People all over the world have only three states of experience – waking, dream and deep sleep. The dream state of human experience has been the subject of many kinds of research and study across millenniums. The Egyptian hieroglyphics containing dreams and their interpretations are numerous. Interpreting dreams is the process of fixing a meaning to dreams. Almost every culture in the ancient times, including Indian and Chinese, accorded some level of importance to dreams and their analyses.
However, the most interesting aspect of dreams is that they help question the basic reality of people’s existence. Assume someone dreams of visiting France. And then he goes to the Cannes Film festival where he has dinner with movie stars. In the middle of a sumptuous dinner, he wakes up – in his bed in New York. This person, like all people all over the world, has an instant realization that the experiences that preceded the waking were a mere dream. They were unreal and that reality is as it is now – in a bed in New York.
The question is when did he know it was a dream? People recognize dreams only in the waking. It was only after waking up that the dreamer found he was never in France and there was no dinner at the Cannes Film Festival. As long as he was in the dream, there was no knowledge of the experiences being a mere dream. They were real – as real as the space, time and objects experienced in waking. So who is to say that we are not in a dream now? If one can claim an experience to be a dream, one has to be in another state (like waking) to make that claim. As long as one is in the dream, it does seem real. Doesn’t our waking state seem real to us now?