User:Dc.samizdat/Maybe we are dreaming

Maybe we are dreaming all the time!

But conscious of it only when asleep.

As if our consciousness focused on a dream stream only when the higher priority sensory experience of the body did not demand its attention - as if we had bandwidth to look inward only when not required to look out. This notion that REM sleep is the dream state is suspect, it may be nothing more than the disassociated senses fluttering - the dream itself may be ongoing, day and night. In fact the dream streams we experience seem very like a viewpoint or linearization of a larger, nonlinear, massively parallel and not temporally ordered multi process which is the life of the mind itself - suggesting that there is in one sense something about dreaming that happens only when we are asleep, namely, precisely that linear attention, a selection process of applying a viewpoint. We don't do that absent attention; though it still all happens unconsciously we don't 'experience' it in the sense of introspecting upon it, perhaps remembering having 'experienced' it, etc - of this inner dream life, Jaynsian self-awareness occurs only when asleep, because awake our attention is demanded by our senses in outer life - daydreams excepted.

I do not believe that the unconscious life of the mind is only memory, unless we characterize memory as much more than persistence, a multiprocess as active as consciousness - indeed far more so, since it is massively more parallel. This is the chief weakness of Gelernter's view of  the 'down-spectrum', that he reduces unconscious mind to less than consciousness, 'experience' and selfhood to conscious awareness, with unconsciousness merely a kind of backing store for consciousness - when really our unconscious experience is our real self, and much more multifarious and inventive than our consciousness can ever apprehend fully - in a sense unconscious mind is much more observant than consciousness, though 'we' (conscious us) cannot ever be aware of (all of) it at once. The perception that 'we' are our conscious selves is a modern illusion, a kind of blindness to our true dimensions, borne of the Jaynesian virus of incessant waking introspection, by which (if Jaynes is to be believed) humans once were not confused. When Gelernter says 'if we didn't remember it, it never happened' he is so wrong, though I know just what he means - it never happened consciously and didn't introspectively reprocess but it happened, and is happening, is unconsciously reprocessing and being perpetuated actively, not merely stored. The unconscious life of the mind is a vast active field of mental reprocessing, a veritable cloud of mind working day and night, almost all of it out of our conscious awareness, and it alone gives rise to emotion and the perceptions of higher aliveness that we recognize as our 'selves' - consciousness merely focuses us, in 'real' time, and so preoccupies us that we misidentify this small part as the whole or main part of the self - when it is but a projection of the self into the more limited dimensions of our temporal reference frame, our body's steps through time.

David Brooks Christie

January 25, 2016