Awoke from dream! Why?

24/2/2010

Last night I was awoken from my deep sleep by a rustling sound. I came around and heard the rustling and got thinking about what it was. I concluded it was a mouse – I had a mouse in my room last week. I decided it wasn’t a problem and would deal with it in the morning and went back to sleep. Then I got to remembering what had just happened…. why did I need to wake up to decide to go back to sleep again? What is the purpose of wakefulness?

It is apparent that consciousness does serve some purpose. I have to agree with D.Dennett here. What was completely startling was the realisation that possibly I had to wake up to decide not only what to do, but also what it ”was”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do we actually know what things are in our dreams? This has got me puzzled. Is it only when we wake up and remember a dream that we know what it was? To be decided. Got me thinking that maybe the Chinese philosopher who woke up from a dream thinking he was a butterfly could not now be a butterfly dreaming he was a man!

One way or the other however it seems that consciousness may have a role in the higher level functions of essential judgement… i.e. judgements based on what something is.

A friend once awoke from a dream to see his alarm clock as a big buzzing wasp. He had been smoking a lot of grass which would have helped the hallucination. Did his brain confuse the alarm buzzing with a wasp, but only when consciousness kicked in did he identify it as a wasp? OR did his unconscious mind think it was a “wasp” before he become aware of it. I siding with the former now, the latter is philosophically problematic because it leaves consciousness like a watcher in the cinema with no involvement - an epiphenomenon which is where I already have been stuck for many years.

10/8/23

Okay so finally got an answer to this from within Mahayana Buddhist theory. This version courtesy of Thich Nhat Hanh.

So basically the only consciousness that sleeps is the Mind. While asleep the 5 Sense consciousnesses and Store House consciousness are still operating as usual. It means that we can hear a sound and do some basic processing on it while asleep. But if it is interesting it will stimulate the Mind consciousness to activate and that is waking up. I am unsure where the Self-Consciousness fits into this, whether it sleep too. But when we wake we are not self-conscious it can take quite a while to start all the narratives about who we are and what we think about our self. So empirically I'd say the Self-Consciousness sleeps too. This is actually handy given that meditation is very much about getting free from these two consciousnesses (Mind and Self) to see them for what they are. But anyway in 2010 I was seeing the mind as a unified thing and the self to be an integral part of that. It was not "me" that awoke, at least not initially. My senses and Storehouse were not even asleep. What I noticed was the coming into existence of the Mind consciousness. And that is a complex thing to say. "I" was not already in a cinema waiting for the film to start. "I" was asleep. What happened is that Mind consciousness started and that is all that we need to experience things. Mind consciousness by definition has everything needed to be aware. Once it starts there is awareness. Later Self Consciousness may start and usually it then owns Mind consciousness and creates the awareness of "what I am seeing" or "that I am seeing" but this is a separate consciousness from the seeing things. And that a separate consciousness from the seeing itself. That is 3 layers of consciousness involved in our daily experience of seeing. So its quite interesting using the Mahayana schema to explore the subtleties of what seems at first look to be simple and unified. But sleep is a definite way in to break up this apparent simplicity.