# What is a Dream?

*Johannes Siedersleben, Oxford, June 2017*

We spend one third of our lives sleeping. In that state, the thalamus, a filter between our senses and
the brain, is almost shut, limiting perception to exceptions such as strangury or the ringing of the
alarm clock. According to neurologists, sleep is divided into the REM phase (rapid eye movement) and
the rest, called NREM (no rapid eye movement), which is subdivided into four categories of slowwave 
sleep phases. Brain activity is low then; we are not dreaming. The REM phase lasts one to two
hours. As the name suggests, the eyes are moving rapidly, brain activity, measured in terms of 
electric current, is almost as high as by day; we are dreaming. Waking during REM degrades mental and
physical wellbeing quickly, much more than waking during NREM. Taking 1.5 hours as the average
REM duration, we spend about 6% of our lives dreaming, whether we remember it or not. What do
we dream about and why? There are at least two dream types.

*Dreams dealing with the dreamer’s experience, hopes or fears*. This is the realm of Freud, Jung and
other psychoanalysts. What they say is that positive and negative experiences get stored in our 
subconsciousness, are processed little by little and occasionally reappear in our dreams, unveiling 
secret thoughts, wishes or fears. Reality is often distorted or squeezed: a manager might dream of sitting
exams he passed successfully years ago, a professor of a huge audience awaiting a talk he has failed
to prepare, a husband of desperately wooing the woman he has been married to for decades. On
waking up we discover often with relief that it was but a dream, and tell at breakfast what nonsense
we lived through last night. A famous dream of this type but with a very real content is that of 
Richard III on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, when he is haunted by the ghosts of his eleven victims.
When Richard starts out of his dream, he is in black despair: “Have mercy Jesus!” he laments and
then goes on to a painful self-analysis. Dream analysis can indeed be helpful to understand one’s
own personality and sometimes even to heal psychic diseases. This approach has given rise to the
theory of subconsciousness. Freud and others have shown that experiences, in particular painful
ones, get buried in our brain, lie there for days, weeks or decades, and are digested by subsequent
dreams serving as a self-healing device. They are fuelled by our conscious experiences and thus always 
connected to a previously perceived reality. No supernatural mechanism is required for their
explanation. Can blind people see or a deaf ones hear in their dreams? They certainly can if they
could see or hear earlier in their lives, but otherwise cannot unless some mystery comes in.

*Revelation dreams* come out of the blue. They are hard to explain by standard arguments of logic or
physics because they convey information not available otherwise. Their existence is not generally 
accepted – there is no way to verify a dreamer’s report, a grave objection to the seriousness of dream
research. Martin Luther King’s famous dream reveals a beautiful vision but only he himself knows if
he really had that dream – and the vision’s beauty wouldn’t suffer if he had it invented. A terrorist
might claim to have got an order from his God in a dream, an argument unfit to convince the judges,
let alone to comfort the victims. Let us take revelation dreams for granted for now, and were it only
for the sake of the argument. Dreams are reported to have witnessed concurrently happening
events, possibly at the very same moment, the event being often undesirable, such as a grave 
accident or the death of a dear friend. A traveller might dream of not taking a particular 
flight which effectively crashes with a hundred less lucky passengers. 
On waking up from a revelation dream, the dreamer would ask himself if his dream is to 
be believed and, in the affirmative, take according measures, depending on the dream content, 
the dreamer’s faith, mood and other non-measurable parameters. 
The Bible abounds with examples of relevation dreams containing order, advice or warning: 
Pharaoh’s dreams in Genesis 41 about his cows and his ears of grain, both forecasting seven years of
plenty and seven years of famine, Abimelech’s warning (Genesis 20), Jacob’s dream when he is told
to return to the land of his fathers (Genesis 31:10-11) and Laban’s warning (Genesis 31:24). It would,
by the way, be interesting to know on what conditions God bothers to appear personally as in 
Genesis 22 with the testing of Abraham, or when his mere appearance in a dream will do.

Are revelation dreams just fiction or in any way real? The answer depends on what we mean by reality. 
Many identify reality with what can be consciously perceived, with George Berkeley going as far
as pretending that reality depends on being perceived: things are real as long as they are perceived
and unreal otherwise. By whom, one is led to ask: is a human being necessary to grant existence or
would an observing dog or a microbe suffice? And what about extra-terrestrials with completely 
different senses, not perceiving what we do, and perceiving what we don’t? At any rate, the perceived
reality is paramount for what we are used to calling real, which is quite useful in everyday life, 
because conscious perception can be shared among different observers and thus be confirmed. Natural
science is all about confirming observations by means of repeated experiments, developing theories
and predicting the outcome of future experiments. However useful this notion of reality might be, it
is dangerously subjective and human centred. Extra-terrestrials would have a different reality, and
there might be objects perceivable by strictly no one and nothing: no microbe, no human, no extraterrestrial.

I suggest two new terms: p-reality is the perceived reality in the usual meaning, x-reality includes 
p-reality and whatever might exist beyond, perceivable or not. The x stands for extended, 
extra-terrestrial or the Unknown. A subtlety of p-reality is the distinction of the perception and the perceived. 
A person’s feeling hot may be due to an overheated room, in which case the heat is real, or to the person’s fever, 
in which case the heat is unreal, but in either case the perception of heat is real. In fact,
perception is, beside tautologies, the only incontestable truth we command. The difference between
p- and x-reality cannot be overstressed. Humanity is but a spark in the Universe, confined to an infinitely 
tiny part of space and time. Our ability to perceive depends on the senses evolution has happened to fit us 
with and is thus an extremely weak indicator of what might or might not exist in the Universe.

If dreams can open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf, they might also be able to open a
window, however small, to x-reality. We can only speculate about what we perceive when dreaming.
But there is worse to come. We don’t even know from where we perceive as a simple reasoning
shows. If we can dream that we dream there is no way to prevent us from dreaming that we dream
that we dream and so on. We thus find ourselves in a stack of arbitrary many dream levels with no
idea where our customary p-reality we believe to live in is positioned. We cannot tell whether our
conscious life is in any way more real than our dreams. As there is a subconsciousness below our 
consciousness, there might likewise be a superconsciousness on top we are not aware of. 
A different reality could be going on up there, unknown to us, and what we see as p-reality 
would be but our superconscious dreams. And these were just three levels of consciousness out
of arbitrarily many. We have no idea of what's happening, and we never will.

## References
Kelly Bulkely: Big Dreams. Oxford University Press, 2016

Heiko Luhmann: Alles Einbildung. Was unser Gehirn tatsächlich wahrnimmt. WBG, 2015

Bertrand Russell: History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, 2004

Evan Thompson: Waking, Dreaming, Being, Columbia University Press, 2015

Link verified on 11 June 2017
http://overviewbible.com/infographic-dreams-bible/