The final images: A pale flash as the sky soaks up curdling scarlet. Flames rise and engulf the horizon. Your body wobbles helplessly and your head cranes up and around in search of help. Back to center-front and with a final gasp you lock onto the wave barrelling towards you. Burning trees are uprooted from ancient grounds and hover in the sky like zeppelins. This can’t be real. This isn’t really happening. Is it? These are your muddled, concluding thoughts as the blast overcomes you, and you realise it’s all over. But…it’s not over. Your consciousness is hanging in the midst of a silent glow. Your body is gone, but you remain. How is this possible? And then with a sudden jolt you remember yourself as the dreamer, aware in a world of your creation. A relief washes over you. An ultimate freedom. You open your eyes.

Dreams have been culturally important for thousands of years. Ancient traditions held dreaming as a process of revelation, a key to understanding the self and the mysterious forces of the universe. Nowadays, we don’t give too much thought to the nature of dreams. They’re taken for granted as background noise with little relevance to the trials of daily life.

I believe that disregarding dreams as mildly entertaining night stories is to overlook a suspiciously peculiar human experience. Not because I believe every dream is of the utmost importance and should be analysed to death. But because the overall structure of dreams: creation, forgetting, false identification, and emotional attachment is a pattern that provides a fundamental clue about the nature of reality.

When you pay attention to dreams and how they unfold, a radical possibility arises:

What if our waking life is structured exactly like our dreams?

What if existence operates as its own form of dream?

Let’s investigate.

Understanding dreams

From an objective, scientific point of view dreams are simply brain activity. But from the first-person perspective, they’re more than that. You experience them. They’re a form of imagination. Worlds, characters and stories conjured up somewhere deep in your unconscious and presented to you as vivid encounters with an intelligence beyond the rational.

When you’re dreaming, you have entered a reality of your own creation. However, unless you’re having a lucid dream (and become aware in the dream), you have no idea that you’re dreaming. Your mind has created a world and then forgotten its role as creator. In a very real way, you have become lost in your own imagination.

Next comes fragmentation. In a case of mistaken identity, you’re no longer aware of your role as the dreamer (or the dream itself). Instead, you identify with fragments of the dream world. This is usually a character in the dream, but it could also be an undefined point of view, or even an object. Either way, a process of reduction takes place, from the big mind of the dreamer to the encapsulated experience of a fragment within the dream. Yet, this encapsulation is an illusion. You are, and will forever remain, the dreamer.

For example, if you’re dreaming about being chased through a forest by a bear, you’ll feel fear. You’re identified with a dream character and therefore believe you will be hurt or killed if the bear catches up. What fails to occur to you is that you’re not just the one running away, but also the bear, the forest, and the entire fabric of the dream.

This is how the process of dreaming works. There’s creation, forgetting, false identification, and an emotional attachment to what is essentially an illusion.

Dreams reflect reality

What I’m interested in exploring here is not so much the content of dreams, but what this strange process could infer about the nature of reality. Dreams are inarguably a natural process of the mind, and that strangeness is key. Dreaming is the only time we drift unconsciously into another world beyond the one we’re familiar with. Due to this odd twist, it seems possible that the very existence of dreams is a clue to how our waking experience works too.

Consider the possibility that reality is its own dream-like experience. We go about life thinking of ourselves as individuals operating in a world of other people, objects, emotions, and stories. But what if this supposedly concrete reality is nothing more than the reflections of a dreaming mind. If our individual dreams are a product of one encompassing field of imagination, why couldn’t our waking lives work in exactly the same way?

The implications of this idea are huge:

Firstly, it would mean that you are currently experiencing a false fragmentation of identity. Just like in your dreams, you believe yourself to be a fixed character within reality. This set identity seems to be solid and persistent. But what if you’re simply imagining yourself to be a specific fragment of the dream because you have forgotten your true identity as the dreamer. If this is the case, it would mean your true nature is not a human being in a physical world, but the universe experiencing itself as a human being and imagining a physical world.

Secondly, because your true identity is now the dreamer, the substance of the dream, there would be no ultimate distinction between you and other. This twist of fate reframes all conflict, selfishness, and hurtful behavior towards others as self-inflicting wounds. All that you fear, hate or love become properties of your own being. You’d be playing a game of make-believe with yourself. Conjuring a story with imaginary contrasts. Understanding this reframes life as a game, a creative adventure, or a universal playground.

Finally, a dream-like ontology would also indicate the possibility of waking up from the dream. You wake up from your nightly dreams, so why not wake up from the dream you’re currently experiencing? Could this be what death is? The end of the dream and opening up to a larger truth beyond.

Also, the existence of lucid dreaming points to the possibility of becoming lucid within waking reality and realising it’s dream-like nature while still operating as a human within it. I believe this is what many religious traditions refer to as enlightenment or awakening. By becoming aware of the dream while still dreaming you gain insight into the nature of reality and yourself.

I want to pause here for a moment and make it clear that I’m not saying that life is literally a dream and therefore has no meaning or is not real. I’m saying that that it may be structured like a dream, its nature is dream-like, and because of this, the modern scientific conception of you being a human being living in a material world is suspicious, and possibly, flawed.

At this point, the dream to reality connection is an interesting idea, and maybe, like me, your intuition is pinging with claims of truth lurking behind what is being described here. Nevertheless, taking this on would be a radical shift in our perception of reality, and therefore, we should consider the supporting evidence.

Dreams as fractals

The basic idea I’ve presented so far is that our dreams may be smaller versions of reality, their structure mimicking the way reality itself works.

To add weight to this theory, I want to direct your attention to the naturally occurring phenomena of fractals.

Fractals are infinite patterns that repeat themselves at different scales. Or, in simpler terms, the parts that make up the whole are the same as the whole.

Below are some images of different types of fractals found in the natural world to give you a better idea of what this looks like:

The Romanesco Broccoli is a good example as you can clearly see the fractal patterns without having to rely on a microscope. Notice how the structure of the whole object (image one) is recreated within its parts (image two), and then how each part is made up of smaller parts which also reflect the larger clusters they form. This is how fractals work.

Another example, one that will land closer to home, is the fractal structure of a tree:

As demonstrated in the image above, a tree branches out, creating miniature versions of the main object. The whole tree is made up of branches that structurally mimic individual trees. These branches, in turn, are comprised of smaller twigs that repeat the original tree’s form. The design is replicated across every scale. Weird, right?

Another example of the whole being contained within its parts comes from biology:

Every cell in your body contains the DNA necessary to build the entire organism. The whole of you is genetically coded within the smallest biological part of you.

If our bodies are designed this way by nature, wouldn’t it make sense that our psychic lives are designed in a similar way? If the physical self carries the genetic totality of the organism, then the conscious self may carry the full template of the universe’s creative imagination.

When you closely examine the natural world you’ll start to notice this pattern everywhere.

If we apply the same pattern to reality and our dreams, it begins to make more sense that in the same way the floret and the branch are structured like the whole, the individual consciousness (the dream) is a miniature replica of a universal consciousness (waking reality).

Another point to note is that the structure of the whole is not merely found within the part; it is repeated by the part. This means that every single individual is not just a fragment in the dream, but is an active, miniature dreamer repeating the fundamental mechanism of the whole. The pattern of creation, forgetting, and fragmentation is the ultimate fractal mechanism.

An infinite reflection

The dream to reality connection we’ve discussed here finds a suitable philosophical expression in the concept of Indra’s Net, originating in ancient Mahayana philosophy.

Indra’s Net is described as an infinite web:

Each point of the web containing a sparkling jewel.

Each jewel acting as a mirror.

Each mirror reflecting not only every other jewel in the web, but also the reflections of every other jewel.

Each jewel an infinity contained within an infinity.

Each point believing itself to be the center of the web.

The end result is a self-creating, undefinable oneness.

In real terms, we could see each human consciousness not as isolated, but as a jewel reflecting the totality of reality in its being. When a consciousness is set free from artificial limits, while dreaming perhaps, the structure of the cosmos is reflected back, a glimpse of infinite imagination.

When applied to our waking lives, a dramatic change of perspective becomes necessary. The dream we find ourselves in is our own. And as the Dreamer, we are existentially motivated to act from totality, not from fragment. This means consciously dismantling the illusion of separation and engaging with reality without the illusion of conflict. For each of us, as a wave, as an island, as a jewel, reflects back the whole as a representation of who we are and the dreams we’re willing to dream.

Ben Worrall