A weird dream, questions are raised thereafter. I had a good lunch catching up with some old friends and their kids, then had an afternoon nap in an attempt to try and synch my diurnal rhythm to the real world, after months of weird working hours. During the nap, I had a spotty dream composed of vignettes arranged in chronological order: In the dream, we pile into the car with our stuff. One of us has a videocassette – yes, kids, it’s one of those things your grandparents told you about – which we accidentally leave on the roof of the car as we try and fit people and stuff into the car. We’re driving away, car-windows left wound down. The car hits a slight bump. The videocassette flies off and hits the ground with a crash. The crash is a loud enough sound to wake me. It is, in fact, loud enough to be real, and true enough, one of the cats has knocked something off the dining table. It has to be a coincidence, right? Or did my subconscious mind, anticipating the crash, build a sequence of events that would ultimately ‘explain’ the crash, thus linking the dream-world crash with the real-world crash? Why would it do so? But isn’t that how we see the world? Light hits our rods and cones, information is sent to various parts of the brain where it is processed and finally, in the high-level portions of the cortex, processed into understandable objects and phenomena, and thus interpreted as real things – all this takes ‘time,’ yet our perception makes it seem like it is now, and we can react, physically, to the world, to past phenomena, as if they were current phenomena. It’s like how some of the stars we see at night may have ceased to exist millions of years ago, but we see the light and thus those stars still exist in the present, for us. We humans are masters at treating past phenomena as current events. When we’re in a dream state, we slip the constraints of a causal universe, but our conscious minds can only make sense of the world by imposing causality. Or all this could just be from having two beers at lunch.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:23:42 +0000
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