Are Dreams Holograms? 


Jim cuts up consciousness in a new (for him) way. 

The insight I had yesterday was about dreaming. In other blogs I have written extensively about how consciousness is either holographic or similar to a hologram. However, when I was writing that, I did have in mind waking consciousness. It is really clear to me that our waking consciousness (at least mine) amounts to the moment-to-moment construction of a perceptual image of the world, where the objects in that world have meaning and plans embedded into them. But yesterday I asked the question, if this is what waking consciousness is, then what is sleeping consciousness, and particularly, what is dreaming? Is dreaming similar to consciousness in that there is the construction of a meaningful perceptual hologram during dreams?

I think the answer is a qualified "yes," but there are several points to consider.

Oddly, it is the phenomenon of lucid dreaming that is closer to waking perception. What is being constructed in lucid dreaming may well be a hologram but without the usual connections to existing objects in the world.(Mystically-minded new-agers may well disagree with this assertion.) In a lucid dream the objects are very sharp and clear, and the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. Still, for many lucid dreamers, the dream-constructed world does not exactly obey the normal laws of physics. It may well be in lucid dreaming that somehow the receiving end of the perceptual system is "unhooked" from this conscious process.

I may have had a couple of lucid dreams in my life, but by and large my dreams are more garden variety. I'm seldom aware that I am dreaming in any clear way, although I have had the experience of thinking that I woke up only to wake up out of that state. In my dreams people and things are more hazy. Often upon awaking I realize that a central character in the dream has actually shifted between a friend, a family member and some strange new person that only reminds me of these people. Scenes follow scenes in a disjunctive way, perhaps carrying a theme through them. Yet anyone who has read some of my blog entries on my dreams knows that they often have a significant and even powerful effect on my life.

On occasion I have observed that even in these "normal" dreams there is a tenuous but definite correlation between the objects in the dream and the real objects of our everyday constructed world. Here are two examples. I remember once dreaming that I was playing something on the piano even more beautiful and complicated than a Chopin ballade. As the dream faded into waking, the very music that I was hearing seemed to morph into the rustling sounds of my body moving against the sheets. On other occasions an object in one of my dreams, say a wheelbarrow, was approximately the same shape and size and gradually blended into some wallpaper pattern as I awakened in a motel room.

I don't have a whole lot else cogent to say on this topic, but my reflection does lead me to a final provocative (so it seems to me) observation. I have made the claim that

"The hologram that leaps into existence when we wake up and collapses when we fall asleep is more than just a three dimensional array of color, sound, and other sensory qualities. Somehow, it also has embedded into it a plan. To be awake is to have a plan, or to have motives, and human beings are among the best examples we have of planning entities."

It looks to me like a dream is a plan-like phenomenon where the normal connection to the perceptual hologram is mostly disrupted. We continually solve problems in dreams, just as we solve them in waking reality, only our dream actions and responses aren't effectively connected with our normally constructed perceptual world, and our dream objects are only vaguely prompted by the shared social objects of waking perception.

Another way to talk about this that I also explored earlier is this. In our waking moments, we have the intersection of the world of possibility with the world of actuality. Through our waking choices and decisions we create actual states of affairs that are as much to our liking as we can manage. Some of our chosen possibilities become actual. In our dreaming moments, no such transaction between the possible and the actual occurs, although dreaming can certainly be a prelude to our waking accomplishments. And maybe even we could say that we are ALWAYS dreaming. There are actually three dream states: "normal" dreams, lucid dreams, and daydreams. And we could finally divide daydreams into "idle" daydreams and "engaged" daydreams. Those latter would be when we are actually creating the actual from the possible.

And finally, it is well to remember that it is always the ineffable person, the unique point of view, the system of organized possibilities that is dreaming (normally or lucidly) or awake. Part of this person may even be beyond time and space. 

Posted: Thu - June 1, 2006 at 06:53 PM          

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