The dream as medium of reality

Let us call that “the dream” which acts as a medium of reality.¹ That is, which gives individual things their realness, and, especially, which ensures that different things can have something to do with each other. It is what makes things seem to be what they actually are, insofar as it is possible to see them. It is also what we call “I”, or “everything”, or “the soul”, or “other people” (or else it is very near to these things).

Plotinus and the Neoplatonists write about “the One.”² There is a glue that keeps everything together by ensuring the coexistence of similarity and differentiation: there is a single cohesive thing, which can at times be split up into parts, but the parts always stay together.

And the binding medium can be more or less rightly also called “the dream,” because it really is like dreaming, for in a dream, everyone agrees without controversy that all parts of the dream are coextensive; and furthermore, I am sure that what we experience in dreams are really happening. And in a dream, there can be other people, but everyone agrees that the other people are in some sense the same as the one experiencing the dream; and the dreamer is also in the dream (and these two entities may be said to be the same, or to be distinct, depending on what exactly we mean). Another similarity is that when we are dreaming, there is also, most people think, a world outside the dream, and the dream is in some sense happening inside of this outer world (but in another sense, the dream and the world are different kinds of things—and one might just as well say that it is the world that is inside the dream, since it is meaningless to speak of “the world” except to the degree that it is experienced by something, and the dream is closer to the experience of the world than the dead world-by-itself is). And there are other similarities as well, but I will not list them all here.

It is the bridge between what some people think of as “the physical world” and our actual reality. (Contra that only things touch each other directly, whereas living beings have a membrane separating us from the mystery of the thing.) There is a single living being, which is identical with the non-living world, and its parts are both distinct and identical.

The dream as medium of reality

See also