a model for understanding what dreams are
Imagine a house. Like any house, it has doors and windows. Lights that turn on and off. And inhabitants!
During the day, we easily see in and out. It may be busy, slow going, or whatever an average day resembles. The open windows let in a warm breeze, and the door is a place where implicit or explicit permission is given to come and go.
As night settles in, it’s lit up from the inside. The curtains are drawn, and maybe the front door is locked. Things appear still, and quiet. Yet. The breeze still crosses the threshold of the window. The back door is ajar, and the critters of the casa slip in and out of the yard. Light from outside doesn’t stop; streetlights and the moon trace along the interior. A soothing cricket chorus meets the soft sound of a house at rest.
Despite darkness, the neighborhood is still there. Despite darkness, the inside remains intact. Everything continues to exist, but differently. Nothing stops. One does not cease to interact with the other.
These things register on the WELL DUH scale of knowledge. We know these fundamental truths, and accept them early on. Neither the house nor its environs cease being either because of the night. Yet this is how we have divided and segmented consciousness. Consciousness does not stop at sleeping. We are not divided in that way. The attention consciousness gives to the person changes focus, and surveys a living world around it through a changed light.
We can think of dreams in a very materialistic way, as permutations of the outside within the house at night. Just as daylight gives us expected visitors (ordinary stimuli), bumps in the night and the comings and goings of critters are like dreams. They belong to the nighttime domain, part of its ‘behavior.’ Sometimes, these are memorable. Sometimes, we shrug them off.
We can also think in a way that reconciles the intangibile, which contains the majority of our awareness. Your sensory input represents physical happenings, yet how much time are we actively dwelling upon the solely tactile? A vast majority of our awareness is given to concepts, ideas, emotions, hypothetical scenarios. If someone tells you what you’re thinking about doesn’t physically exist, you might bristle. Until you reckon with the fact that our awareness primarily encompasses references, not objects themselves. We accept that “make believe” is not just imagination, it’s vital to cognition. It’s vital to survival. You cannot feel a shadow but you depend on contrasts in light to navigate safety.
Dreams can be seen as reflections of an intangibility only encountered by a shift in conscious focus. A necessary sensation referencing points interior and exterior, dreams are the “in-betweening” of the self as we know it, and the Universe we inhabit.
The point?
To put it (sort of) simply…
Dreams are breadcrumbs left on the trail when our awareness surrenders to sleep. Sleep is a function of the body, but it doesn’t subdue awareness. It requires to to do something different. We suggest that dreams are not a by-product of our body at rest, but rather how our experience of awareness changes with our consciousness.
Emerging science is demonstrating that consciousness- our awareness of being aware, the quality of having a mind- exists outside the body. Our mind is not contained in our skull, but rather a field of awareness that extends well beyond our skin. Sleep doesn’t turn off that awareness, it’s rerouted. Dreams may then be a memory of sorts of what happens to our awareness once it shifts from the body to the ‘field’ around it. Imagine a lens on a camera shifting focus from your hand to the space around it. The hand blurs, the distance comes into view. This is a way of explaining expanded consciousness, and its native tool for accessing “extra-bodily awareness,” and likewise whatever other awarenesses that may inhabit it.
When we are in conversation about or with our dreams, we center our inquiry on “how” questions, versus why. “How” allows us to discover more about the feelings and sensations of dreaming. “Why” puts us in a position of assuming how things work or function. That does have a place in the process, but only after we connect to the nonverbal experiences of being (whether being in the dream, or being in where you are now, “how” invites a process of sensing versus analyzing).
The point of beginning with how questions is to build a perception of the ever-open aperture to that door of perception we call dreaming. We suggest that there is an always-on state of dreaming which connects us to a Universe which has qualities of self-awareness. As we gain access to ever-present dreaming, we further gain access to an ever-present world that is always awake. These are like gaining new senses; a dream sense and a cosmic sense.
Or, Oneiroception and Cosmoception.
Or, to get into wordy weeds…
Starting from the premise that dreams are not a mental routine, but rather a retained experience from an indivisible consciousness, we explore their implications on self, community & the numinous present.
Five Fundamental Facets:
- Dreams are not a phenomena of biology but rather of consciousness, which is not divided by sleep, a biological state.
- Dreams are neither exclusive to nor dependent upon sleep; rather, they are transmodal experiences of stimulated perception.
- Dreams (& related states) are affordances of and to awareness, a utility for transcendent cognition.
- Dreams encode relevant data to the percipient & their environs accessible through external modes of inquiry.
- Dreams are suggestive of a cosmology ascribing to the Universe conscious qualities exceeding objective comprehension.
We approach the dream via Micro-Phenomenological Interviewing, with a goal of eliciting a somatosensory re-engagement with the moment of onset, or moment of recall. Building upon established techniques & the social custom of dream sharing, these experiences are felt as thresholds to insight. Thus, we consider the dream as much an experience as it is a sensation. We build a framework of “dream sensing,” akin to interoception. Our ontology postulates “Oneiroception” as a wake state mechanism recognizing the presence of overlapping dream state stimuli. Further, we postulate “Cosmoception” as a mechanism for the awareness of
Dreams are evidence of undivided consciousness, and working them into our daily lives only brings us closer to individual understandings of what it means to be alive in a Universe that never really sleeps.