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Walking in a Dream
Considering the form of an illusory world
The mind speaks in metaphor. Everything we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, is a construction based on our brain’s sorting of chaotic stimuli coming in through our sensory organs. Variations in light and vibration reach our bodies and our brain interpret these data based on the patterns of past experience to construct what we experience now. We don’t really see, we think images. We don’t really hear, we think sounds. All of it, constructed by the mind. Every waking moment, we live in a kind of dream.
One thing we know for certain: living in this world is not what it appears to be. The mind plays tricks on us, perhaps the greatest trick of all convincing us that our perspective is objective. It isn’t. The mind makes up it all. We can check what our minds construct based on what happens when we interact with the world around us, confer with others to make educated guesses on which constructions are accurate based on how widely they are shared, but at the end of the day, they remain guesses. Good guesses, but guesses we mistake for cold fact.
In our dreams, we often process real feelings through random images. An emotion of longing for home might show up in the dream about a lost love, his arms standing in for the comfort of rivers and redwoods. A pervasive anxiety for the future and sense of…
