Dreaming and Waking: Which Is More of an Illusion?

In what ways can dreaming be considered "real"? Do dreams give us access to aspects of reality that cannot be reached by waking consciousness?

These are some of the questions I discussed last night with a group of about a hundred Portlandians, comfortably seated in the planetarium of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, as part of the “OMSI After Dark” program. The museum is currently presenting an exhibit titled “Illusion: Nothing Is as It Seems,” which was the theme of the program last night. I was eager to participate, because this theme brings me back to the teachings of one of my graduate school mentors, Wendy Doniger, whose 1986 book Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities was a huge influence on me. (At that time she wrote as Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.) In a way, I’ve been preparing for thirty years to give this lecture….

INTRODUCTION

I’d like to start by asking you to do three things.

First, please bring into your mind the most memorable dream you’ve ever had, whether it’s from last night, last week, many years ago, or all the way back in childhood. Your most memorable dream, whatever comes to mind. (If it’s a really upsetting nightmare, you can choose a different one.)

Second, give this dream a title, as if it were a poem or short story.

Third, turn to the people on your left and your right, and share with them your dream title. If don’t remember a dream or don’t want to talk about it, it’s fine to just say “pass” or “nothing came to mind.” Otherwise, go ahead and share your dream’s title—and just the title, not the whole dream. We’ll be here all night if we go down that road.

Excellent. And so you know, my own most memorable dream occurred in my early 20’s, and I titled it “Being Dissected by the Evil Alien.”

What we have just done is a little oneiric ritual, a kind of dreaming invocation. It’s a way of welcoming you here as dreamers, and highlighting the fact that you are surrounded by dreamers.

THE QUESTION

It’s also a way of connecting our discussion tonight with an ancient and universal human practice, the practice of talking about dreams. Not just personal dreams, but about the nature of dreaming itself, trying to understand what happens when we dream and how these strange yet compelling experiences relate to waking life. Throughout history, in cultures all over the world, people have wondered about the very same question we’re going to consider tonight. We are merely the latest in a long lineage of humans who have gathered together under the stars, or their simulacra, to ponder these issues.

And so here’s the question I want to pose. Which is more of an illusion, waking or dreaming? Putting it slightly differently, which gives more access to reality, waking or dreaming?

[You may actually have a prior question, which is who is this guy and why should I listen to him tell me about dreams or anything else? Which is fair! I’ve been interested in dreams since I was a teenager. I went to college at Stanford, got a Masters degree at Harvard Divinity School, and then a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School in the psychology of religion, with a focus on dream research. I’ve written lots of academic books and articles about dreams in science, religion, history, and art, and I run the Sleep and Dream Database or SDDb, an open-access digital archive designed to promote the scientific study of dreams. (The SDDb is managed by Graybox, an excellent web design company here in Portland). All a way of saying, I do know a lot about this field, and while I surely don’t know everything, whatever I tell you is going to have some basis in empirical research.]

WAKING AND ILLUSION

I assume you’ve had a chance to view the current exhibit here at OMSI on illusions? The exhibit shows that what we take for reality can be rather easily manipulated without our conscious awareness. Simply being awake is no guarantee that you are accurately perceiving reality.

Neuroscientific research on the process of human perception has revealed that our senses actually take in a fairly small and fragmentary amount of perceptual information from the external world. What we experience as a unified, stable sense of reality in waking is the end result of a hugely complex process that actively constructs this integrated awareness out of multiple strands of perceptual input.

How exactly this unification process works is unclear (it’s known as “the binding problem), but what’s important for us tonight is that neuroscientific research on the constructive nature of our sense of reality refutes any simplistic polarity of waking and reality vs. dreaming and illusion. The truth is turning out to be much more complex than that.

DREAMS AND THE BRAIN

Now let’s talk about dreaming. What happens in the brain when we’re dreaming? I think you’re going to find this interesting.

You know about the cycles of REM and nonREM sleep, yes? Many researchers also speak of REM as “Paradoxical Sleep,” because it has qualities of both waking and sleeping brain activity. Dreaming can occur in all stages of sleep, but it does seem especially frequent and intense during REM sleep, so let’s consider what happens in the brain during the four or five REM phases each of us goes through each night.

During REM sleep the overall electrical activity of the brain rises to levels comparable to waking awareness. Even though we are motionless and processing no external stimuli, our brains are revving at full power.

The neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which predominates in waking consciousness and is key to stimulating arousal and attention, rises to waking levels during REM sleep.

Various parts of the sensory cortex become activated, especially areas associated with visual and auditory perception. (visual processing occurs in the occipital lobe, at back of brain)

The limbic system, associated with emotions, memories, and instinctual reactions, is highly activated.

Parts of the prefrontal cortex, responsible for focused awareness and linear thought in waking, become less active.

The brainstem, with the help of the neurotransmitter glycine, prevents any signals from the REM-revving brain from actually reaching the arms and legs and causing “real” motion. We are effectively paralyzed during this stage of sleep.

What can you take from all that? Neurologically speaking, we process dreams just as we process waking experience, except there’s no perceptual input and no physical output. Dreams, while we’re dreaming them, are as experientially real as anything that happens to us during waking.

So does that make dreams pure illusions? As far from reality as anything could be?

BIG DREAMS

Maybe. But if that were true, it would make it all the more puzzling why people in cultures all over the world and throughout history have reported incredibly intense dreams with quite specific relevance to their waking lives. These are what Carl Jung called “big dreams,” rare but highly memorable experiences that tap into deep instinctual energies, from what he called the collective unconscious.

One sign of a big dream is what I call a carry-over effect, when the energy of a dream bursts through the boundaries of sleep and crosses into waking. Some dreams are so vivid they seem realer than real, hyper-real, surreal—it’s often hard to describe in words.

Here are some of the most prominent types of big dreams:

Dreams of being chased or attacked: We awaken sweating, shaking, gasping for breath. Why do we have such frightening dreams? One theory is they prepare us for potential threats in waking life, rehearsing our possible responses to fight/flight situations.

Dreams of a romantic or sexual encounter: We awaken very aroused, sometimes climactically so, even in situations and with partners very different from our waking lives. One theory here is that such dreams are also preparations for the real thing, suggesting possible directions in which to channel our reproductive desires.

Dreams of helplessly falling: We awaken in a panic, with vertigo, gasping in fear. Perhaps these were originally warning dreams for our primate ancestors who slept in trees? At an existential level, falling dreams reflect an inescapable awareness that life is a losing battle against entropy.

Dreams of magically flying: We awaken with a sense of elation, freedom, and boundless agency. Even though such dreams are obviously unreal, they stimulate a sense of creative possibility beyond the limits of the normal, ordinary world. They encourage us to go beyond what is to imagine what might be.

Dreams of a visitation from a deceased loved one: We awaken with a powerful feeling of presence; even if the person is physically gone, they are present emotionally and spiritually. Such dreams help people to re-weave the painful tears in the social fabric that occur after a death.

These kinds of big dreams may be illusions in the moment of their experience, but upon waking they help to focus the conscious mind on issues of real biological importance to our species: survival, reproduction, social bonding. If we’re still going to call such dreams illusions, we should at least say they are illusions in the service of greater awareness in waking reality.

ANCIENT TRADITIONS

Now let’s shift from a modern Western perspective, guided by neuroscience and evolution, and look at some of the ancient religious and philosophical teachings about this question found in other cultures.

Asian spiritual traditions have been interested in dreams for thousands of years, with roots in shamanic traditions going farther back than that.

In the Upanishads, a series of mystical texts written in ancient India, dreaming is portrayed in surprisingly modern terms, as a creation of the dreamer’s own “inner light,” which draws together various elements of perception and desire and builds them into realistic world. The Upanishads take this idea a step further to claim that waking life, too, is a creation of your “inner light,” using elements of perception and desire to build a realistic world. For Hindus, and for many Buddhists who branched out from Hinduism, dreaming is ultimately no more or less illusory than waking life. Once we realize both waking and dreaming are illusions, we are a step farther along the path towards the great awakening.

In the Daoist tradition of ancient China, dreaming also provided an experiential means of teaching deep spiritual truths. You may have heard this story before, from the Daoist sage Zhuang Zi, and his text The Inner Chapters. One night Zhuang Zi went to sleep and dreamed of being a butterfly, flying freely in the air and knowing nothing of Zhuang Zi. Then he awoke again, and he was undoubtedly Zhuang Zi. Which raised the question: How could he know if he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man? The Daoist answer is, you can’t know; what’s real here is the process of change and transformation, not any one momentary state of being.

The earliest philosophical traditions of ancient Greece also recognized the ontological weirdness of dreaming. In one of Plato’s dialogues a young man named Theaetetus, who has promise as a critical thinker, is brought to the great philosopher Socrates for consideration. Socrates asks the young man a series of questions about how exactly he can be sure he is truly awake and not dreaming right at that moment. After trying and failing several arguments, the young man is struck with wonder and admits he cannot sharply distinguish waking from dreaming consciousness. Although the young man thinks he has failed, Socrates congratulates him and says he has actually taken the first step in the right direction: “This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” For Socrates, philosophy itself grows out of this interplay between dreaming and waking, reality and illusion.

Skipping forward many centuries…

The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the first to really think through the implications of the fact that in dreams we behave in some really horrible ways, beastly, immoral, illegal, taboo ways. What do those kinds of dreams say about us? Nietzsche rejected the Christian answer that it’s our sinful lower nature, and he rejected the Enlightenment answer that it’s just irrational nonsense. No, Nietzsche said, it’s not nonsense, it’s actually a revelation of our true animal nature, seething behind our façade of civilized rationality and moral virtue. Now to be clear, Nietzsche did not say we should let these unconscious desires rule our lives. But he did encourage us to be honest about the full reality of our instinctual nature, and figure things out from there.

Nietzsche’s ideas directly influenced the two founders of modern dream psychology, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Both of them agreed with Nietzsche that dreams reveal unconscious aspects of the psyche beyond the awareness of the waking ego. Dreams reveal that we are more than our conscious selves. In dreaming we have access to a more complete version of ourselves, much broader and deeper than the waking identity we project into the social world. This is why Freud, Jung, and generations of therapists have found dreams so clinically useful, because dreams help to reveal realities of the unconscious mind that people often struggle to consciously acknowledge or accept.

Of course, this is exactly why some people shy away from dreams. They do not want to learn more about themselves; they feel just fine with the status quo, and they’re not looking to shake things up.

That’s ok, everyone has to process life at their own speed. But sometimes dreams have their own ideas about what you should pay attention to, and it’s wise to at least be open to those possibilities.

The best way to approach dreaming, I suggest, is to regard it as a kind of play, the play of the imagination in sleep. Dreaming is a space of free creativity and boundless exploration, and it’s fine-tuned to your life, your personal interests and concerns. If you play more with your dreams, they might play more with you.

CONCLUDING ANSWER

I want to go back now to the opening question: Which is more of an illusion, waking or dreaming? The easy answer, the kick-a-stone-with-your-foot-materialist answer, is dreaming. Dreaming is more of an illusion than waking. But I hope you’ve learned tonight that there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that a better answer might be both. Or neither. Or, it doesn’t really matter.

Both dreaming and waking consciousness are profoundly illusory, and yet both are legitimate modes of connecting us with important aspects of reality. Dreaming and waking are so intertwined in the natural, healthy functioning of the human brain-mind system that it seems a waste of time to try and sharply separate them. Better to try and understand how they work together to make all forms of consciousness possible.

I’ll close with this: Modern scientists and ancient mystics and philosophers basically agree that the key insight here is recognizing the incredible powers of creativity within each one of us, powers of creativity that generate our rich and vivid experiences of reality across all states of being.