Realer than reality. How much further to go?

Hi,

First post so please move if this doesn’t belong here or point me in the right direction if this has been posted many times before.

Okay, the thing I wish to discuss is this:

All the good lucid dreams I’ve had have been realer than the world I am currently typing this message in. When you wake up in your dreams the dreamworld instantly becomes so sharp and vivid, so solid. It contains many more colours and details than the daytime physical world, that the daytime physical world pales in comparison, it becomes less real, duller. So obviously there’s something special in that. I put it down to direct perception. In the physical world your brain creates the image of reality obviously but it is having to expend extra effort matching your perception to the real physical stimuli. In a dream it can just conjour perception directly and so have more juice to put into it’s rendering, so to speak. Fair?

Thing I want to know is is there more to go? I read about higher levels of reality, information overloads, other dimensions, spiritual lights etc etc but whenever I have what (I think) are these experiences they are ‘with eyes closed’. I mean, they take place in the inner world, somewhere roundabout the imagination unbound. They are certainly not truly as impressive as reality, except in their meaning, their emotional, intellectual and spiritual content. Yet reality, as I already stated pales beside the hyper-reality of a lucid dream. So is there still something beyond that?

I will put my interpretation in a heirachy here to simplify things:

Higher: ??? <— This is what I need to discover from you guys
Highest I’ve had: Lucid dream hyperreality/Glimpses of “beyond mind enlightenment” whilst awake
High: Seeing and appreciating the wonders of the physical world we all seem to share.
Not so high but still amazing: “Spiritual” or halucinatory experiences that get lost in time but leave a marked effect.
Base: My day to day general life, be it awake or asleep dreaming normally, not being an enlightened master or anything.

Yeah. What sort of things go up the top there? How amazing do things get beyond hyperreality? :woah: Or am I just being fooled all the time by basing my definition of reality too heavily on cool visuals perhaps?

There are so many things out there not yet completely explored. The dream world is only one of those. I don’t think it exists only in our minds though. It’s too big for that. I think it expands beyond that in the non-physical sense. There are probably more levels to reality and our physical one and the ‘dream world’ are only two of them.

I think the main reason for the higher detail in dreams is that when you’re awake, the detail at which you perceive the world is limited by the detail of the signals that your sensory organs send to your brain. When you are asleep, you are not limited by your sensory organs anymore, only by your imagination.

I don’t know if there is anything really beyond that in the sense that you have an experience that is “better”-- what is most important is what you get out of your experiences, in my mind… even if it is dull, every-day life. :smile:

I have had a few dreams that were hyper-real. Sometimes I think I’m convinced I was actually in another place, physically. 0_o Who knows…

Maybe the next step is taking that knowledge of “beyond mind enlightenment” and applying it to waking life… perhaps the everyday can become hyperreal for the spiritually advanced? :content:

I’ve had hyper-real lucid dreams too. Makes waking life seem dull eh?

Not sure what is beyond that. It might take death to access the higher levels but I’m not dying to find out. :wink:

At first, dream cannot be realer than reality. In real world there is X number of details. If in dream is more details than X (e.x. X + Y) , it’s further from X. When there is less details than X (e.x. X - Y ) , it’s also further from X.

Or a simply way :

Reality gives us limited number of details. If there is more, or less of them, dream is less real.

That’s interesting thing - in dream, when brain produces too much details, is possible to brain to overheat, or something. Not in a physical way, i meant that it might lead to some sicnesses and other unwanted stuff.

Or maybe im underrate that weird organ :tongue: noone knows how it works.

moving on

naaaaah, i dont belive in things like that.
And what kind of dimention you meant ?
In phisical, our universe have got 3 dimentions, and no more.
(on some simlations, it have been shown that universes forms into a 3-dimentional or 7-dimentional way)

But a human perception is limited, so …

I doooooooooooont belivvvvvvvveeeeeeeee innnnnnnn thaaaaaaaaaaaat stuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuffffffffffffff

There are many traditions that what we take to be reality is illusion. From the Greek tradition, Plato’s metaphor of the cave from The Republic

I’ve had 2 or 3 dreams that were more real than reality. I am usually amazed by the beauty of everything, so I like these experiences. :smile:
Hopefully more experience will lead to more understanding. :grin:

This seems like a good explanation for why many lucid dreams can seem “more real than reality itself.” However, while I have had a few incredibly vivid lucid dreams, many of mine are no better than real life. I just wanted to get that message out for MP, just to note that lucid dreams can differ greatly in how vivid they are. :content:

From how I understand it, lucid living has to do with the “more real then real” aspect of lucid dreaming, and bringing that into your daily life. Generaly we have so much on our minds while we are awake that we don’t notice most of what is going on around us. We don’t see the detail in all the little things we see. When we are dreaming, our mind is making all this up in our head, so that it is more avalable to us. We can percive it without having to pay attention to the sensory information that is comming in. We can see it just by wanting to. So it is easyer to notice in a dream, or a lucid dream. It can also be that our SC is just focusing on one thing, like when you are playing a game, nothing else matters, so you are 100% in the game. In our dreams we can be 100% in the dream. While we are awake, we are very seldom 100% aware of what is going on around us because so much is going on in our heads. So in one way it is not more real then real, it is just 100% real. We just don’t pay 100% to reality most of the time.
don

[color=darkblue]The information you take in during the day and throughout your waking life is shown/ interpreted/ organised in dreams. Feelings specific to the person become apparent in a dream. We don’t all need vivid colours to experience hyper reality- some simply feel more alive through their senses.

This is because in a dream, everything is tailored around your own mind- nothing else. I agree with the input from sensory organs idea, there is no bias from outside sources.

In effect- it seems so real to you because everything that happens is produced by your mind, hence it will be infinitely more understandable, concise and real to you than anything you can ever receive from your waking life.

Other factors play a part though, such as how good your dream recall is or how well you are able to lucid dream and control your environment. This is the reason why not every dream is so vivid. Those that are, are either rare or can come about through practice…[/color]

Yes that’s obvious but you’ve missed the point. Hyper sensitivity may be a more accurate description of what we’re talking about. And when all senses are heightened it’s an amazing experience. Super conscious, more real, more vivid, more alive are just our descriptions of that experience.

Obviously not all of my lucid dreams are more rich than life. Many are just plain blurry. The sense of touch is deadened and vision dim. Then there are the ones that appear to match reality. Above that again are the hyper sensitive lucid dreams.

Since I’m no expert, I don’t know how far it goes. But here’s food for thought. While in persuit of hyper real LD’s we should still try and appreciate your “average” LD. Otherwise I wonder if like a milkshake we just want it richer until we throw up!

DeadDuck’s point is this: if it has aspects of reality made more intense, it can’t be real because, although more “vivid”, it’s also different from what real is like.

Your point, on the other hand, could be compared to a short sighted person wearing glasses for the first time: the world they saw before was real, the world they started to see after is also real, only it “feels more real.”

I think neither is right: I also understand the first post is talking about hypersensitiveness (the short–sighted guy wearing glasses for the first time), but I don’t agree that this makes the dream more or less real than reality.

Think about it. Is a short–sighted world less real than a wearing–glasses world? Is it more real? Does that question make any sense? They’re both real, and real is a static condition, boolean: it’s either real or not real, there’s no such a thing as “x being more real than y.”

I think you people are looking for another word. A dream in which reality is more “alive” or “vivid” than waking life reality, perhaps. But discussing whether it’s more real or not is plain nonsense. :tongue: You’d have first to discuss whether dreams can be considered real or not. And that’s a whole other matter…

I agree, real is probably the wrong word to use. More alive is just as bad. It’s like being more dead. :tongue: Vivid is better, but who cares! This is just being picky about wordz and getting sidetracked from the topic of discussion in the process.

Anyway, I’m going to more sleep now in which I will have a more LD. Knowing my luck I will have a more nightmare. :cry:

Reality and truth are relative not absolute.

We experience the world through our mind’s representation of it. The quality and experience of this representation vary over time.

Suppose you watch a movie. You could say its just a movie, but that actors behaved in a realistic way. Then you watch a documentary movie, it is more realistic, but at the same time it is partially artiface.

Or you have a conversation with friend who likes to lie. They tell you they care deeply about something, but you know sometimes they exagerate, you are not sure how real the feelings are.

Sartre wrote a book called Nausea where the protagonist struggles with how real or unreal things feel.

In a peak experience you might feel you’ve entered a greater level of reality. While in mental illness you could suffer from derealization - the feeling that things are not real.

Vividness may be one characteristic. But there is also the felt sense of reality, which is a spectrum, not a binary dot.

I dream in vivid color schemes all the time, so it doesn’t seem that strange to me (of course some end up being more like a dreamy blur of bright colors rather than hyperrealistic experiences).

Sometimes they are very sharp and believable though. Sometimes they are completely lucid and sometimes they are just unbelievably intense epic dreams. I find that when they are the latter, I just sleep so much more deeply (I am already a pretty deep sleeper) and longer. I sleep through my alarm clock, I sleep through storms blowing down my bedroom door. Sometimes when I sleep with a fever, I get these bright, intense dreams.

Usually lucidity doesn’t last very long for me, but I’ve had dreams where I’ve fell asleep lucid and woke up from a lucid dream. I’d spend hours staring at window frames and sunsets that smelled, felt, looked and sounded so much realer than reality. But I’d wake up feeling like I havn’t slept at all. I’d be so tired the next day.

These are just my own observations…

The idea of what is real or not is really just an idea. Its how we perceive it to be that changes. In a dream reality doesn’t actually become more real, you only sense that it does.

Actually if you belive in String Theory there are 13 dimensions! :grin:
1: Lines
2: 2d objects
3: 3d objects
4: Time And Space
5-13 ask a scientist :shy:

I don’t really believe the “4th dimension” is time and space, though I do think it could exist. If you look at a graph of the x (or 1st dimension), y (or 2nd), and z(3rd):

Just imagine a line perpendicular to all 3, thats the 4th dimension. (We just can’t see it)
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Dreams are hyperreal because of their plasticity :smile: It’s because you have way more interaction with the dreamscape than the real world that makes dreams “realer than real.”

Think of it like this–very simple: What can you do here that you can’t do in the dreamworld :wink:

Now, what can’t you do here that you can do in the dreamworld :content:

And, what can’t you do in the dreamworld :lol:

You shape the reality…or rather “hyperreality” of the dreamscape around you literally like silly putty which makes it more real than real life itself :happy:

According to the string theory there’s 10,11 or even more dimensions. First four are macroscopic (space-time), the rest is tightly wrapped in a fairly complicated ways and are very tiny in dimensions, so we cannot observe them.

Not that this has much to do with dreaming…

–NL