Life is a Dream
Posted on: April 15, 2012
‘We went on to speak about the nature of thought, and how our experience of life is made out of the same invisible “stuff” that dreams are made of. And we don’t try to “fix” a bad dream – we wake up from it. And this is the real promise of a deeper understanding of the nature of the human experience – not that circumstances will always go our way, but that we are able to relate to our circumstances in a way that allows us to tilt the odds in our favor and enjoy the ride.’ – Michael Neill
The idea that life is a dream has a scientific basis. Anatomy of the eye, for instance, tells us we have many more receptors (cones and rods) than there are nerve fibers in the optic nerve, implying that there is some kind of information compression taking place. Cognitive science points out that the brain constructs what the mind sees out of this “compressed” information by making “decisions” about what the raw data means, normally choosing the most reasonable, common interpretation. The brain does not function like a television screen for the mind, but actively builds a dynamic, three-dimensional model of the world that we use to navigate and make decisions. Add to this our amazing ability to construct past and future scenarios, feel empathy (the re-construction of other’s feelings using our own physiology) and accurately head a soccer ball into the net. We construct our experience of reality so well and so fast that we don’t even realize we are doing it.
It’s possible and likely for us to make mistakes during all of this. Most of the raw data from our senses, compressed as it may be, gets ignored because otherwise the awesome powers of the brain would be overwhelmed. Then, the majority of our construction gets ignored because our conscious attention (also awesome) is limited in scope, so the parts of reality that we focus on are such a small sliver of the reality that exists “out there” that it is silly to think we perceive anything accurately. To make up for this, a large portion of our cognitive power is taken up with the ability to make corrections based on new sensory feedback. Part of our model involves correcting the model!
When we dream at night, we use all the same faculties of construction, except that the majority of the input is from within the brain itself. “Our experience of life is made out of the same invisible “stuff” that dreams are made of.” We are living in a dream, and your dream is not the same as mine, even if we agree on some aspects of shared reality. In our shared reality dream, we need to take action, look after ourselves and our world, act within the dream as if our construction is accurate because that’s what we know.
Feelings are the motivators of our actions, and the main difference between a good dream and a nightmare is how we feel in it. If our feelings arise out of our interpretation of events, and that interpretation is based upon a constructed reality, we can change the feel of our experience by:
- re-interpreting it, or by
- re-introducing deleted perceptions back into the construction, or by
- shifting sensory attention to different aspects of the situation.
These interventions involve working with different levels of the construction process. You could say they are different paths to “waking up” within the dream.
When things are going well, we rarely feel like changing them much. It is when the dream becomes a nightmare that we want to change it, so suffering and dissatisfaction become an impetus for change. I would not suggest that we stop working to make changes in our world, but what if it were easier, more enjoyable and more effective to wake up in the dream. What would that be like? How could I do it? What’s involved? If I ask the questions, I’m more likely to discover the answers. Perhaps if you come back here in a week or two, I’ll have something to say about it.
What I’ve come up with so far is that the most accessible wake-up option is at the highest level, the one involving identity, belief and interpretation. Nine times out of ten, painful relationships and experiences involve miscommunication and narrow perception, producing beliefs and interpretations with painful meaning while ignoring other possible, more pleasant or more useful interpretations. “How do I wake up in this situation?” is a simple way to interrupt an old pattern and open the mind to new possibilities. Earnestly asked, this question is often enough to instantly change everything, shifting experience to a different set of priorities and relieving mind and body of the burden of fixing things.
It may sound strange, but we can learn to cherish our bad times when we use them to remind ourselves to open up and be present.
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