In my recent reading, I have come across an interesting concept: the passage of time in dreams. Whether it be the idea of having long journeys passing by as we sleep or actual empirical evidence showing why people perceive time slower while dreaming, we have always known that time seems to move slower when we dream.
What I had not considered before though, were the implications of this passage of time. We spend roughly a third to a fourth of our lives asleep, and time can feel like it passes hundreds or even thousands of times slower while we're asleep. I made comrades, plotted elaborate escape routes, fled an apocalyptic utopian complex and built an entire society in the wilderness all in the span of one night. This means that by the time we're ten, twenty, or any age really, we may have lived, at least in our heads, thousands upon thousands of years.
Unbeknownst to all of us, we've been the leaders of great civilizations, we've been beggars upon the streets, we've been sinners upon death row, we've been survivalists encountering the most fearsome cosmic horrors, and much much more. We've already lived through so much more than we ever have or ever will in our lifetimes through our dreams.
Does the fact that we don't remember anything invalidate this experience? I don't think so. We forget many things throughout our lives. In fact, I doubt most people can recall even a single percent of everything that has happened in their lives. Even those with what we call perfect memory-able to remember the weather from specific days years ago or recall every person they'd ever been introduced to-cannot tell you how they scratched their head or what time they sneezed three years eight months and five days ago. To live is to forget, and only by forgetting do we then forge onwards. What we do and do not remember continues to affect us-why would lost memories from dreams not?
Even if we assume the experiences from within our dreams are completely wiped from us and do not affect us at all… so what? The time we've spent out here in the "waking" world pales in comparison to the sheer magnitude of the time within our dreams. How can the minuscule amount of time that we've spent living out here compare to the thousands of years spent in there? Is it because the occurrences within dreams don't bring a physical result into the "real" world? That because there is no substance to the results of a dream in our perceived reality, suddenly what occurred within ceases to matter? No! For many years, those people were real. I laughed, I cried, I loved, I mourned, and I grew old with them. In those moments, it was they who were real, it was they who were present, and it was they who mattered-not the people in "our" reality. Our time together now differs not from what I had experienced through my dreams.
How can we even be sure that this current reality in which you are reading my writing is the true "reality"? Perhaps this is just another long dream… and we when die we simply wake up. Then we live and wake up once more, again and again, in another place, in another time, in another us, in an infinite amount of dreams, without there being any perception of a true reality other than the one we currently reside in.
Is an infinite dreamscape so unrealistic to imagine? I don't think it's any more difficult to imagine than our infinite universe. After all, you wouldn't believe you can reach an edge of the world where everything simply ceases to exist beyond that point, so why would you reach an end in reality where you simply cease to exist?
But if we were to live again, we would likely be wholly different than we are now. With different experiences, we would develop different habits, different preferences, and different relationships. Is that person who shares not a shred of ourselves really us? Here I suppose we must turn to the philosophical idea of soul-that there is simply just some intrinsic part of us that does not change from reality to reality. We are us and there is nothing beyond that.
With this being the case, there is only one conclusion I have left to draw about the lives we live-that we should live with all sincerity and without regrets, for that is the only way to sustain our existences in a wholesome way throughout all of "reality".