i dream therefore i am

It sounds like you’ve read this Pim Von Lommel book (Pom Von Lommel?). I guess I am going to dismiss it out of hand. It just sounds to me like people relating dreams, and then there’s that subjectivity thing, like when those seedy psychologists question kids to see if they are victims of satanic cults, but do it in such a way that the kids say whatever the psychologists want them to say. I imagine myself coming out of a coma and this doctor asking me if I saw a light. “Uh, yeah, sure Doc.”

And then there is a confusion of the material and the spiritual. I assume the doc is using his instrument readings to determine who has approached that bridge, no I think it is a tunnel, between life and death, but how can instruments detect something like that? What if some guy in to get his tonsils taken out wakes up from a nap and claims to have seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but the instruments don’t show any approach to death, do they tell him, no, you were in some other tunnel? I’m not buying it at all. Some of these guys were just dreaming and some of the others were just saying what the doc wanted them to say.

Interesting thought though, when do you cross the line? Can you take a few more steps and peer into whatever is behind the light, when do you cross the point of no return? Maybe you get close enough to hear the Lord strumming that harp and your feets just have to move, or maybe it is that other guy and you are impaled on a pitchfork. I have to say sometimes I fear that I will wake up and St Peter will be quoting to me irreverent sentences like the previous one and I will be ass over teakettle into the fiery lake, and let me laugh my way out of that one.

How about this one? I was reading a story in a magazine and at one point this charaters mother comes to him in a dream and he, aware that he is dreaming, tells her that she is not real, and she tells him that she will prove that she is real, and then the story goes off in another direction. But it got me to thinking, how could she have proved that she was real? She could pull off some miracle, but that wouldn’t mean shit because miracles are a dime a dozen in dreams. She could tell him some fact that only he could know but that wouldn’t mean anything either because everything in the dream would be from him, so of course she would know. Seems to me if you ever found yourself in the predicament of being in somebody else’s dream there is no way you could prove to them that you were real.

Of course if the guy is awake, and you are like some mythical being and the guy thinks you are a hallucination you can prove you aren’t by setting a bush on fire or telling him something only he could know. But how could you prove to him that he was awake and not dreaming? You could just do something ordinary because ordinary things almost never happen in dreams, but then talking trees seem as ordinary as anything else in a dream.

Sometimes I see a distinction made between being alive and being conscious, conscious being that I think I am conscious, therefore I am. Some people claim that only people have consciousness and other animals are more like machines, just following their instincts. Of course we can never know one way or the other about this, but it doesn’t make sense to me. I think that whole machine theory is based on the fact that animals don’t have language, therefore they can never think that they have consciousness. But what about those sign language and computer chimps, who have something like a language? But how would you ask a chimp if it was conscious? I could ask you, a human, and I would assume we are both talking about the same thing.

But what if you said no? How could you know that you didn’t have consciousness unless you had it?