Is The Sky in Your Dream Truly Blue?

One night you dream of a blue sky. According to you, the sky is very blue. It is a fact in that world. You look up at the sky and think, my, that’s a very blue sky. You can navigate in the world where that blue sky exists, and it impacts your memory — the blue sky is a memorable sight and can be recalled in the waking state. This means the dream world causes memory formation, just as waking state experiences would.

All of a sudden, that blue sky and its entire world, in the blink of an eye, at the opening of the eyelids, in a moment that cannot be measured, in an event that can never be recreated or observed, disappears, and a new state appears. You find yourself in the room where you sleep. You think, let me look out the “real” window this time, saying to yourself, my, that’s a very blue sky.

During a dream, we deem the dreams real, and after we awaken, the dreams are deemed false. Key lesson: the state we are currently living in is generally the most real to us. In the dream, you can also identify the cause-and-effect relationship between transitions of states of matter and events (“This happened, then this happened, and then this happened…”).

Remarkably, in the dream, you view the dream world as having been created, and existing for millennia. If you inspect that state and you measure it with the best dream microscopes and telescopes, discover laws and properties of that state, you will likely come to the conclusion that there must have been some event which caused the dream universe to exist. And yet, as far as you can look in all directions, with every instrument, you will never be able measure the moment the dream state was created, because it never was created. There is no moment of creation of that dream that you can point to from within the dream. From the waking state perspective, however, we know that the “creation” of the dream world is achieved by shutting our eyes, and its destruction by opening the eyes. Since the dream world is not really “created”, it only appears to us; it is only an appearance. It is merely an experience of the mind.

When in the waking state, we also take measurements with every available tool, and assume that this would must have been created, that there was a moment where it came to be, because it feels so real. Just like the dream world did. Yet you will never be able to peek outside nor see the beginning, because just like the dream began without a traceable event, the same applies for this waking state.

There is no reason to think that this waking state is more real than any other state of experience. If you think the waking state is more real because we spend more time in it, consider this. It is common knowledge that we experience two dream hours each day, rounded to a 1:10 ratio; one dream hour for every 10 hours of life. Imagine a person who lives for 100 years; they would have spent ten of those in the dream state. And there are also children who die at one year of age. This means the 100-year-old would have been in the dream world longer than the child lived. For the cherry on top, dreams feel much longer when we’re in them, sometimes years, and thus we don’t experience dreams as a two hour event.

In our dream, we look around and don’t see the inside of the brain. We do not see brain matter. We do not see the mass of moving electrical connections that make up our brain. We see images, and hear sounds. And yet, that entire experience is produced by the movement of energy and nothing else. Strangely, the dream state is entirely produced by electrical energy, and yet its inhabitants experience sights and sounds; not the electrical energy itself. We can see from this the world we are currently experiencing is only electrical energy.

The human is largely a transducer at numerous levels; we convert energy from one form to another; at the sensory level, we convert mechanical to electrical — light and sound waves into electrical impulses. We believe it stops there. But what transforms electrical impulses into image and sound? As I see it, although the logic gates in computer memory store high and low voltage states that make up the respective 1 or 0 information composing the data for each pixel of an image, one cannot see the image by merely looking at the memory cells. The image must be loaded on a screen, which transforms an electrical signal into a physical one — like producing the color of a particular pixel on the screen. Wouldn’t we need a transducer for that process in the brain? How can the electrical impulse be enough to also produce the image?

Truthfully, when we are dreaming, the only thing that is the alleged cause of the dream is the movement of energy. In the same way, the world that we inhabit in the waking state can be said to be an experience of the movement of energy. And in that sense, we can never truly see what it is that we are living in. In the waking state, it would be as hard to measure its beginning as it would be to see the energy of the brain producing the image of the dream universe. We simply cannot inspect what is producing the illusion.

Once the eyes open, the dream stops. What makes us think there is no greater, cosmic eye outside our own? Our very own eye is enough to destroy the entire dream world. A greater cosmic eye may open and cause our world to vanish without a trace. Thus this world is said to be an appearance.