David asked:

I just got finished watching a movie called 'Waking Life' where a young man while dreaming explores
basic philosophical questions.

My question is this If you believe that by thinking you exist, then isn't it possible that a dream could
actually exist? I mean couldn't a dream itself think and have dreams of its own? Is existence just a
series of mutually accepted experiences?

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This is an answer to David's question, and Stephen's question, above.

This is a common confusion of pretty ordinary facts. Dreams are not "real" in the sense presupposed
by your question. We know pretty well where dreams come from and what role they play. In a
nutshell, the hypothalamus is a kind of perpetually active "driver". While you're awake it happily purrs
along, directing all the myriads of information generated by your sensory modalities to their proper
destination, although on a busy day it can get pretty congested and cause the occasional hiccup in
transmissions. Now you may be aware that complex electronic equipment is sometimes very costly to
switch off and on again, so it's better just to keep it running nonstop. It' s like that with the
hypothalamus. It must be kept "on" because it always has to be on the ready for emergencies. But
when you're peacefully asleep, nothing much happen to keep it going, so the next best thing is to
reach for bundles of information that can be piped through again just for the sake of piping it through.
Hence dreams. (People in solitary confinement suffer hallucinations from the same cause.)

This is more or less the normal picture and one reason why most dreams are pretty nonsensical. The
signals now feeding through the hypothalamus don't belong to any particular order of events; and
when you sometimes get the feeling that you're running standing still, it is because the signals being
sent to your muscles and your cortex are at loggerheads with each other: although the cortex
produces running images, the legs can't move along. Exceptional circumstances may prevail,
however, when you're still excited even though you've fallen asleep. Your memory may still be
working and trying to access your waking brain while "you" are asleep. It is reliably establish that
some people have solved (say) difficult mathematical problems in their sleep. But that's got nothing to
do with dreaming per se. It's your memory transgressing union rules.

There's more to it yet, because at times the "excitement" I referred to can be long standing. Jung and
Freud published interesting theories on this, but again neither of them (or any other psychologist)
would wish to be read as promoting a separate reality for your dream life. And although I just admitted
what apparently your movie proposed, nevertheless it is an exceptional state, a less than one in a
million possibility. So if it came down to me buying a lottery ticket or trusting a dream to give me a
Nobel Prize calibre inspiration, I think I would take the ticket.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney