Dream Stuff and the Restraint of Ontology
My eyelids were glowing a bit. The summer Florida sun was beaming through the reed curtains covering the window towards the foot of the bed. The contrast of the warm hue mixed with the airconditioned room and hum of the overhead fan must have been the perfect environment to put me into a semi lucid dream state. This sensorial cocktail seemed to give birth to a perfect mental atmosphere as intense insights about the mysteries of the world, each one more awe provoking than the next, rose into my consciousness. The answers became salient and clear and a feeling of enlightenment started to emanate inside me. As I excitedly began to pull myself from REM, a chapter's title from Chiara Marletto's book, The Science Of Can And Can't, started repeating itself as part of the revelations. "Such stuff as dreams are made on", was on loop as I came to.
When I fully awoke, none of the insights got trapped in my skull other than this one resonating phrase. Despite a tinge of disappointment, I was still excited that the concept of the chapter's title was with me and had clicked in a deeper yet simple way. I realized my dreams and thoughts are indistinguishable to a certain degree. My mind creates things whether I'm asleep or awake. It's what minds do! They create these special kinds of projections! This mental manufacturing is part of the root of human knowledge production and meaning making.
I began to wonder what the difference between a dream and a conscious waking thought was. They both kind of popped into the brain in similar fashions. But if both are being forged by the mind are both equally meaningful? Are dreams and thoughts the same? To say yes seemed like an equivocation and false, but why?
The most apparent answer was that dreams are absurd. The whimsical and sudden changes to environment, people, stories, that somehow all coalesce despite their incongruence, was not how reality worked. If it did the world would be horror. In fact, this is what horror is. The blending of incompatible and contradictory categories which make the world less incomprehensible. Zombies and ghosts are antagonistically scary themes because they are both alive and dead. Just imagine if you actually came across either! It's two impossibly harmonious ideas merged together and presented as true. Our intelligible conjectures could never make sense of such a reality; but in fantasy stories and dreams they affect their make-believe domains as if they existed. (Dead thing can't make changes to reality except via one's thought. This isn't the dead thing making the change, but rather the living person acting out the thought.)
Horror stories undermine ontological categories. Dreams, too, are absurd since they have no rational ontological structure. Reality, on the other hand, is full of ontological structures and the capacity to make more of them to increase our fidelity of understanding. Leveraging waking thoughts has an advantage in that they can be used with more intent, which means they have a greater chance of solving real problems. One may stumble across real solutions in a dream, since the mind is generating ideas even in this state, but if one can't transfer the dream idea to ontological reality it won't produce insight. All this is why, in a dream, someone playing basketball in a football stadium can go by unquestioned, where, in the real world, it won't. A sports game can't shift and randomly mutate in the middle of play and still be playable. To work, one would need an entirely new game with its own coherent rules. It would then be it's own distinct ontological sport that could work in reality. Maybe it would be called Basketfoot?
If dreams and horror are ontologically similar, since they lack definitive categories, does this mean that everything that breaks the frame of prevailing classifications leads to dread?
Dreams have the capacity to produce the insight just as any waking thought does, because they are all products of human cognition. An idea gleaned from a nap or a eureka bathtub moment could equally give birth to amazing results, but only if one can give a good explanation and a new ontological framework. These rare moments have the potential to supersede what we currently know, just as the Theory of Relativity replaced Newtonian physics and the concept of romantic love eventually became a culturally assumed standard in marriage practices. To hold up though, ideas are inevitably tested by the world outside our imaginations. Because of this, most of our thoughts won't make the cut in the same way most dreams won't be anything but incoherent flickering moments of stories.
So, whatever the origin of our ideas, they will have to fit a framework that is ontologically coherent in order to make positive changes. If they can't, they only lead to a less knowable world. It's the difference between transcendence and horror. The awesome and the awful. Maybe basketfoot could be the fulcrum that produces the greatest athletes the world has ever seen, or maybe it would be a hot mess of a sport that no one wants to play. Only our thoughts could instigate such a change. Our dreams are made of the same stuff.
