Dreams — how virtual can your reality be?
I had a dream last night, “I was walking through a long corridor of some university with some purpose which, I couldn’t fathom what? I was followed by two other girls; whom I had no clue but I seemed to know them. After couple of left & right turns and few storeys up & down and few enquires with passerby, I seem to have reached my destination. There they were seemingly distributing some books, bags and few other stationeries. While the first queue was long I skipped it and entered another room further inside where there were 3 girls overseeing the distribution. As one of them turned towards me, it was someone I knew [classmate of mine from my bachelors whom I had not seen in years]. In my dreams I seemed quite surprised to meet her there. She said she was working there; we spoke something which I couldn’t recollect, and the dream ended as I collected my materials and moved out.”
I woke up in morning, running through my reels of dream [freshly itched in my memory]. I was bewildered, to have a included a person whom I no contact for several years. Why did my brain think about “Ezhil” who was not in my close circle of friends nor had any contacts in the last 15 years or so.
There are quite a few questions, but the most bugging one is this,
when I saw her, why was I surprised?
Let me break it down.
- my brain had brought her into the dream
- so technically I knew she was there
- yet I was surprised by her presence.
Are there two autonomous parts of brains? or more than two which are working parallely without any strings of communication. Lets name them for some clarity,
- the Dream Creator
- the Dream Consumer
The Dream Creator knows that “Ezhil” is part of the dream, so my question is “why did I feel surprised”, when a part of myself created the dream. Even before she turned to face me, my brain knew it was her in that scenario, then why at all “be surprised” at her presence.
To be frank, am afraid of not knowing the fullest extent of our virtualisation capacity and what emotions it can trigger. A fragile veil that separates the autonomous parts may still perceive dangers in the virtual world as real & trigger all the responses for flight or fight, as is for a physical danger.
With virtual reality, metaverse, apple pro headset all lined up to conjour everything imaginable; perceivable as real - how would we react to those?
- Are we ready for that?
- How can they impact us?
- What does the future hold?
- When fantasy becomes convincingly real, would we want to return to sober reality?
- At what age do we start understand difference between virtual or physical world?
Like some quests of mine, this doesn’t have any answers yet. Documenting it for someone in future to unravel.
P.S: Would love to know your thoughts on these spectrum, do comment!
