Life and Death and Consciousness (revisited)

(11AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

I woke up very early this morning, as I usually do, had a cup of coffee and something to eat, read and replied to a few essays and comments here, and then again as I usually do, went back to bed and slept for an hour or so.

It’s become a habit for me to do this because I really enjoy the extremely lucid dreams I have while sleeping when I’m already rested and after eating.

The dreams I usually have at that time are so lucid they are literally worlds and realities indistinguishable in quality and “realness” from the world of daily life. I converse with people in them, can bang my knee against a wall, pet the cat, slam my fingers in a desk drawer, listen to music, in short they are experiential worlds as real as any other. As “this” one – the one we each find ourselves in at this moment.

Dreams, in other words, are real. They exist. They are as real as anything else.

So, “what is real”, or “what is reality”?  

Who knows?

There I was trundling along in my dream talking to 4 people, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for a cab we had called to arrive. The sun was shining on a warm summer day, there was traffic driving by on the road outside the building we were in, the parking lot was about 70 percent full.

The cab finally arrived and I watched it turn off the street and come across the parking lot towards us as I also watched the 4 people I was with walk down the stairs and across the lot towards it.

I started down the stairs, went out the door and walked across the lot myself. A couple of birds flew through my field of vision and landed in the trees at the edge of the road. A dog wandered  by crossing my path as I walked towards the cab that the other people were sitting in by this time.

I got to the car, walked around to the side of it, reached out my hand and grasped the door handle, opened the door……

And was lying in bed with my eyes closed listening to traffic noises from down the street and feeling the pillow under my head and and the bed covers on me and the cool morning breeze come through the open window beside my bed, and Magic stretching and meowing quietly in her sleep on the chair in my room.

The transition was that fast, and I thought to myself “what just happened?”

WHAT just happened? The traffic noises and the cat sounds and the breeze and everything else I was now aware of had been there all along while I existed in that other just as real world that we call a “dream”, but I was not aware of them until I suddenly was aware of them.

Did any of it exist? Most of us would I think say yes, but until I became suddenly aware of it it didn’t exist as far as I knew.

How much of life are we not aware of at all until we are suddenly aware of it?

What does it mean to be aware?

What does it mean to become aware?

How many “realities” are we unaware of?

Is physical “reality” dependent on “awareness”?

Who opened the car door? Did he get in?