Is life a dream.....

[Bakiryu]

Of which death is only the awakening?

In lieu of a poem by becker

Es un sueño la vida,
pero un sueño febril que dura un punto;


"Life is a dream
but a feverish dream that last point"

So?

[NikolaiI]

For me, life is a lot of different dreams. Fantasies are realities, and I think I translated the things I've senses in my life into fantasies, and then those fantasies are my reality. I wrote about it in a blog last night.

Oh, and R.I.P. abortion thread :)

[Bakiryu]

I'll read it as soon as possible :) but then, how do you know you're awake?

[Crazy_mode60]

May be

[Bakiryu]

Like this disscusion:
Tell us what you did yesterday Baki...I bet the post isn't 24 hours long.

If you don't 'remember' everything you did yesterday, did you still do it?



well, since I have almost no long term memory (seriously I can't even remember what I did in the last hour) perhaps I just dreamed it all up and will wake up stranded in a ditch somewhere to find out i just got really drunk and dreamed I was a high school student :D


But then how would you know that the ditch wasn't a dream also?



True! Perhaps all human beings are just dreaming particles in an empty universe which is in turn a dream of some greater entity which is being dreamed in its place by a more powerful being and so on in a never-ending philosophical conundrum.


What do you think? Are we god's dream? (or nightmare)

[Demian]

Here's my take on life as a dream. This nation, this culture, this world we were born into were not wrought by our design. As we mature, we can always change this, but this same fact confronts us no matter where we go. And the enviornment around us is spellbinding, it will "hypnotize you every day". This makes true awareness a huge problem, for we have all been lulled to sleep by the siren's song and are being pulled into our rocky demise. In this respect we all become products of our enviornment instead of conscious structures of our own consciousness. It is hard even to know if one who claims to be aware actually is--because they are simply another dream character who has wandered into your dreamstate and have just claimed to break the spell. Plato's cave was one illustration of all this; here's my own spin.

Another problem when we discuss so called reality is the malebility of time. If the future already exists, then it seems that we are all being swept along some sort of cosmic timeline; we are actors in a great metaphysical psychopomp. Western thinking does not really adhere to this idea. But the Soviets, who did more research on ESP than any other nation, found that the greatest amount of participants had precognitive dreams than anything else--something near 90% or so. This is where the experience of deja vu comes from. It is an experience we are having while suddenly remembering a past dream. But we are not consciously aware of this dream. I think this time problem when coupled by blurred reality and the haziness of memory all add to the distinct feeling that what we are experiencing can't really be called 'reality'.

[NikolaiI]

Wow, that is amazingly well said, Demian.

[bazarov]

If life is a dream, I'm having a nightmare.

[Pensive]

Perhaps it is, but if it's a dream then it's a dream where we don't know whether it's a dream or not until we wake up.

You can't be too sure about it but then the absence of proof is not the proof of absence...

[JCamilo]

Well, I would talk about Jorge Luis Borges.
Once he said he was not sure about what is the true universe, because he could not tell yet if the true universe is the real or the universe that we created.
In another place, he says that writing is a guided dream and Dreams are the first form of art.

[Bakiryu]

But if we were dreaming, how would we know we are?

[Lote-Tree]

But if we were dreaming, how would we know we are?

You can't. You can only use Descartes Cogito Ergo sum to say that you alone exists....

[JCamilo]

Actually, it would not be relevant. If You are dreaming and you are unaware of this, you will assume the dream reality as reality and reality as a dream. Deffinition of what is real is always a matter of which perspective is used.

Another thing, Coleridige once said something like this"IF we dream and in the dream we visit heaven and pick a flower, then we wake up and find the flower in our hand, so what now?"

[Bakiryu]

Actually, it would not be relevant. If You are dreaming and you are unaware of this, you will assume the dream reality as reality and reality as a dream. Deffinition of what is real is always a matter of which perspective is used.

Another thing, Coleridige once said something like this"IF we dream and in the dream we visit heaven and pick a flower, then we wake up and find the flower in our hand, so what now?"


Then maybe modern life, the NOW we know it's just an Ontological paradox. and we're all just living something that already happened. deja vu. :D

[AdoreroDio]

All I have to say on this subject is if we are living a dream then in must be an odd dream we're dreaming indeed in which we dream about talking about our dream being not our life but a dream instead and that if we wake up from said dream we might be in another dream. So the question is are we living in a dream that is affixed on dreams?

[Lily Adams]

Well, there is solipsism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

All of you and everything are figments of my imagination. So there.

My mind likes to torture me. :p

Oooh how about this: "Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum." "I think that I think therefore I think that I am." One of my favorite quotes of all time. :D I love parodies...

[Demian]

Well, there is solipsism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism


I personally believe that solipism is the doctirine of our time. Especially with the rise of technology, with our computers, ipods, xboxes and the like we have crawled deeper into the recesses of our own minds than ever before.

[NikolaiI]

Well language which we argue over and live by is a concept, and we travel through the concepts like they are tangibles, and obey the rules of it. In fact any world we put ourselves into we have to obey the rules, but different people in this world go by different rules. Don't we value people a lot of the time by their English skills? I mean at least we can say "If they'd written these____ books, then they'd have millions," so what anyway is the difference between a dream and reality? I think situation, and every thing is sort of like a dream. Everything we can put up for ourselves, is no different than our own fixations on the reality, like language.

[Bakiryu]

All of you and everything are figments of my imagination. So there.



Nope. I don't think your mind could make up someone as randomly crazy as me :D (Unless you actually live on a mental facility!)

[bluevictim]

This reminds me of my favorite quote from The Tempest:

... We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. ...

[Bakiryu]

I love that quote, so pretty. Never read the tempest, yet.

[Bakiryu]

how do we know that reality is real?>>>>>

[Demian]

How do we know that our dreams are not real? H.P. Lovecraft wrote a story about a man in a mental institution that dreamed at night of his 'real' existence on a faraway planet. His dreams became so vivid and intricate that eventually he woke up and found himself on this distant shore that he vaguely recalled but couldn't quite place in memory. When he slept at night he had nightmares about being locked up in a mental ward. Only from the minds of feverish writers of horror and fantasy...