Do you remember that sensation of having a nightmare and then finally waking up to reality? It feels like a huge relief. But with a second thought, this apparent “base reality” where everything feels coherent: you know where you are, your name, who your spouse is, what your job is, where you attended high school, etc. is it really ultimate reality?
What do I mean by that? Well, yes, you are back from the dream into “reality,” but into a reality where we still don’t know why we are alive, on a flying rock in the middle of the universe, why we die, who created us, with what purpose, and so on. Of course, these kinds of questions normally get buried as afterthoughts while this reality starts feeling very real with hunger, pain, jobs, anxiety, delicious food, travel, etc. So it is easy to lose sight of it.
But then the question is very simple: couldn’t this whole “reality” be another mere dream we are in? No! you may argue, because I know the difference. Here, I know my name, where I came from, who my family is, what I have to do on Saturday. In dreams, normally, it isn’t like that. There is no coherence; sometimes things seem random, weird, and our senses aren’t as vivid as in “reality.”
So from this we could infer that memory is the glue that keeps everything coherent and in place. It is what makes our “reality” the “real one,” right? As it is the one where we at least know some of the basic things that are part of what we perceive as our individual “life.”
Imagine the opposite: were you to lose all your capacity to store memories, you would still be able to see, hear, taste, and experience emotions. You wouldn’t just disappear in a Cartesian way “I think, therefore I am.” Even if you lost all your memories: your name, how to use a fork, if you have family or not, where you live, what a cat is, etc., you would still experience “life” with your senses.
Now, following that possibility of not being able to remember anything, but only the present moment, how would you distinguish dreams from “reality”?
We could also imagine the opposite: what if we had the possibility of remembering everything from our dreams? Since the first time we dreamt, we would remember all that happened, why we were in that specific place, how we got there, what name we had in our dreams, if we had other family members there, how the laws of physics worked there, etc.
Do you see where I’m going? We may not even have the word “dream.” All we would know is that sleeping is the portal or gate to our second “life,” assuming that every time we sleep, we go back and forth between reality A and reality B.
If one life is complex enough, imagine what it would do to our psyche to have those two completely different “realities” simultaneously. In A, we could be a happy and successful lawyer, while in B, we could have just gotten divorced and fallen into a deep alcohol addiction.
It would be a unified consciousness, but memories, emotions, and thoughts would be fragmented into two completely different personas that remember and know about each other.
What would then be “real”?
Imagine another possibility: that dreams are not brief at all. That from within them, an entire lifetime unfolds: a name, a body, a family, memories, hopes, fears, love, failure, death.
And perhaps death, from the inside, is only what waking up feels like from the outside.
Then maybe this life, too, with all its solidity and continuity, is only the dream of another layer of us. And when we die, something else opens its eyes and says: what a strange dream.
A dream within a dream. A life within a life.
A Fractal Dream.