On Reality

and Dreams

Yesterday, I dreamt of a dog. It had the face of a cat, but barked nevertheless. It was chasing me around in a house that I thought was my own, but now know was a mansion from the movie Godfather. Nothing about this seemed odd in the dream of course, but suddenly a silhouette of a clown appeared behind a curtain which made me realize none of it is real and I jolted awake.

But reality is much more complex, right? There are rigid rules to how things happen, and with science, a lot of them have tangible, realistic explanations. Now consider this. When you are in a dream, you almost never doubt its tangibility. Dreams have their own level of consistency, that seem equally 'real' at the time. But when something too strange occurs in it, a part of you realizes, wait, none of this is real, and you wake up. But what exactly is that, capable of knowing when your experience isn't real? Our ancient yogis called this Chaitanya or Consciousness. When your level of consciousness goes beyond the bounds of the dream, you wake up. The yogis realized the only way to escape reality was to raise their consciousness beyond reality's limits. They practised this intensely for decades and reached a point where they could burst out of our reality, escape their physical form, and gain Enlightenment. We question the authenticity of science in the Vedas with our skepticism of how those yogis could've possibly had the technology to observe and measure phenomenon of our modern science. But we forget that they weren't bound by the rules we are in their ethereal state, and perhaps after escaping their bodies, all of this was obvious to them.

"Cogito Ergo Sum / I think therefore I am"
- René Descartes

René, a french philosopher wrote this in 1637, to answer his own argument of the decietful demon. That argument went like this. Your entire life you have percieved reality from five senses. So suppose there is an all powerful evil demon who is out to fool you. He can create anything he wants to decieve your senses and he can do this forever. Now what surety is there that this world isn't the work of such a demon. After years of thought over this argument, he concluded that the only guarantee, the only thing that exists surely in such a world, is YOU. Because something within you, possibly your consciousness, is processing all this information, experiencing your life, and telling you what to do next and for such thoughts to exist there has to be some absolute and tangible mechanism behind the scenes.

'Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.'
- Einstein

So is this all a dream? Are you some kind of advanced supercomputer running a simulation of life? Living billions of lives over different points of spacetime to accumulate knowledge in a megaconciousness that may solve the problems of an advanced civilisation? Frankly, I don't know, and for now - unlike the yogis - I don't really care. Because no matter who the evil architect, my reality, is a beauty to behold.