You’re in a classroom. Your professor walks in and goes to his desk at the righthand side of the
front of the room. He places his messenger bag on the desk and takes out a handful of papers.
He says something, but you’re not really paying attention.
Then, it suddenly hits you. You realize you have a test today. Not only a test, but a final—an
exam that could make or break you. You begin to panic. You didn’t prepare at all, and you
barely remember any of the information. In fact, you’re not even really sure of what will be on it.
You look down. A test paper has been slid in front of you. It appears to be completely blank,
though. You’re confused and overcome with anxiety. Your heartbeat begins to reverberate through your
whole body. Your professor notices you and quickly comes over. Your panic intensifies.
“Are you ok. You don’t look too good,” he says to you.
You try to pull it all together, but when you go to say that you’re ok, you can’t. You can’t
seem to get the words out, and you suddenly can’t seem to really move at all. Then, in an instant,
you black out. The next thing you know, you’re waking up in your bed. This visceral,
seemingly real experience suddenly becomes a vague memory of a dream.
The trope of waking up from something that suddenly reveals to be a dream is arguably
so clichéd in story, film, and TV that it’s almost unusable at this point. But there is arguably good
reason for why this is the case, why it has and continues to be such a common storytelling device.
It points to something so profoundly strange and yet so ordinarily common that each and
every single one of us experiences each and every single night—something that, if we think about
it long enough, can both unsettle and astound us about the mysteries of consciousness and reality,
of sleeping and dreaming. In the words of Fernando Pessoa, “Whenever someone
tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.”
The average modern American adult gets around seven hours of sleep per night.
Over the course of an average lifespan of about eighty years, that means the average person
spends around twenty-three years asleep, or about one third of their lifetime.
There are five stages of sleep across two main categories: non-REM and REM sleep. Starting in
non-REM, we move through the first four stages, where the body and brain increasingly relax
and slow down, the breath and heart rate reduce, the body’s temperature decreases,
and brain waves slow, becoming what are known as delta waves. This period of non-REM sleep
makes up around five hours of sleep per night, or around seventy-five percent of sleep in general.
There are essentially no dreams during these stages, and so,
as far as we can tell, there is no thought or conscious experience at all. Our subjective
experience of self appears to disappear—a strange, almost mystical loss of self into nothingness.
And so, at around seventy-five percent of sleep, this means that across your lifetime you
will spend around seventeen years in this state essentially equivalent to death. At stage five,
however, you return, and you enter into the second category of sleep, REM sleep. During this stage,
the brain paralyzes the body, the eyes dart back-and-forth like a glitching animatronic,
the heart rate and breath spike back up, and the brain returns to a near-awake state.
And here is where most dreams occur. Throughout an average night, we cycle through the five
stages about four to six times, and we spend about two hours per night in this dream stage,
or around twenty-five percent of sleep in general. And so, across your lifetime, you
will live about six years in a dream—in this other strange state of sleep, where the lines between
reality and non-reality blur and an entire, seemingly self-created realm is experienced.
But what exactly is this realm? What are the implications of experiencing it, something that
seems so real but isn’t? Why do we experience it? How do we? Why do we even sleep and dream at all?
Despite all modern science and technology, and despite how prevalent and how much of our lives
are surrendered to these years of sleeping and dreaming, these questions remain largely
unanswered. The reasons for why we need to sleep each night are obvious. A lack of sleep weakens
our memory and ability to think clearly, it can cause mood swings and hallucinations,
nerve cells may not function well, the immune system can weaken, and much worse. But the reason
for why sleep is needed for these reasons is still unclear. There are, of course, many theories
related to why we sleep, as well as pertaining to the functions of REM sleep and dreaming.
Revolutionary psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung directed much of their psychoanalytic efforts
toward dreams, both believing that dreams served to provide a relevant conscious window into the
unconscious mind, Freud specifically believing that dreams were symbolic representations
of repressed fears and desires, Jung believing that they were more often symbolic manifestations
of the collective unconscious of humanity as a whole. Following the twentieth century,
increased understandings of the mind have also allowed for neurobiological theories to form,
like activation-synthesis hypothesis, which argues that dreams are merely a product of random neural
activity taking place in the brainstem and then the cerebral cortex attempting to make
sense of the meaningless activity by forming thoughts and stories out of it. Other theories
suggest that dreaming helps memory, learning, or forgetting unnecessary or harmful information,
dreaming either being a primary or secondary phenomenon to these neurobiological processes.
And theories like threat simulation theory and social simulation theory argue that dreams serve
as a sort of practice rehearsal to improve one’s abilities and likelihood of success in threatening
events or important social situations. These are just a few of the many theories focused
just on dreams and REM sleep. However, since the mind is still largely not understood,
and since consciousness is such an unbreachable, subjective realm, all theories are essentially
both unfalsifiable and unprovable. And so, there is still no real consensus on why we
dream or how dreams are created. Perhaps most confounding and unsettling is this last part—how
the mind creates dreams. How does it create a reality so real inside our sleeping, unmoving
head? Without ever moving the body or experiencing anything outside of it, in a dream, you experience
the physical sensations and visuals of a world that feels completely real. To your dream self,
it is real. And here, that classic, clichéd trope of not knowing if you are a in a dream
becomes eerily uncertain and ripe with reasons for literary and philosophical exploration.
Typically, the strange things that happen in dreams don’t seem strange when we are in them.
It is only after we awake and recollect them through what we believe to be our normal state
do we sift them through a filter of normality and derive their strangeness. But if things in dreams
don’t seem strange when we are in them, how do we ever know that any filter through which we
determine what is normal when we seem to be awake is not in fact also part of a dream?
“When I consider this carefully,” seventeenth century philosopher Rene Descartes wrote,
“I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream. How
can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?” How do we know that we will not reawaken
into another state that will turn everything that feels normal right now into a memory of a strange,
dreamt reality? Of course, this is very unlikely to be true, but for the same reasons we cannot
prove or disprove any theories of why and how we dream because we can’t sufficiently
enter the minds of others nor escape our own, we cannot truly prove or disprove that we are
not in one right now. There are certainly things that seem to be obvious indications of reality.
Perhaps things like the level of perceptual detail, the experience of pain, the pace of time
and events, the consistency of memories, a memory of having woken up in the morning, and so on.
But many people have dreams where they awake at the beginning of it in what is known as a false
awakening. In this case, the dreamer experiences waking up normally in their bed, often followed by
intensely vivid details of ordinary life, but yet, they are still asleep in a dream. And moreover,
how do you know that your assessment or beliefs about what is sufficiently detailed or painful is
not a dreamt conclusion. How do you know that your memories are not dreamt? How do you know that your
experience of having awoken this morning with a memory of having dreamt the night before, although
it felt like you were remembering a dream, you were not actually remembering reality? In truth,
it seems that any test or claim of knowing you are awake could theoretically take place in a dream.
Of course, again, this is extremely unlikely and is perhaps more to serve as an interesting
philosophical contemplation as opposed to a practically useful takeaway. But nonetheless,
the contemplation shows us that when our reasoning for believing something
is true or real is because it’s obvious, that does not necessarily mean it is.
Without any concrete knowledge, evidence, or way of proving it, we find ourselves on a shaky ground
of knowledge and uncertainty at the beginning and end of each day. The good news, though, is that
whether you are in a dream right now or not likely doesn't matter. If you can’t know the difference,
then what’s the difference? If love and fear and meaning is felt in your dreams, apparent truths
discovered and wonders found, if experiences are experienced in anything anywhere, does it matter
if it is objectively real in the way you think? The fact that you exist anywhere in anyway able
to experience anything is all you can and all you truly need to know. And perhaps if we wish to wake
up from our dream, if we are in one, we simply need to close our eyes and find the real world.