DREAMING AND REALITY, meeting 2 (out of 3)

"surely I dream'd to-day"

Surely I dream'd to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?

Ode to Psyche by John Keats

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Cupid and Psyche

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Psyche and Morpheus

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nothing is real unless imagined

"The Romantic idea that nothing is real unless imagined found poignant voice in John Keats. Its current avatar, on the grandest scale, is Dan Simmons."

(from a review of Simmons' Endymion by Michael Alec Rose)

"...Hyperion. That title, along with most of the other titles in the sequence, comes directly from the poetry of John Keats, a gifted and tragic figure who died of consumption at the age of twenty-five, and who believed, up to the moment of his death, that his name had been "writ in water." Keats is a pervasive presence throughout these novels, providing not only titles, but primary sources of inspiration and a formidable array of historical and literary allusions. In a very real sense, he is the patron saint of this vast enterprise, the avatar whose fundamental principles - creativity, love of beauty, spiritual and philosophical adventurousness - inform the very fabric of these books."

(from The Void and the Word)

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interpreting human sleep brain maps

two ways:
  1. bottom-up:

  2. top-down:

consider this (a propos telling apart dreams and reality):

our perception of the world during waking life is heavily tinged by the preexisting conceptual system; there is no "privileged" access to reality during wakefulness...

this suggests that dreaming and wakefulness should be rather easily confused (cf. Philip K. Dick)

looking into REM sleep

RED: regions where rCBF increases during REM sleep.

BLUE: regions where rCBF decreases during REM sleep.

  1. lateral view
  2. medial view
  3. ventral view

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quantifying dream content

a study: multidimensional analysis of 1770 dream reports resulted in five highly segregated and consistent dream categories:

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dream phenomena that parallel neuropsychological disorders

  1. Frégoli syndrome; the dream description was: `I recognize A's sister (...) I am surprised by her beard, she looks much more like a man than a woman, with a big nose...'

  2. polyopic images of bathtubs in a dream

  3. micropsia in a dream: the woman in front was seen at normal size, but the man at the other end of the table was seen as miniscule

  4. hemi-achromatopsia in a dream; color was missing only from the left half of visual space

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cognitive neuroanatomy of face recognition

  1. normal face-processing network: the fusiform face area (FFA), the amygdala (A), inferotemporal cortex (IT), and prefrontal cortex (PF).

  2. supposed changes in prosopagnosia

  3. supposed changes in Capgras delusion

  4. supposed changes in Frégoli syndrome

yellow: normal functioning

blue: decrease in activity

red: increase in activity

dashed lines: modifications in connections

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telling apart dream and reality

"... I must remember that I am a man, and that consequently I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake, or sometimes things which are even less plausible." from the Meditations on First Philosophy, by Rene Descartes (First meditation, p.2)

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10 microamperes of reality

"I once wrote a story [`The Electric Ant' (1969)] about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally, he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-up fantasy. Which I guess is what they were." (from How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later , a 1978 essay by PKD)

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telling apart dream and reality

"Tessa and I started out with conflicting realities, found that when each of us reality-tested the other's, it collapsed. But now, instead of mutually destroying each other's realities, we are shaping a joint one between us. If two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion; the basic test that distinguishes reality from hallucination is the consensus gentium, that one other or several others see it too.

This is the idios kosmos, the private dream, contrasted to the shared dream of us all, the koinos kosmos."

(from The Dark-Haired Girl, a collection of PKD's letters)

"If two people share the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion. Philip K. Dick's books and life are ultimately affirmative; they strengthen our sense of what is really real."

(from Only Apparently Real, a book on PKD by Paul Williams)

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telling apart dream and reality

"But this world can't be para," Gretchen Borbman said, "because we all share it, and that's still our sole criterion, the one point we can hang onto."

from The Unteleported Man by Philip K. Dick

is this a valid criterion?

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telling apart dream and reality

"But this world can't be para," Gretchen Borbman said, "because we all share it, and that's still our sole criterion, the one point we can hang onto."

from The Unteleported Man by Philip K. Dick

is this a valid criterion? not if

  1. cognition (including consciousness) is computation, and

  2. your CPU has some cycles to spare

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telling apart dream and reality: consciousness to the rescue?

finding a conscious companion would not help pin the situation as real if your brain can simulate other minds, consciousness and all

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supplementary material