Have you ever dreamed that you had a watch and looked at the time in your dreams? I just woke up from a dream like that. It had a number of other qualities 😉 but at the end it also featured me looking at my watch. In my dream I could have sworn that the time was 10:30 in the morning, but actually it is 8:46 AM.

This dream has got me thinking about the physics of that existence. I carry around my self-monitor even when I dream so when the dreams are offering me a chance to explore something I wouldn’t normally feel alright exploring I usually don’t elect to go forward with whatever it is. Its the flow of time that interests me. If everything in a dream is constructed out of my mind, then a watch, indeed the flow of time itself is completely malleable and up to me. There has to be some basic irreducible moments in dreams because you can’t spend an eternity dwelling in a dream-state, you do move forward despite the notion that time is a complete construction in that state.

I think the jury is still out as to the phenomenology of dreaming. I’ve seen competing theories ranging in meaning from dreams as prophetic tools, diagnostic tools, all the way down to a bored cortex that is clamped down with a motor inhibition yet continuously gets input from other parts of the brain that are accidentally firing due to their functions as part of the restorative part of sleeping. I think dreaming is more than a bored cortex making up bits and pieces to keep itself occupied while the limbic system and the hippocampus are busy refining the days memories, chatting up the immune system, and pushing brain chemistry back to a point where we are unlikely lot run into pink elephants.

I do certainly believe that the brain is actively occupied in a lot of maintenance procedures during sleep. Resetting neurotransmitters, dealing with chemical deficits here and there, and conversing with the immune system, but for me, dreaming feels more than just a random series of inputs making my cortex come up with a set-dressed stage to entertain me. I think that when we are in a dreaming state, that we are much closer to the reality that exists purely in our minds. Existence there is not really bound by reality in the real world. I’m sure a more spiritual person would approach this argument that when you dream you are in direct communication with your soul. In a way that is compatible with what I imagine, as the physics of the brain have to point almost by default to the existence of a soul, I just don’t go that far. When people dream, the only real thing that your mind has to go on for stimuli has got to be the noisy click-clack chatter of cells that are firing “accidentally”. I put “accidentally” in quotes because it’s actually very much a quantum mechanical thing, these cells are so small, their connections so fine that a portion of what they are firing for might be the foamy background noise of virtual particles being created and annihilated in the very small spaces between synaptic clefts between neurons.

I can’t escape the theories from David Bohm, that perhaps these tiny spaces between synaptic clefts or even along neuron cells themselves are an interface between classical reality and the implicate order. That the soul is a part of a holographic superstructure that lies independent of classical reality and needs a brain of sufficient complexity to access these special conditions. That it is our larger, more convoluted brains that lead us to consciousness, sentience, and that dreaming is a natural epiphenomenon of that sentience.

If all of of this supposition even has a whiff of being true, that means that the soul is immortal, and that our experience in the world, our persistence in it despite how often our bodies are effectively replaced and how much of our bodies aren’t really ours, but mostly bacteria is all because we are expressions of the implicate order inside flesh. Here we arrive again, like a big circle and back to a really awesome statement: All Is One.

It would be certainly something if our ability to dream Implied a soul, that our bodies were constructed to tune the implicate order and that our consciousnesses, our sentience is not only a fundamental structure of the universe itself but that we are actually all connected in a fashion in the implicate order. The ramifications for ethics and morality are mind boggling. If we are all in a certain way intimately connected to each other wether we are alive or dead, then we are never truly alone and when we do violence to each other, we are doing violence to ourselves.

There is no way to prove any of this. It’s pretty to think about and perhaps someday science will demonstrate wether the brain actually does what I suspect that it does or rather the opposite, that it’s all just a flash in the pan. I really find the entire notion of my soul being a part of the implicate order to be very comforting and puts a rather fine set of clothes on Buddhism.