The Comment Factory

Have you ever been engrossed in a dream, woken suddenly and had such a confused state of consciousness that you actually believed you were still dreaming? Or believed that the dream was actually real? Have you ever searched for evidence to support what happened in your dream? Ever wanted to be able to confirm that the dream was something more than an unconscious development of your imagination? Ever found it impossible to accept that that’s all it was?

If you have experienced any of these feelings and emotions then you must at least consider the following question. If you have had a dream which you believed was in some way real then how do you know that your perception of reality is not a prolongment of this same feeling in reverse? In those moments following a ‘life-like’ dream, your confused consciousness managed to trick your mind into questioning what you did and did not experience and what was and was not ‘real’. For maybe a few seconds or minutes you experienced a mish-mash of consciousness, as you inadvertently stepped onto an illusory roller coaster of reality. What caused your brain to mistake dream for reality and reality for a dream? Could life be a prolongment of this trick? Could the dream be reality? Could our reality be a dream?

In the past, dreams were seen as nonsensical and unimportant aspects of the imagination. The work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud has done much to change this perception. Jung argued that dreams are a complex manifestation of all our conscious fears and aspirations. He felt that dreams were an attempt by our unconscious to unravel the insecurities and fears developed by our conscious during interaction with the world. He felt that if we learnt to understand dreams on an individual level, then we could begin to recognize their importance on a more collective scale.

The contents of our psychic experiences in dreaming are as real as any conscious experience in life. They are as real as the individual perceives them to be. Jung argued that our dreams are formed by an unknown greater source and are there to guide our conscious lives via the unconscious. The nature of what this source actually is becomes a matter of personal belief and is not a debate I wish to engage in here. What Jung confirmed was that dreams can be as ‘real’ to the dreamer as any perception of reality can be. An individual’s notion of ‘real’ is based entirely on sensory perceptions, whether it is sight, sound, taste or smell. All of these sensory perceptions can be replicated in the unconscious stage of dreaming.

Often our dreams can seem to make no sense when we try to consciously rationalize and make sense of them on an individual scale. This is because we try to decifer them through our conscious mind when it is our unconscious which has the answers. Jung argued that by trying to understand an individual dream through our conscious we only over simplify, as individual dreams are linked with a person’s entire life and linked on an even greater scale to the actions of the human race as a whole. By attempting to make sense of our unconscious dreams through our conscious methods of order and logic, Jung argues that we completely misunderstand what our dreams actually mean and how they function.

It is no coincidence that recurring dreams or nightmares occur more regularly in human beings of a young age or those nearing death. Jung believed the reasons for this were because of the closeness with the unconscious primordial world. “The child is still close from whence it came – the primordial world of the unconscious,” he said. In early life, the unconscious works at a far higher rate than at any other time in our lives as it seeks to help the child make sense of a nonsensical world. As humans grow older, dreams and nightmares become less clear and less well remembered as we lose touch with the very thing ingrained to guide us. Jung firmly believed that it is our dreams that can provide answers to the complexities of life, as he believed dreams were working on both an individual and collective level. This idea is summarized more succinctly by the musician, Marilyn Manson:

“I believe in dreams. I believe that every night on the planet everything that is, was and can be is dreamt. I believe that what happens in dreams is no different and no less important than what happens in the waking world. I believe that dreams are the closest equivalent present-day mankind has to time travel. I believe you can visit your past, present and future in dreams” (The Long, Dark Road Out Of Hell, p.212)

Manson is summarising Jung’s notion of dreams functioning collectively to guide society in the right direction. Manson goes on to say:

“I don’t believe in chance, accidents or coincidences. I believe in the delusional self, which is to say that I believe that the things I talk and think about change the world around me and result in events that appear to be coincidental. I believe that my life is so important that it affects the lives of everyone else.”

This summarizes the idea that all human beings successfully project their own reality so that we all see and recognize what we are pre-programmed to see and recognize. We view our external world according to how we feel internally and this means our perceptions of reality are entirely subjective and differ according to emotional and mental factors. As philosophers such as Immanuel Kant have argued, we only accept that we exist because of the fact others recognize our existence by interacting with us. Without others, an individual would be left insane as they would have no external evidence of their own existence. That is because, even though our culture places great emphasis on the individual, we greatly depend on each other in order to survive. We form social groups and bonds, like our biological agents do internally, meaning that we naturally mould and fit with others in the external world.

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All ideas of what is real are subjective. We are taught from an early age to believe in object truths such as 2+2=4. But these truths are not objective, they have been created by others and are therefore subjective. Many teachings and concepts are taught to us as absolute and unquestionable when in fact they are only thoughts and perceptions. From our earliest education, we are taught to think and behave in a certain way. We are taught to form queues, stick to rigid time scales and follow seating plans. This is a way of ingraining order into human beings from an early age. Anyone who strays from these unnameable codes of convention becomes stigmatized as ‘freaks’ or ‘weirdos’. These people are ‘outsiders’ and are considered to be dangerous. In the same way as Einstein was initially ridiculed for his assertions, people want to believe that what they know is absolute because it is more comfortable that way. However, our only understanding of what is ‘real’ comes from personal experience and personal projection. All idea’s of truth and right are subjective no matter how much governments and institutions try to convince us they are objective. All this brings us back to the central question. If dreams can be misconstrued as ‘real’, can our reality be a dream?

Of course, the question itself is of such complexity that I could not hope to answer it within a few pages here. However, in today’s technological age, where life has already been cloned and where virtual reality, online chat rooms and media distortion remain abundant we must ask how relevant the question regarding our conscious lives really is anyway. My point is, how much of our conscious lives can be considered to be ‘real’? And how much are our own lives being constructed by technological sources? How much of our conscious lives do we have control over? And how much is created for us, via holograms, camera angles and surreal video games. These function to steal our sense of reality by controlling our own lives in the same way as dreams function to control the unconscious. Computer games, virtual reality simulators or virtual world wide webs all function to manufacture alternate realities which remove the individual from waking consciousness and so remove them from human emotion and human interaction. These virtual worlds all function to detract from the collective level of consciousness in favour of engrossing people in individual virtual acts which operate in the same way as unconscious imaginings.

The original question can be succinctly put like this: How far do we create our own realities? And how far do we then seek to escape them? The other day I watched as a mother and child shopped. The boy was mentally lost in a handheld video game whilst his mother attempted to converse with him, with little response. Infuriated, the mother snatched the video game from his hands. “What do you want for dinner?!”, she semi-screamed. For a few seconds the boy looked shocked. Then he calmly took the video game back, switched it back on, and replied, “whatever”. The game had allowed the boy to detach himself from real events and lead him into a surreal world where all he had to do was get to the next level to gain satisfaction, happiness and success. The reality outside of this video game became unimportant as the complexities of everyday existence had been reduced to a single word of inconsequential nothingness, “Whatever”.

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Technology has already succeeded in taking over and governing human life. People walking round on mobile phones. People alone in pubs pushing buttons on a phone. Packed trains with people scared to speak or touch. A swaying of the carriage becomes a series of muttered apologies and shuffled feet. Plugged into walkmans or staring into internet screens, we have lost the desire to interact. We are losing the essence of existence. The outside world becomes unimportant as we become outtakes in a surreal world of advertising and monotony which entices our conscious to escape the complexities of the present. Modernity has resulted in a technological age in which science has displaced nature as it becomes a surrogate parent to our sense of perception. We use it to mask our own insecurities or escape from global problems we do not believe we can solve. Every now and then a tragedy comes along which is so real or so close to home that for a few brief moments we awaken from our lull and experience life again. Yet even a moment as tragic as 9/11 becomes surreal as we watch it from the comfort of our living rooms. We watch 3,000 people die before our eyes whilst drinking tea and eating sandwiches. We switch channels to watch Eastenders or Coronation Street. Then we find ourselves asking, “Was that real? Did that happen? Was that a film? Were those people really falling from that building? Gosh, that is terrible”. Then we switch channels again.

The tragedy and complexities of life become so regularly mediated to us that we detach ourselves from their realness, as we seek to escape to the comfort of surreal soap dramas or interactive television games. The TV soaps which we know are not real become so addictive because we desperately want to believe in them. We want to accept a simulated world where locals meet to chat in pubs and streets where neighbours stop and chat. We want a world where 3,000 innocent people do not die; a world where CNN globalizes pictures of a war without victims. We watch fighter jets take off and foreign statues get toppled and we accept it as reflective of reality. We do not want to see the reality of war. I mean, hell, that’s just gross isn’t it? It’s not even past 9 o’clock in the evening. Who wants to see that, right? We watch distortions of reality and we engross ourselves in it. We become it. Then what do we do? We change channel.

The media completely deludes us and we accept it. We accept reality television without debt and without illness. We accept adverts where a brand of fruit juice becomes equatable to happy family life. We accept politicians who act. Ludicrously, we accept actors as politicians. We believe in adverts which tell us wealth and happiness are only a moment away. If you haven’t found either yet, well, just watch some more T.V and wait your turn. After all “it could be you”. We are told not to worry about poverty because it will be solved by G.M crops and we accept it. We are told that unhappiness will be brought to all after a few wars and the removal of a few “rogue leaders” and we accept it. But technology cannot create perfection and virtual reality cannot replace existence. Our dreams can offer us answers and our minds can offer us hope. Our world cannot be perfected by technological ideals of infinite production. It can only be changed by collective minds and collective will. It can be changed by those who allow themselves to experience life, by those who accept its tragedies and understand its pain. Our world can only be changed if we wake up and experience it.