(you can read a fascinating interview with Jeff Warren here) which deals with all the different states of consciousness that exist. Most people would say there are two, maybe three states of consciousness: awake, sleeping, and dreaming. They would be wrong though, because there are many more.
So how is knowing about different types of consciousness useful? Im glad you asked.
When you wake up in a dream and actually take a look around — it’s bananas. It’s the absolute craziest goddamn thing in all of human life. Every night we beam down into an elaborate virtual world where we can pound the walls with our oven-mitt fists and sniff giant daisies and have elliptical conversations with archetypal bus drivers. From inside a dream there is nothing vague or washed out about the experience — dreams are totally real, as real as getting off the plane in Lagos and ordering a beer from some guy at the side of the road. You are at this place — you’re IN it! At the time it’s every bit as solid and real as waking. Except… and this is what’s so cool… except when you’re self-consciously aware inside the dream you can then squeeze up real close to the walls with your little magnifying glass and look for suture marks. You can conduct experiments. You come to realize that there is a set of laws operating in the dream world that is every bit as real as the laws of physics in the waking world. What are these laws? And why aren’t there as many scientists down here with their slide rules and theories as there are out there? We spend our lives in two worlds and yet we only pay attention to one of them — the other is seen as an embarrassing curiosity, a forum for banality-rehearsal and botched sex.
People protest: “but it’s not real, stop living in fantasy.” All experience is real. On the personal side, dreams reveal all kinds of junk about the self.
What Jeff is talking about is dreaming, and more specifically, lucid dreaming, which is where you wake up in your dream, realize you’re dreaming, and are able to control your dream.
This topic may seem a little strange for this blog, but that’s precisely it, it’s not! Imagine being able to explore your mind and everything in it. Imagine being able to control a dream; just think of the creative potential! In fact Raymond Kurzweil, a prolific modern day inventor and futurist, uses lucid dreaming for inventing.
As Jeff says in the interview, ”consciousness is 24-hours”, and our dreams are like pure consciousness:
without sensory input to dilute everything, you get consciousness in a pure culture. And it so happens that this pure culture — The Dream — runs like an underground creek beneath the waking world, muddying the ground in all kinds of interesting ways.
To understand ourselves and our own minds I believe it’s imperative that we also understand these different forms of consciousness that affect our experience of the world. In a way it’s a lot like meditation, which is used to increase mindfulness, and hence our awareness of the world around us and our place in it. When we meditate we are exploring another state of consciousness. Anyone that has meditated before will tell you that it’s a different kind of consciousness from being awake and walking around.
I really want to encourage everyone to look in to lucid dreaming and the dream state of consciousness in general. Like meditation, it’s an experience that can change your outlook on the world significantly, and I think a lot of people would benefit from experiencing it.
There is a great introduction to the mechanics of lucid dreaming here, and for anyone interested in the topic of different states of consciousness, I highly encourage you to check out Jeff’s book (linked to at the top of the page), it really is fascinating.
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I had read somewhere that with help of lucid dreaming, we can overcome our fears, increase confidence etc – we can visualize and dream things the way we want and gain power from it. Never tried this out although.
Interesting reading, but I am unable to agree with Jeff here: “without sensory input to dilute everything, you get consciousness in a pure culture.”
To imply we our isolated from our memories in our dreams is just nonsense. And certainly our dreams are hardly devoid of sensory input – quite the opposite.
But, maybe I need to read the entire interview, as I may be misinterpreting what he is saying.
Thanks for posting it.
@Rod – I don’t think Jeff is saying we get isolated from our memories in our dreams at all. In fact one of the big functions of dreams is to catalog and relate our memories and experiences to our older memories and experiences.
You’re right, sensory input does factor in to dreams, but certainly not in a big, meaningful way. Definitely nothing like when we’re awake. This was, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating parts of the book actually. Jeff made the case (and backed it up. There is a whole book about this that he cites, although the name escapes me) that dreams are a more ‘true’ reality, because sensory input is limited, can be easily tricked, and is far from perfect. I can’t really expand on that any more without writing a whole lot more, but if it’s interesting to you, I definitely recommend picking the book up, it’s one of, if not the most interesting non-fiction book I’ve ever read.