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Are We Living in a Dreamworld?

My son asked me a few months ago (he was 5 at the time) if we were really in a dream and if life was real. At the time, I was blown away by the question and struggled to even formulate a token response. Instead, I simply said, “I don’t know.”

The question has since bothered me night and day because it is one I’ve asked myself, although far later in life than my son did. In an attempt to shelter myself from uncertainty, I am guessing that I simply disposed of the question in the back of my head. The catch with that sort of thing is that eventually the question will return, more nagging and burning than ever.

Movies like The Matrix touch upon the subject and music often takes us to a place where we feel dreamy, but still it is difficult to ponder such a thought without becoming very troubled. They say that meditation will teach you that life is a dream of sorts, but one cannot really understand that statement until we reach the mountain top for ourselves. Yes, we all want to get to that mountain top, but what do we do until we get there?

The Riddle

I often imagine that I am living a dream and that this life I am living is simply an imagined construct based on a set of loosely held predispositions and beliefs. If my current dreams are any indication, were we to really be in a dream world, our imaginary world is most likely a gross misrepresentation of the real world we are missing. Laws that exist here probably do not exist in other worlds, at least not in their entirety.

So, an interesting question based on the dream world hypothesis would be, “is everyone else real?” If they are, then are we all dreaming? If they aren’t, then am I living a hallucination? For me, this is the hardest part about the dream world idea, because if the rest of life was not real, then my family, children, and friends would disappear when I woke. Now ask yourself this question: If we had positive evidence that life was a dream and no-one else was real, would you be willing to wake up knowing that you would sacrifice everything you had become and those you have/had loved? Would you even be given the choice? Maybe upon knowing we are dreaming we simply, wake up?

Bringing it Back Home

I know what you are thinking because I am thinking it too. Somehow while hearing this message from my source I’ve stumbled upon a truth of some sort. If meditation and Buddhism/Zen teach us that to climb that mountain we must give up every bit of baggage we carry, then in a way we really do have to give up our current “realities” in order to reach the higher ground. So is that what is stopping us from waking up? Do we purposely stay asleep so that we can continue to live and love our life on Earth? If we have to give up our realities to reach that summit, are we wrong in wanting to just admire the view from below?

I suppose this is where the cycle of death and rebirth nudge us in the direction we must go, but it sounds like a very difficult journey. I’ve dedicated myself to reaching that peak, but I hesitate to do so without my love.

So I ask you, is there a place for love at the top?

Maybe sanity is overrated…

Tags: dreaming, dreamworld, meditation, rebirth, wake up