"In the ages of the rude beginning of culture," wrote Nietzsche, "man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dream, and here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world. The parting of soul and body goes also with this way of interpreting dreams; likewise, the idea of a soul's apparitional body: whence all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods."
If early humans believed they had discovered in the dream a second "real world," what might they have meant? Did they merely mean that the dream world had a subjectively verifiable existence? That dreams were only real while they lasted? Or did dreams exist actually and objectively in some subtle plane of existence every bit as real as the physical world?
These are only a few of the possibilities we might consider in trying to settle the question of whether dreams are real, and if so, how the mental reality of the dream world might compare with the physical reality of the world you are reading this book in.
There are really two issues here: one is the degree to which an experience seems subjectively real (at least while it is happening). The other issue is independent of the first; this is the degree to which the experience seems objectively real in the sense that it produces actual effects on other parts of reality. We say that something really exists if it can produce an effect (of any kind) on another member of some class of existence. As an example, imagine a very special little object, which is so soft that you can't touch it; and covered with invisible paint so you can't see it, and moreover transparent to every kind of light; it is also odorless; it has no weight; and it has no other property whereby it can be grasped. In short, there seems to be no way in which you can interact with it. So how would you know it exists? We only know a thing exists when it interacts with other existing things.
But even though the subjective reality of dreams can be demonstrated that, we have not faced the bigger question: is there any evidence suggesting that dreams can be objectively real as well? There are in fact several enigmatic phenomena that seem to raise the possibility that, in some circumstances at least, the dream world may be at least partially objective. One of these enigmas is the uncanny experience in which a person feels that he or she has somehow temporarily detached from or "left his or her body." Survey data indicate that a surprising number of people have had such so-called "out-of- body experiences" (OBEs) at least once in their lives. [2] Very frequently those who have this experience become unshakable convinced that they, or at least some part of themselves, are capable of existence independent of their bodies.
Another phenomenon whose existence is widely attested to is the mysterious mode of information transfer called extra- sensory perception (ESP). A wealth of anecdotal evidence supports the idea that ESP, working across both space and time sometimes occurs. If it is indeed possible to "perceive" in some fashion events that are happening at a distance, or even those that have not yet happened, space and time must be other than what they seem, and the same thing goes for subjective and objective!
Accounts of "mutual dreaming," (dreams apparently shared by two or more people) raise the possibility that the dream world may be in some cases just as objectively real as the physical world. This is because the primary criterion of " objectivity" is that an experience is shared by more than one person, which is supposedly true of mutual dreams. In that case, what would happen to the traditional dichotomy between dreams and reality?
These mysterious phenomena that threaten the simplicity of our common sense view of life are all primarily children of the night. Surveys indicate that more spontaneous psi experiences are reported to occur during dreaming than in the waking state. Most out-of-body experiences tend likewise to occur while the person is dreaming or at least in bed. Dean Shiels, an American anthropologist, studied the OBE in 67 different cultures around the world and found that sleep was regarded as the most important source of OBEs in about 80% of the cultures in his sample. (MORE ...)
