Do your dreams have color? Are they as blurry as the thoughts in your head, or are they blasted in high definition during your sleep?
Can you hear in your dreams? Can you smell? Taste? Can you feel temperature? Can your arm get numb?
In my dreams, I can’t feel temperature. I have all my other senses just fine, but my sense of touch is very remote. It’s partially because of this that I am always able to tell whether or not I am in a dream.
Or can I? Often, when thinking about dreams, I am reminded of Zhuangzi, of a man dreaming of being a butterfly only to wake up and wonder if he were a butterfly dreaming to be a man. Could it be that my sense of touch is in fact as poor as it seems in my dreams? Could it be that my memory in real life is poor and much more unreliable than I believe it to be?
Or perhaps my memory is neither poor nor extraordinary, but instead subjective to my state of mind. Maybe my sense of self does not exist in my form, but instead in the sense that I am myself.
The self is as fluid as the world, you know? There may be stagnant figures and observable features in the world, but the truth is not in our comprehension but in the reality of existence. There need not be words to explain the truth, there need not be logic. But words and logic certainly help those poor sentient beings with thoughts and mouths in comprehending themselves.
So, paradoxically, could this train of words and logic be what sustains imagination? For imagination is not found in reality, instead, it is an elevated version of it, supported by one’s comprehension of reality. Imagination needs logic to exist, but reality does not.
To take it a step further, could this be the basis of a dream? Should dreams have logic comprehendible to the self so that they may exist? Reflections of reality that the self has collected in order to solidify one’s comprehension of existence. Might that be the function of a dream? To simulate reality and prolong one’s stay in reality by practicing good things learnt in the past, so that existence may be akin to learning to ride a bike a second time? After all, dreams can only replicate things experienced by the self, rarely so a tactile memory, no?
Therefore, dreams must make sense. Dreams follow a certain logic that is unique to the self. Whatever thoughts or sights that the self has experienced is digested into an inner sort of logic. So, if the self lingers anywhere, it should also be visited when in a dream, since the logic of that moment seems to not have been fully digested. New dreams cannot be made until the last dream has been completely solidified to the self. Or else, the dream has failed.
Ah, failure? Success? Why should dreams have a standard of success? Why did I think of that?
I’m more privy to the idea that all things in life have no sense of success or failure. There is only constant evolution and the occasional mutation. Things do not stop after a so-called success or failure, things accumulate and keep rolling no matter what. A plateau is rarely a plateau (unless it is the landform, right?), and a valley is but a valley. There is a constant motion.
It is just that the perspective of sentience is limited to time and usually to one perspective. Oh, I do wonder if it’ll ever be possible to hold multiple perspectives at once. How strange would that be? I don’t know if holding multiple perspectives would be overwhelming, although the easy answer is yes it would be.
