When you awaken from a dream and return to your familiar experience of space, time, and identity, it’s easy to differentiate and say, “it was just a dream.”
Here is Zhuangzi’s Butterfly dream:
“Once Zhuang Zhou (Zhuangzi) dreamt that he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solidly and unmistakably Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the “transformation of things.” (Zhuangzi, ch. 2; trans. Watson)
Dream and wake are different psychic states. Even though dreams may be vivid and gripping when we are dreaming, they are unreal when reviewed from the wake state. Dreams are not subject to the dependable constraints of space, time, identity, and gravity that we experience in the wake state. So it’s easy, when we awake, to say, “It’s not real, it was just a dream.”
On the other hand, “reality” is clear as daylight because we experience it repeatedly. We believe that it just “is.” That tomorrow when we wake up, we will still be the same person and that the world and other people as we know them will still be very much the same.
We hold on to this belief tenaciously. Maybe we have a need to. But it is obvious that every person’s reality is not the same. In fact, they may be drastically different. So, is our individual sense of reality simply a psychic state we insist on perpetuating? In psychological terms, this is called a trance. Is our sense of reality a deep trance we enter into and reinforce everyday?
In Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Circular Ruins,” a man arrives at the ancient ruins to dedicate himself to dreaming another human being into existence. After years of effort, his creation comes to life: a being unaware of his origin. A fire approaches the ruins. The man, his dream fulfilled, walks into it but finds himself unburned. The man now realizes that he himself is the dream of another man. Maybe himself.