Last night my sleeping brain and my waking brain had the same thought just as I woke up, and I’ve been thinking about it since
(To be clear, I don't actually believe the idea I'm about to share is really true, but it fascinated me and provides lots of potential story material, so I'm going to share it with the rest of you.)
Dreams are the result of one's consciousness observing events and experiences happening in parallel realities, while taking a break from this reality.
(Before I expound on this, let me once again reiterate that I am NOT sharing my religious, personal, or spiritual beliefs here. This is simply meant as a fun imagination-expanding exercise. Having said that, I'm going to state the idea below an actual concept, simply to make it easier to read.)
Imagine an aspect of yourself that exists independent of your body. A part of you that existed before you were conceived, and will continue existing after you die. Feel free to think of this as your “spirit,” “soul,” “essence,” or any other terminology you’re comfortable with. For the purpose of this conversation, I’m going to refer to this aspect of someone’s self as their “consciousness.”
Now imagine that your consciousness is WAY bigger and more complex than your own body. In fact, imagine that your consciousness and your brain are about as different in terms of scope and complexity as you are from a handheld video game device. Sure, the game device runs the programs and processes the input and output, but as the player holding it, you make the decisions and drive the action. Sometimes the gaming experience is effected if devices have buttons that stick, hardware that runs a little slow, or snag on the occasional bug, but it’s still you at the controls.
Likewise, our brains and bodies bring a lot to the table in terms of gathering input and executing the output. And biological systems like instincts, appetites, hormones, autonomic responses, and other factors help our consciousness to process all that information in ways that are appropriate and relevant to life in this reality. In fact, it would be as impossible for your consciousness to interact with this reality without a body as it would be for you to interact with a Pokemon Blue game cartridge without a Gameboy.
But even if you like that Gameboy and play it often, and even if that Gameboy never interacts with anyone but you, that doesn’t mean that YOU only interact with that Gameboy, right? You interact with many devices and objects every day. Utensils for eating, pencils for writing, shovels for digging, phones for... well pretty much anything these days. And you likely even interact with several different objects at the same time.
Now, imagine that your consciousness is so vast and complex that it exists not only in THIS reality, but across an infinite multitude of realities. And I don’t mean different versions of your consciousness, I mean the exact same consciousness that is driving your mortal experience here in this reality at this very moment. At the same time your consciousness is controlling your body and reading this post in THIS reality, your consciousness is doing the same thing (or similar) with other bodies and other interfaces in other realities simultaneously.
Some of these parallel realities are very similar to our own, with similar scientific laws and logic. Others are wildly different. In some realities, time may move backwards, or more slowly, or skip around unexpectedly. In some realities, you can cast magical spells, or fly, or access incredible superpowers. In some realities, your consciousness may inhabit a body that’s similar to the body it inhabits here in this reality. It may go by the same name, or associate with similar people.
If you were to glimpse the lives and experiences that your consciousness is driving in these other realities, some of them may seem remarkably like your own life, while others feel bizarre and disconnected, and yet hauntingly real.
But what if it’s exhausting to drive around in any one reality endlessly? Just like you might set aside your Gameboy for a few hours to give both yourself and the device a rest, what if your consciousness needs to take occasional breaks from our reality to avoid corrupting the connection and causing bugs in the processing hardware needed to interface with this reality? And what if... that is one of the reasons we need to sleep?
Imagine if, when your body goes to sleep, your consciousness continues to interact with all those other realities that it engages with. Now, your consciousness would never leave your body and brain completely (as long as they continue to function) because it wouldn’t want some other consciousness to come along and steal its only interface with this reality. After all, your consciousness is a part of you, and you are a part of it. So it never actually leaves while your body sleeps, it just stops driving in our reality for a while.
But since your consciousness may be still driving in OTHER realities, and because it is still connected to your sleeping brain and body in THIS reality, those conditions provide just the right circumstances for you to see and hear and experience the events that your consciousness is engaging with in other realities... and retain memories of those experiences here.
So when you wake up from a terrifying nightmare that feels SO real and SO upsetting, you realize that it felt that way because SOMEWHERE in the vast reaches of the Multiverse, your consciousness was experiencing a scenario where those events really WERE happening, and your feelings of fear are valid. At the same time, you realize that you really do have nothing to fear further from the nightmare because your consciousness is far beyond the reach of anything in the Multiverse to actually hurt or kill your consciousness, including in this reality.
Or when you wake up from a wonderful dream that feels so happy and content that your heart almost aches to wake up from it, you take comfort in the fact that somewhere out there, your consciousness is driving a brain and body where that IS the reality, and you’ve tasted just how sweet that experience was.
Likewise, you never know when your consciousness is taking breaks in other realities and letting those other bodies rest. So at any time there may be an unseen connection across the Multiverse, recording your joys and triumphs, struggles and hardships, and everything in between in this life. And those memories of your experiences may be passed along as dreams to some of the other lives that your consciousness is driving.
So your dreams become like a window to a wider expanse of existence and possibility, providing glimpses of the unfathomably diverse sea of realities in the Multiverse. Instead of dismissing them as nonsense or reverencing them like portents, you come to appreciate them as opportunities to look, hear, and imagine beyond the confines of your home reality.
And doesn’t that idea make each bedtime feel just a little more exciting?
