The Problem with Perception (Part 6 of 6)

Merrily Merrily Merrily


Life is but a dream. I am certainly not the first to recognize the usefulness of the metaphor of the dream. From children’s songs to Shakespeare, Plato, and the Gnostics, we find references to life being a dream. When we think about our journey here, many of us speak of it as an awakening, at a minimum implying that we are asleep. When asked by his followers who he was, the Buddha said, “I am none of these things, what I am is awake.” The Bible suggests that “a deep sleep fell upon Adam”; there is no reference to him waking up. History is replete with these references. Why? Let’s start with our sleeping dreams.

Think about your sleeping dreams for a moment. When you are asleep, do you not believe that what is happening is real? Unless you are having a lucid dream, a dream during which you recognize that you are dreaming, you do. We all do. We all believe that what happens in the dream is actually happening to us. Adhering to the “reality” set up in the mind, the body often reacts accordingly. Our heart beats faster when we’re running or frightened in the dream. We can be observed talking, screaming, or laughing while fast asleep. As a student recently pointed out during a class, sometimes our bodies react to the seemingly specific physical stimulation in the dream by responding with a particularly pleasurable experience! Convincing things, these dreams.

When we awaken from a sleeping dream, we recognize that all of the people in the dream are gone. Everything that seemed to happen didn’t actually happen, and with few exceptions (most notably those referenced by the aforementioned student!), the dreams had no real effect. Think about who you are in the dream. Typically, you are not the person lying in bed having the dream. In fact, often times, you are not even you. You may be a younger version of you, a superhero version of you, etc. The people in your waking life who show up in your dreams rarely look like themselves either. You know it is you and you know it is them, because of the content that you ascribe to them in the dream. We may not recognize the form once we awaken, but in the dream, these changed forms point to familiar content.

Our sleeping dreams are another useful example of the denial, projection, and identification dynamic. When we’re asleep and dreaming, we deny the reality of our body in the bed, and we project a new story, a new reality, which includes those who are not us and the one with whom we identify. When we wake up, we recognize that we were the dreamer of the dream, not the figure in the dream with whom we had identified. We recognize that all of the figures were within our mind. There was no external reality to our dream. Everything in it was representative of something in our mind. That’s why so many therapists and psychologist spend so much time analyzing dreams; they often reveal what is actually going on in the depths of our minds. In general, we have become fairly comfortable with the notion that our sleeping dreams are symbolic and provide insight into what is in our mind. Rarely, do we consider that the same dynamic may play out in our seeming waking state.

So, as a symbol, what does the dream mean? What is the purpose of the dream? Freud offered some brilliant insight into our sleeping dreams. Freud said that there is one wish that every dream is intended to fulfill. Although the wish assumes various forms, the wish is always to stay asleep. We dream to avoid having to wake up, because we want to sleep. That is the purpose of the dream. Think about your sleeping dreams. Have you ever noticed that when the phone rings in the house or we have to go to the bathroom that we will work the sound or the discomfort into our dream? The purpose? To keep us asleep. The mind recognizes that in a conscious state we would pick up the phone or go to the bathroom, so it keeps us unconscious by working those stimuli into the dream. Dreaming is a defense against waking up. At some point in the dream, the desire to wake up overtakes the desire to sleep, and we wake up.

Mindful perception uses the metaphor of our sleeping dream to inform our waking experience. We are not saying that our waking experience and our sleeping experience are the same. Obviously, the forms are different, but as we’ve established, form is too variable, too subjective to be useful in this context. Purpose is what is important. What we are saying is that our everyday waking experience has the same purpose as our sleeping dreams. The purpose of both is to stay asleep. That’s the problem with perception.