How do we know that this is not a Dream. What is the difference between a realistic Dream and Reality? Blessings...Miles

What if we knew for sure? THAT would be a dissapointment.

Because we know what's reality from The Twilight Zone

Yeah that and "Family Guy"

All when awake that is known is from what our brain takes in as Reality. So when we are a sleep what our brain takes in is just as much reality if not more than when we are awake..

..i got a solution..how about slapping yourself a few times to see if you wake up..or how about this..go jump off a building, if you fly, you know your in a dream

roco

I used to think about stuff like that all the time

then I quit smoking pot

aww the natural drug.

a little off topic. But i am curious if anyone remembers in 1993 this guy said he had a religion to where people came in the spring and they planted pot seeds and in the fall they had a pot smoking festival. He called himself Chief Wanna-Dubbie.. It was in Headlines of papers and on Tv that said Chief Wanna-Dubbie seeks Treaty with Mo. he actually got a restraining order keeping cops off his land while this went through the courts. Only in America. Or was it a Dream

Who cares?

Experience is experience.

Does it truly matter how it is manifested?

As a physicist I'm often asked by philosophers, "What would you do if you discovered that life is just a dream and your whole life studying physics was for naught?"

First off, it wouldn't automatically follow that studying physics was for naught.

If life is a dream, the dream appears to be adhering to rules. The rules are what we call the laws of physics.

There's no need to believe in a 'billard ball' reality.

In fact, a 'billard ball' reality is actually quite unattractive.

Physics itself has come to the conclusion that matter is nothing more than energy in standing waves.

So in a sense, physics has already determined that life is but a dream.

But clearly it's a organized dream rather than being purely chaotic.

The only thing that makes 'reality' meaningful is its organization. And that organization equates to rules.

Can the rules ultimately be changed?

I believe so.

In fact, I believe that this particular universe that we are currently experiencing is nothing more than the result of random seeds that constrain the rules that we call physics.

So as a physicist I simply view myself as a "Dream Mechanic" happily investigating the rules of the dream and all the possible ways they might be broken, or by-passed, via loopholes.

For example, humans can't naturally fly. This is a rule of the dream. But they can by-pass that rule using a hang glider.

Or if they want to get really snotty about it they can build a bunch of jumbo jets and destroy the ozone layer whilst rushing back and forth between corrupt commercialized financial war zones.

Then the dream becomes a nightmare.

All because they had to break the frigg'in rules.

When it comes to natural herbs I think it's wrong of a government to tell people what they can use on their own private property.

I can understand the "being under the influence" laws for public places, expecially for people who are driving vehicles on public highways. That's make perfect sense for the government to enforce that issue for safety reasons.

But telling people that they can't grow herbs on their own property for their own use on that property is just wrong.

And it shouldn't be the government's place to protect people from themselves.

The government should only be concerned with protecting citizens from each other.

In the case of private property the only consideration should be whether under-aged children are involved or other non-consensual citizens.

Other than that, people should be able to do anything they want on private property even if it results in their own ill-health or death.

It's their choice.

" Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream."


I knew that when I was four...

reality is nothing but a dream ...reality just like any dream can be changed altered and manipulated which mean it is never truth... but if you notice reality and dreams has one constant in them that never changes and is always present ...and that one constant is yourself

You must be alive in order to dream.

well, when I sleep I die nearly in all my dreams. [calling them dreams because it's during the time I "sleep". If I had the same experience when I was awake, I'm sorry to say but I wouldn't be able to type on this keyboard right now.


as far as "enhancing" the experience of life to be able to adjust the eyes, mind, and soul to be able to bend light in order to see more of the world, that's up to personal preference. Drugs, are in the impure radicals to the body and in effect in the long run will kill you. Most can force your body to trigger mechanisms you can control if practiced on your own, or by using the "natural" substances to enhance your ability to get the mechanisms in motion. I'm not at all referring to pot btw. There are however simple substances obtainable though considered illegal to achieve maximum enhancement to the mechanisms humans aren't very aware of. In the long run, no damage will be done, as these substances...are natural to the body and very much are present in them without the human knowing at certain points of time during day, or night.

Knowing what is dream and reality, like everything else in life is just your opinion. To me there's no truth to life beyond the truth I create for myself through my own experience. Sh*t a person can pray to a waffle stuck to the ceiling if they wanted to and think they got truth, I can care less. My experiences, My intellect, My knowledge, My..self. yours is yours, and mines is mines, until down the line, when all else intertwines, two minds, will be, two different kinds.

"CreativeSoul"..that's not necessarily so...you may actually be dreaming because you are dead

This is true.

This reality is different from our individual dreams only in duration and stability.

Enhance the senses, lengthen the duration, increase the stability and your personal dream can seem just as real as this thing you call reality.

You've surprised me funches. I thought you were a hard-line materialist.

Speaking of dreaming. I've been practicing some visulization techniques recently. I'm finding that I can actually create quite vivid dreams fairly easily that are very lucid.

And I'm only just starting out with these techniques.

It may well be that the true way to leave this life is to simply create a better dream. People in this life will think you've died, when in fact all you've really done is join in a totally different dream.

For example, I've been working on the image of standing on the beach of a tropic island. I can form this image in my mind to an amazing degree, including hearing the waves crash, smelling the salty and fishy air, hearing the seagulls squawk, feeling the breeze on my face, the sand beneath my feet and even the warmth of the sun's raise.

On of the problems I tend to keep having though is that I often experience this as an 'out of body' experience. In other words, even though I can imagine all of these things I tend to view myself from the outside (just hovering over head, or standing next to myself).

I need to get inside that body in my dream.

I'm working on it.

If you suddenly hear that I've died maybe it will be because I was successful.

"Skyhook" dreaming is not materialistic ...it's an illusion

Well being a hard-lined materialist myself. Notice I make this statment unashamedly. I tend to feel that there is no way to know exactly and its probably not important. As Rocco mentioned, if you jump off a building and cant fly, chances are, you are not in a dream state or in functional REM stage in that moment. So most of us have the capacity to draw a distinction.

However I would guess that everyone posting on this forum has had that WEIRD experience when you think you have woken from a dream and may even feel yourself moving and walking around and then you discover that you are still dreaming. Ive had that most assuredly and it scared the b-jesus out of me. Generally it only occurs when I am under tremendous strain or coping with anxiety.

It is also interesting that dreams and dream experience are interpreted in MANY ways and it can vary significantly from human population to human population. Culturally dreams mean something different depending on where you are in the world.

As an example. In African American culture sometimes dreams will be associated with precognition and foreshadowing of future events. It is believed in some cases that long since deceased members of the distant family can convey information to their living relatives in the forms of prophetic dreams. Sometimes the ancestors deem certain information so important that they send it to the subconscious mind without being consciously asked. This can result in prophetic dreams, rich in symbolism and unforgettable in certain cases.