ON THE ACT OF DREAMING

so the science of sleep kind of attempted to do this, but with more of a focus on the aspects of the dream world in reality and less of a focus on those aspects of reality that appear in dreams, and in what ways they do so...

my thought is this... do you know the feeling i speak of - the feeling had by the dreamer in the midst of a dream - which is as if the absolute relevance and significance of the dream (and of reality itself too) is figured out and understood? the dream contains events and interactions that are of a nature we might consider "odd" in real life, yet in the dream these odd elements are never questioned. there must be a reason behind this lack of need for questioning... perhaps the reason is that we are somehow aware more of the connection between events and fantasies (perhaps even the connection between people, as boundaries between individuals seem to be broken down in the dream world and affinities between multiple people are made quite clear), and this awareness of connection between different entities, ideas, emotions, and elements allows us to experience events that make perfect sense, taking into account these connections, whereas they would otherwise not. i really feel that, in every dream, i am aware of factors that make perfect sense and help explain things - big things - in a way that is both gripping and fascinating. nothing is mundane in my dreams. every tedious event has a larger significance, and every significant events is, although sometimes more obtuse or less shocking, equally important to the smaller events. i feel at ease in dreams, even those that frighten me or those which deal with difficult subject matter, because i experience a general sense of purpose, and every event seems to happen for a reason - each event is a little necessary part of a larger, linear puzzle - and i never doubt that the end conclusion and result of all the events and all my thoughts regarding these events will ultimately be revealed. herein lies the problem: i don't like waking up because it keeps me from solving the puzzle that seems so profound at the time of REM. furthermore, upon waking, the sense of purpose and fate and logical-connectedness-between-events is lost. things seem so much more up in the air and daunting and, often, less exciting in reality. but i feel that dreams are very much a part of reality. we spend 1/3 of our life dreaming. it makes sense to assume that the events in our dreams are, in some unconscious sense (and any of us who know anything about the psyche know that our unconscious mind has almost as much effect on our actions as our conscious mind, perhaps more.. i don't know) we are effected by the lessons learned in dreams, ideas composed in dreams, and events experienced in dreams. so the great mystery, which is the question of where our dream come from and from what source they are derived, is of great importance when this is taken into account. if dreams have a huge effect on our unconscious mind, and if our unconscious mind has a huge effect on our actions, then whatever puts the dreams into our heads has a lot of power over our actions. i like to think that, when i dream, i am somehow more connected to the entirety of my mind; perhaps even to the minds of others and hopefully to the soul of the world in general. i like to think that events in life will gain the significance and connectedness that events in dreams seem to have, and that the act of dreaming perhaps guides the dreamer by setting said dreamer's unconscious mind on the track that will help make the dreamer's life what it should be or what it can, gloriously, be. the fact that we understand so little about dreams is comforting to me. i think that which i consider to be the closest thing to god that i have ever experienced has been most present in my dreams, and i carry this sense of significance into my waking life when i have dreams that seem beautiful and profound. if all of us had beautiful dreams as we dozed, and if all of us were able to better understand them and able to remember the FEELING they were able give us, even after we awoke, perhaps we'd put more stock in reality and we'd aim to make life as exciting and open-ended and limitless as the dreamscape.