What Is a Dream? What Is Real?

A lot happens in a dream.

But did the dream itself happen or not.

What does it mean for something to have “happened” or not.

Any “happening” how can we “know” has happened or not?

Only through “experience”.

But then I “experienced” delusions during my bipolar disorder episodes in the past.

Once I gulped a tablet, I “knew” that it was a “delusion”, which is to say that although I had “experienced” it but once I took the tablet and realized it was a “delusion” whatever it is that I “thought” or “believed” I was “experiencing”, that is to say, the “experience” was NOT real.

But then, compared to the so-called “delusion”, whatever I was “experiencing” in the current present was telling me that the past “experience” of the delusion was not “real” and only “imaginary”.

But then, one is now talking of “relative” reality. Compared to “some” experience, some other experience can feel like unreality.

But who’s to say the “current experience” is “real” because some other “future experience” may show the current experience also to have been merely “delusional”.

Which is why perhaps Edgar Allen Poe wrote that poem — “Dream Within a Dream”.

Does that mean we are stuck now?

To be sure, this is a Cartesian move, but what is the “cogito, ergo sum” that we can discover thereby?

Since it is clear that every experience is threatened by a future experience whereby it could get exposed to be delusional, then NO experience can be indubitably certain as being non-delusional — in fact, one does not even know what criteria one could apply to ascertain such a thing. More troublingly, any criteria we do come up with would themselves be based on some experience from which they are derived, so it becomes a circular argument.

This shows that there can be no “experience” that can be shown to be the “real deal”.

Then what are we left with?

Only two things: (1) The process of experiencing, and (2) The experiencer.

Now, every “experiencing” is always with reference to “someone” experiencing it or the “experiencer”. So, if we pull on one, the other comes along.

Hence, let us see if the “experiencer” himself/herself/itself is itself real or delusional.

But, to set oneself such a task is to be operating from outside the framework of “experiencer-experiencing” because if the “experiencer” is indeed delusional, then such a delusional entity cannot give itself the certificate of “non-delusional entity”.

So, the only certainty or certificate, if it all it has be found or issued, can only come from an entity that is itself NOT delusional but REAL.

Hence, the VERY entity conducting this investigation into experiencer-experiencing-experience has to be in a way be looking at that triad (triputi as it is called in Vedanta) objectively.

Plus, the triad cannot exist if even one entity in the triad is missing or NOT happening. So, the triputi entails itself. Then, in which case, if experience is suspect, then the experiencer it entails also has to be suspect because each one is co-dependent on the other.

Hence, there is NO certainty of the reality of the triputi.

Then, the only entity that can be REAL or NON-DELUSIONAL has to be that which is “looking”, “questioning”, “examining”, “understanding” this triputi.

What is that entity?

Whatever that entity is, it cannot be caught in the flux of this triputi.

So, it cannot be part of this stream of this triputi.

But the whole world of thinking, feeling, perceiving, sensing is this triputi.

So, that entity cannot be found in this world.

Then, where does one find it?

Ah, the very one that asked the question, “Where does one find it?” is that entity or that is the only entity left that can be such an entity.

And only that entity can “know” what it is. The “experiencer” cannot know it.

So, maybe the one you are in search of you already are.