Dreams are Life Experiences

Imagine that a drug had been created that can erase specific memories. Memories of childhood abuse may thereby be effectively erased.

I think everyone has the intuition that this would fix little. Survivors of childhood abuse would continue having difficulty establishing trust and forming intimate relationships. They just wouldn’t know why.

Dreams, for most people, are this kind of experience. Events take place that you think are real while you are experiencing them. You fear. You have glee. You react. Even though you forget or discount the experience, you are changed by it. Evidence for that would become manifest when you dream again of the same theme. It goes further: you might find that you resonate with a song or movie scene in waking life, but cannot explain the attraction. The reason is that you’ve forgotten cultivating that interest.

Feed-Back Loops

Dreams are life experiences. They are to be approached with the same seriousness as waking life experiences. Maybe more, because your dream environment is much more reactive to your predilections than waking life. Slippery slopes in the dreaming world are slipperier.

This fluidity makes virtuous circles are possible: if you dream of something good, and get groovy with it, then the next dream is (potentially) better. The limit is how good a dream can be before you reject it as unrealistic and wake up. If you come to realise that realism is not the point, you can be propelled into a heavenly dreamscape.

Vicious circles are also possible: You suspect that you are being tricked. You suspect there are hidden dangers and threats. In subsequent dreams, the threats and dangers are manifest. Then you must deal with them. Whether you are successful or not is not as important as the fact that you are dreaming about them in the first place. If you have been given the choice between a heaven and a hell, you’ve chosen a hell. There is no way to win at hell. All one may do is practice it. Ultimately, you get comfortable with what you are good at, and you get good at what you practice. This arguably has an effect on your waking life.

A Magical Circus Tent

Imagine a magical circus tent which has magical stalls at which every vice and every virtue is catered to. You go to a stall out of curiosity. With practice, you become better at whatever game is offered there. You become excited by it, frustrated by it, aroused, frightened, whatever, but the familiarity is making it part of you. This is the dreaming world. The excitement and familiarity are a powerful combination; they act like an addiction. Worse, they increase your readiness to engage in vaguely similar situations in waking life.

This is why dreams are to be taken seriously as life experiences. They matter. They have consequences. The magical circus tent is arguably the most important test of your life.