelnut
The realm of dreams are often 50% truth and 50% fantasy but you still find events in waking life that mirror what you dreamed that past night.Think about this what if reality is programmable? if this is so then the collective consciousness is far more potent then what many people think.

Reality is real

Even if it isn't, there's nothing to be gained from exploding the myth.

reply to post by Astyanax


Why would we not gain anything??

I think it would be impossible to escape what we percieve as reality, but if we

could we don't know what we might discover.

reply to post by halfmanhalfamazing

Why would we not gain anything??

Here's why:

I think it would be impossible to escape what we percieve as reality.

You answered your own question!

I said

I THINK it would be impossible to escape what we percieve as reality, but if we could we don't know what we might discover.

I would like to know why you think it's not worth it??

If this is all a collective dream, who are the dreamers, who is doing the dreaming?

We are all without boundries our concepts of individuality are illusory.

We are all aspects of universe and all of universe is singular and whole.

reply to post by halfmanhalfamazing

I'll give you not one, but two answers.

Short answer: I think reality is precisely our reality. It is not an illusion, and therefore escape from it is impossible.

Long answer: the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous critique of reductionism entitled What is it like to be a bat? In it, he argues that the form taken by 'reality' is determined to a very great degree by perception, and that if we could change our perception, then reality, too, would change. He gave the example of a bat, a creature whose world is assembled mainly through sound, not vision. A bat's world, he argued, must be different from ours.

Although I remain a 'reductionist' (I prefer the terms empiricist or naturalist), it is clear that Nagel is, thus far at least, correct. However, these different forms taken by reality as apprehended by brains of different kinds, synthetic as they are, must, I believe, be grounded in a substrate of 'real' reality of which our perceived realities are abstracts or analogues.

It would seem, at first sight, that your point is valid, and that if we could escape from the analogue reality of our percepts, we would discover something fresh and new - 'real' reality perhaps, whatever that means. But this can never be. The reality we inhabit is the one we are evolved to inhabit, and it has evolved with us. To escape from it into a different reality - 'real' reality, or simply the reality of a bat or a duckbill platypus, another creature with a sensorium very different from ours - we would have to become different ourselves. We would cease to be human in any meaningful sense, and could never carry the new knowledge we had gained back to our former fellows.

Originally posted by mike dangerously
I have been thinking about this for a little while and it's an interesting thought what if are lives are nothing more than a dream within a dream? do we really die? or simply begin anew in some other plane of existence.

Your life and everyones life is very much real, its what you see around life is an illusion. To answer your question, off course we die, or else the planet would have been over populated many thousands of years ago.

Perhaps you should ponder the thought, how many human beings have died over the course of the human evolution. Is in the Trillions or in the Quadrillions or is it in the Vigintillion ?

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by halfmanhalfamazing

 

I'll give you not one, but two answers.

Short answer: I think reality is precisely our reality. It is not an illusion, and therefore escape from it is impossible.

Long answer: the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous critique of reductionism entitled What is it like to be a bat? In it, he argues that the form taken by 'reality' is determined to a very great degree by perception, and that if we could change our perception, then reality, too, would change. He gave the example of a bat, a creature whose world is assembled mainly through sound, not vision. A bat's world, he argued, must be different from ours.

Although I remain a 'reductionist' (I prefer the terms empiricist or naturalist), it is clear that Nagel is, thus far at least, correct. However, these different forms taken by reality as apprehended by brains of different kinds, synthetic as they are, must, I believe, be grounded in a substrate of 'real' reality of which our perceived realities are abstracts or analogues.

It would seem, at first sight, that your point is valid, and that if we could escape from the analogue reality of our percepts, we would discover something fresh and new - 'real' reality perhaps, whatever that means. But this can never be. The reality we inhabit is the one we are evolved to inhabit, and it has evolved with us. To escape from it into a different reality - 'real' reality, or simply the reality of a bat or a duckbill platypus, another creature with a sensorium very different from ours - we would have to become different ourselves. We would cease to be human in any meaningful sense, and could never carry the new knowledge we had gained back to our former fellows.

I've had my reality completely altered and I've seen things I didn't know existed or was even possible. Through personal experience I know this world to be an illusion for lack of a better word.