How can somebody become wise when they are asleep?

How can an external voice get inside the head of a sleeping person?

How often are your dreams real? For me the answer is clear, never. Reality is far deeper and richer than my imagination can generate. I can imagine a moment of reality. To create that moment with realistic levels of sights, sounds, smells and fine details would take several minutes, possibly as much as an hour, to create one second of false reality. Just think how much longer it takes even to examine the details of a photograph let alone paint it photo realistically compared to how long it takes to photograph it. Dreams usually have the audio-visual splendour typical of a massively over-compressed and under saturated 120 pixel video stream with muffled mono audio while reality effortlessly exceeds DVD quality pictures, in true 3D, and 5.1 channel sound and an actor's commentary.

I will try now to recreate a scene in my bedroom when I was 13. The room takes three or four seconds. The feel of the wall behind my head takes another three seconds, and the sound of the echoes as I gently let my head touch the wall, feel its coolness. I can't do the carpet. In trying I shift somewhere else, a later room. No, wait, I'm back. Cheap carpet. I can feel it. I can't remember the colour. Green? Perhaps. There are three windows. Every room in that house had a window to two sides but my room had three windows. Still for all that it was probably designed as the maid's room. Beyond the window? That other house wasn't there then, was it? Just a large garden, fruit trees. An old man's garden. Damson trees? Leaves turning. Birds somewhere, just out of sight. It has taken me twenty minutes and I still cannot fill in the details of the light switch, curtains, wait, here comes some furniture. That old gramophone box, painted in orange gloss paint to match the rest of the woodwork (the walls in two shades of purple, the pink ceiling and orange woodwork was meant to have been a joke, I didn't expect my dad to take me seriously). For half a second there was a wardrobe. It's back, I can recall the sound of its peculiar hinges, like a swanee whistle but replayed at half-speed. A table that goes over the bed, tubular legs. Very practical, but hideous. No, the wardrobe was wrong. Another one, taller and narrower, wood. Little black labels on the shelves held in place by tiny tacks.

The only way to accept dreams as real is to choose to, after the event or to accept without challenge the feeling that they are real at the time. There is no way that any dream can convince a sceptical mind. The mind is not capable of imagining, picturing, viewing and challenging the picture at the same time in a realistic depth of false reality. To accept a non-sensory experience as real requires a choice. To accept a non-sensory experience featuring the apparent voice of an external agent requires deliberate self-deception.

Several months after writing that piece I had a dream about that house and it felt so real. It was amazing. The sensation was entirely “this sensation is profoundly real”. Actually analysing the sensations in detail reveals that there was no detail at all, the level of detail in the dream was entirely normal for a dream, as I described above a field of view a dalek would be ashamed of, little or no colour saturation, poor detail, no textures, most objects not seen at all just recognized as what they represent. In total it was barely a minute. The highlight was me thinking “wow this is so amazing and so realistic I can even feel the cool of the wall against my back”. Correct, I did feel the coolness of a brick wall on my back and possibly the faintest hint of texture. I had not the slightest clue as to what time of day or time of year it was, whether the wall was wet or dry, how old I was, what shape I was in, what clothes I was wearing, I just assumed I was wearing something because I had not bothered to imagine such details. There was no sky. No weather. I didn't turn around and see anything behind me. I never noticed my hands or feet or any other part of my body, I just knew I was there. One moment I was inside the house thinking “wow this is so amazingly real” the next I was leaning against the outside wall and I could feel it for a second and a half. Sort of. Amazing. A relatively cool sensation on my back for less than two seconds. I will remember this dream all my life, it's that vivid. The only way I could have felt that was by being there. Right. Or imagining it, of course.

I did not perceive wallpaper, furniture, carpets, ceilings, sounds, smells or anything much at all. So why I am bothering to write about it? Because it was so real. The feeling of it being real was the only real thing about it. That feeling was very strong. Because I am a cynic and I don't particularly want to believe in the power of dreams I quickly saw past the illusion of reality. But I am quite confident that in somebody who wanted to believe in their dream, or indeed their out of body or near death experience that conviction of utter reality would have been more than enough. I even for a few moments felt that the “vision” was actually better than real life, which is a sick joke. It was a second rate imagined experience that was very similar in quality to the imagined worlds I create while reading a book. I was not seeing a house at all, I was imagining an image of a house and imagining that I was thoroughly satisfied by it because that was the story of that dream.

I don't believe that anybody can have genuinely sensation-rich dreams which are really as good as being awake. What can happen is that as part of the dream process the mind's threshold for what seems real and what is dreamlike gets messed up and the mind becomes more than satisfied with the paltry efforts of the imagination. Real reality hits far harder (and often profoundly duller) than anything the imagination can manage to create and it does so across a huge range of senses simultaneously. In the room around me now I can see shadows and reflections, texture, dust, the vision distortions of not being able to focus on nearby objects quite as well as I used to and the effect of tiny particles or fibres floating across the surface of my eye. I can also feel a draught, a warmer sensation on my left leg than on my right, slight constriction from my clothes, modest pains and tingles and my nose is telling me that it is doing its best to warm the air I'm breathing but give it a break, the air is still cooler than it would like it to be and its job might be made a bit easier if some attention was paid to the left nostril, would a blow be out of the question? In a dream all that I would perceive is “I'm sat down in front of the computer - wow this is so real”.

Dreams are just the brain making stuff up. No new information can come in via a dream but the brain can get confused between what has been imagined and reality. Everything in a dream is imagined from inside the brain of the dreamer but these products of the imagination can be accepted by the brain as something they are not, such as thoroughly convincing experiences, messages from external agents or experiences of life in another plane of reality.

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