Chapter 6: Inside our minds – our dreams

 

The sum and substance of our lives is that we live inside our minds and are essentially trapped inside our own creation. Since our lives are defined by our experiences and because our experiences are played inside our minds, let us now turn our attention inwards.

Dreams are possibly the most powerful tools to understand our minds and hence it is but natural that we investigate this phenomenon first in our quest to understanding the working of our minds.

We all know that dream is a process that happens only in the sleeping state. We also know that in the sleeping state, all our sensory systems are shut down. Hence, we can safely assume that in the dream state none of our sensory organs are working. We don’t interact with any of the external objects, yet we are able to feel many of the experiences associated with the waking state while dreaming.

The dream process involves activating some of the stored experiences (codes) without any external stimuli pouring in through the sensory organs. The process invokes many of the experience producing circuits without any external stimuli. If it happens during the waking state, then we call the phenomenon as hallucination but if it happens during the sleeping state then the word reserved for it is dream. Hallucinations happen due to the automatic triggering of the experience producing circuits in the waking state while dreams happen due to automatic triggering of the same circuits in the sleeping state.

The important point to note here is that it is the same experience producing circuits in our brains that gives us the experience associated with external objects in the waking state, the experience of hallucination without any interactions with external objects also in the waking state and the experience of dreams, where we don’t interact with any external objects. One will therefore not be wrong to club all the three scenarios under one heading. Modern neuroscience likes to club it into the heading of hallucination while Vedantic philosophy clubs it under the heading of dream. This is a shocking perspective and hence needs some pondering over in the next two paragraphs.

Let us conceive of a scenario wherein we can create an advanced virtual reality environment where one can not only visualise the 3D perspectives but also associate the sensations of smell, sound and touch to those perspectives through new age electronic interfaces. Such an environment is possible to create with today’s technology. If we immerse ourselves into such a virtual reality environment, it will be impossible to say whether we are in a real world interacting with real objects or in a VR world interacting with controlled stimuli. We will be both awake and dreaming simultaneously.

One can also induce hallucinations by injecting synthetic drugs or by consuming natural hallucinogens. The hallucinogens create an altered state of the mind where one may be awake but experience a dream like reality.

Thus, we see that the states of waking and sleeping can be clubbed into a single state called dream. Our lives are one continuous dream, interspersed with deep sleep which is also known as the dreamless sleep.

Now that we have a grip on our dream state, let us analyse the dreamless sleep. Let us start with the question of what we feel in our dreamless sleep.

We feel nothing during our dreamless sleep, no sensations, and no experiences, absolutely nothing. It is as if the world vanishes in front of our eyes. In the dreamless sleep, the experience producing circuits are not triggered, the stored codes of experiences are not invoked, and we settle down into a state of nothingness. Once we wake up from the dreamless sleep, we somehow seem to know that we had a dreamless sleep. We can remember the last set of experiences (while awake or dreaming) that we had before we drifted into the dreamless sleep and then after waking up, we record the fresh set of experiences felt again. Our minds can understand this gap in time when there was no experience, from the two sets of experience data separated over time. Whatever maybe the underlying mechanism, our brains have evolved a way to understand this state of no-experience. We experience this state of no-experience, every time we fall into a dreamless sleep. Deep sleep is not a void of experiences, but it is an experience of the void. It is also an experience in our arsenal of experiences.

Using the analogy of set theory, if we think of all our experiences as elements of a universal set, then what we experience in the dreamless sleep of no-experience is the null element of this set.

To conclude, our lives are a constant stream of experiences played in our minds. Our waking and dreaming states can be clubbed into a single state of dream, while the dreamless sleep is one where we get the experience of no-experience.