Recall your own experience with dreams. Generally you are involved in whatever is occurring in your dreams, and all the while you believe you are awake. You navigate the dreamscape with a familiar sense of self; you react and respond to situations much as you do in daily life. All of your familiar sensory abilities are intact. You are present in your dreams; you see in them, you feel in them, you perceive in them. You experience emotions, have thoughts, and make decisions. You see, hear, feel, smell, touch, and taste. You are inquisitive. You evaluate, analyze, and investigate. You feel the earth beneath your feet, you scan the horizon with your eyes, and you feel the wind blowing against your cheek. Things happen to you in your dreams.
But before we proceed too far along in examining the similarities between our dreams and our waking experience, it would be prudent to remember that for all of the familiar aspects of our self that we carry into the dreamscape, some aspect of our self is glaringly absent. The key evidence in support of this statement is that while we are dreaming, we almost never notice that we are dreaming. And, stated plainly, we should notice when we are dreaming.
During dreams, and in any dream sequence, there are literally hundreds of clues that would tip off an awakened consciousness that one had to be dreaming. Violations of physical laws—abrupt, impossible scene shifts and connections of events—are not the exception in dream experience; rather, they characterize dream experience. People and objects metamorphose as we watch, and incongruities and absurdities are everywhere. Most dream scenarios do not correspond at all with our everyday waking lives. Suddenly we are back at school, a mixture of high school and college, and we are writing a paper, making ink marks with our fingertips as we pull our hands down the page. In dreams, clues abound, but for some reason, we consistently fail to recognize the dreamscape. What has happened to our minds? What should be an immediate and facile reality discrimination task is suddenly next to impossible. Something, something very comprehensive, is missing.
Now, let us return again to our question. We possess a lot in dreams, but do we possess consciousness?
©1995 Charles McPhee. Excerpted from Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams: A Guide to Awakening Consciousness During Dream Sleep published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
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