Could You Be Having a Lot of Real Fun in a Dream?

The question hinges on a single word: real. Reality is commonly defined as the state of things as they actually exist. There seems to be a consensus that there exists a waking world and a dream world. The dream world is produced by our memories, glial cells, and the overlap of images. What we experience in the waking world is taken to be reality; the dream world is something the mind has constructed. Setting aside the question of fun for a moment, the question is really about whether dream experience can be real.

Dream yoga challenges this rigid division. It rests on the premise that the waking state is ultimately no more real or unreal than the dream state. According to the Buddhist philosophical schools underlying dream yoga, although distinguishing between waking and dreaming is valid on an everyday or conventional level, from the standpoint of an ultimate truth-seeking analysis, waking phenomena lack substantiality and independent existence, and in this way are dreamlike. Dream yoga encourages viewing all waking events as dreamlike. The practice targets what Tibetan Buddhism sees as certain basic delusions or mistaken instinctual views about what is real. Whatever we see or feel seems to exist apart from us with its own being or intrinsic nature. This confused state of mind serves as a model for our waking ignorance of the nature of reality. We think our waking ego exists with its own separate and essential nature, but this belief is delusional, for our waking ego is no less an imaginative construction than our dream ego.

Gauḍapāda, an early medieval Hindu philosopher and scholar of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, had proposed that from the standpoint of knowledge of the true self (ātman) and its union with ultimate nondual reality (brahman), the whole of our waking experience is no more than an insubstantial and illusory dream.

We dismiss dreams as reality because they end when we wake. However, the duration of the experience is a poor reason to diminish it. We do not think our experience of life is less real because it ends when we die. It is true we do not remember events in our dreams as well as we do those occurring in waking hours, but that Alzheimer's patients may have little memory of events does not mean their experience is any less real. We are not really experiencing reality as it is given to us; we are creating reality, because reality depends on perception.

Neuropsychological research has discovered the existence of two long-term memory systems: declarative or explicit memory, which is conscious and autobiographical, and non-declarative or implicit memory, which is neither conscious nor verbalisable. Crucially, the dorsal prefrontal lobe is down-regulated during REM sleep, and it is this brain region that mediates the reality sense during waking life. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is thought to mediate self-reflection, insight, self-monitoring, and attention. If the dlPFC is turned off during REM, it is not surprising that insight, self-reflection, and self-monitoring functions would be deficient during that state. Importantly, not all of the senses are blocked during sleep. The sleeping brain may not be entirely isolated from the outside world, though there is a significant sensory attenuation during sleep. The sensory association areas in the cortex are highly activated during REM, suggesting intense processing of sensory information during sleep. That information may not be entirely current; it may be composed of sensory residue from the previous day. Out of all the possibilities the brain can create, waking life is limited by sensory input constrained by physical laws. Dreams have no such constraint, which is why the events they generate can seem nonsensical in waking life.

The waking state reality is just the more common one, but common does not mean the only one. Consider the state of a trance in waking life, or altered states on substances: in such conditions, we have a different perception of life, and much that we experience is not considered normal or real in ordinary waking life. There is therefore no rigid difference between being awake and asleep. The self can be considered a hierarchy of levels of awareness, and dream is just a lower level of consciousness than waking life.

The relationship between consciousness and dreaming becomes more complex when we consider lucid dreams. Sartre argued that we can always reflect on waking consciousness but can never reflect on dream consciousness. Reflection, he held, is impossible in the dream state because any real reflection entails a momentary awakening and hence a departure from the dream state. Reflection confirms and reinforces waking consciousness, but "destroys the dream." We cannot assert, "I am dreaming"; we can only say retrospectively, "I was just now dreaming." However, lucid dreaming complicates this. In a lucid dream, we can know we are dreaming while we dream: we can be aware of our imaging during sleep and attend to it as dream imaging. Contrary to Sartre, this kind of meta-awareness does not destroy the dream and does enable us to assert, "I am dreaming." Meta-awareness of dreaming can establish that we are dreaming, and this is precisely what happens in a strong lucid dream. In lucid dreams, the dreamer knows they are dreaming and can in some cases exert control over their surroundings.

Perceived reality is the reality for humans. It follows that it is possible to have real fun in a dream, if the fun one has in waking life is real.