To understand dreams and the avatars* that live them, we can try to insert ourselves into the life of the avatar.
Imagine that you’re born not with the consciousness of a newborn and not with the one that inhabits you now, but one that would emerge if all distillation between unconscious and conscious thoughts was prevented along with the ability to reason. (Imagine the unconscious became the conscious). Your life is short, dangerous, and entirely determined by outside forces. You perform the show of your life in the theater of your host’s imagination. This host - who knows you to be boundlessly expendable - has created you to represent himself. He simulates a world around you, places you in it, assigns you a script, and watches as the play unfolds. Only, to you, it’s not a play. Often, you’re embarrassed in front of your friends and peers - your reputation is destroyed. Other times, you attempt a dangerous new stunt and fail painfully. Sometimes you die. Each time, you are reborn into a new - usually miserable - simulation where you do as the host instructs before dissolving in a graveyard of your past selves. You are the avatar that embodies ideas. When the host is intrigued by a new idea, he makes you act it out in the representational world so that he doesn’t have to in the real world.
But this isn’t always the case. Sometimes you wake up with agency. Yes, bad ideas are still very much fundamental to your nature, but this time, you get to act them out on your own accord, and the way the world responds is not moderated by the hyper-perceptive, hyper-rational consciousness of the host. You explore the vast wasteland of rejected realities (realities that have some agency of their own. They impose themselves on the imaginary landscape now, rather than waiting to be elected by the host. In fact, the emotional and scenic context often has more of a role in the story than you). Some are horrifying and some are amazing, and you always act as if they make sense - because you don’t know of sense. It’s ironic because the only reason you’re here to explore them is because, to the host, they don’t make sense - or at least they were too dissonant with reality to merit a sustained position in the host’s consciousness. Maybe you’re really here because the worlds the host threw out are rich with treasure that he himself didn’t have time to explore - you’re here scavenging for it. Maybe you’re here to conquer a world that terrified your host, and noble as you usually are, you took it upon yourself to assure him of his ability to face the unknown. In any case, these adventures are different. The puppet strings are detached and no matter how deep a hole you dig yourself by exploring stupid ideas, the host wakes up and rescues you before you die. This is because your consciousness has become his. He thinks he is you and you are him, and he won’t just let himself die.
These episodes of exploration - in which your consciousness is “acted out” and not stifled by the host’s logic - allow you to see what it would be like if you were real and not just a representation. From your horrible misadventures to your brilliant creativity, your temporary realness turns the chaotic possibility of the unconscious into something that can be sequentially computed. This allows for a more peaceful, coherent relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. This must be why we dream.
*Representations of ourselves that are constructed by our (conscious and unconscious) self-conception
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