This apparent paradox of realities is one we all have experienced. But because most of our dreams lack any real lucidity and fade soon after we awake, we often dismiss the realities they present us as fictitious or imaginary. Every once in a while you may have a powerfully vivid dream that even after waking lingers both in detail and emotional impact for a considerable amount of time. You may narrate the dream to others, commenting "how real" it felt and search for some hidden meaning or symbolism. This felt real-ness of the dream coupled with the clear lingering memories in your mind are what attribute the sense of reality to the dream.
Three Anomalies
Patients under the influence of painkillers such as Morphine, regularly experience dreams and hallucinations of a highly detailed and logical nature. They sometimes report not being able to differentiate between reality and their dream states precisely because the two resemble each other so closely. In these cases, they often struggle to establish which reality is the real one, by attempting to identify which reality has more inconsistencies. In particularly traumatic events, the hallucinating or dreaming mind may create a reality which is more consistent than the reality that person actually lives in. An example is of a person I know who was in a car accident in which some of her family members perished and she alone survived. In the hospital for weeks under the influence of Morphine she lived in an alternate reality where her family was still alive and in fact were attempting to convince her that the accident had never happened and that she had made it all up in some paranoid hallucination. Oscillating between the two realities, it took a considerable amount of effort of will for her to finally stabilize within the reality in which the car crash did happen, her family did perish and she lay in a hospital bed recovering. But what of the other reality?
On the other hand consider a person who having suffered some form of injury has suffered a severe memory loss. You have often seen films in which this is the case. For this person the reality of the life that existed prior to the accident simply does not exist. Even if the events of the person's life are narrated back to them, even if they are shown photos or videos of their past, it seems to lack any feeling of real-ness and since there are no lingering memories of the events there is no sense of reality. So did that past reality exist?
The third example is that of an individual that may be diagnosed as schizophrenic. This person may experience sights, sounds, smells, objects, events and people that, within our consensus reality, simply don't exist. Our lack of understanding around the subject leads us to categorize such individuals as mentally insane and we medicate them. Yet that individual's experience of their own reality is that it feels just as real as yours. Even the memories they create are of people and events that have never actually occurred in your reality. What often accompanies the experience of schizophrenia is an attached sense of paranoia. It is this paranoia that the individual and those around them (family members, doctors) react to the most. The paranoia is often simply a reaction to the realization that the reality you are living in is out-of-synch with the one others are experiencing. There is an overwhelming feeling of panic that ensues followed by a sense of deep and utter isolation that very few can imagine. No matter how alone you feel in your life, the sense of sharing this same one reality with all those you know and love, provides a foundation of security and balance that we take for granted. Imagine waking up one day and finding out that the reality you live in is entirely your own and you cannot share this with anyone. You cannot experience a greater isolation than this. It is often thought that a schizophrenic mind is an irrational mind, yet some schizophrenics are highly rational people. A popular example is the one of John Nash, genius mathematician and Nobel prize laureate. He was portrayed by Russel Crowe in the film "A Beautiful Mind". For years, Nash had and maintained relationships that never existed in the consensus reality. And eventually his means of coping was the acceptance that the second reality was only his hallucination. The inconsistency that allowed him to anchor himself was that the people he "imagined" never aged. Similarly, many individuals diagnosed as schizophrenic regularly experience overlapping realities. So which reality is real?
Defining Reality
In order to answer any of the questions posed above, it is first necessary to identify how we define reality. Is reality this disconnected and separate entity which exists independently of a person? That has been the general answer that we have, as a species, accepted as true. We have come to accept that reality is a steady state system in which the individual is only a part. This part can only interact with the whole in a very limited manner, through word and action. Yet, discoveries in quantum physics have revealed that reality is not as easy definable or identifiable as we previously thought. Rather than a fixed state, reality is more like a wave of potentiality. In fact, there is no such thing as a reality, only potentiality. What we call reality is a characteristic that is contributed by the observer. In other words, when an observer (a point of Consciousness) interacts with waves of Potentiality, they collapse into fixed particles - what we would refer to as Reality. (Read A Universe Out Of Nothing for an elaboration).
And so in this version, Reality is no longer some static state that is independent of the individual, but instead is wholly dependant on the individual to create it. An analogy that may help to illustrate this further is to imagine a blank canvas. This canvas is Reality. It is completely blank. What this canvas contains is the potential for a line to appear here, a curve to appear there, an angle to appear somewhere else. There are an infinite number of dots, lines or pattern combinations that can be created on this canvas. And yet the canvas also presents certain limitations. No line can appear outside the canvas, no line can go through the canvas. The canvas presents the limitations yet does not actually create anything. It is the individual who must choose which potentiality to give Reality to, what wave to collapse into a particle - in other words what line to draw. You can think you are creating something new, but in fact you are only choosing which invisible path on the paper you want to make visible, using ink. The paths already potentially exist. Every line you can possibly draw already exists in potential form. Michelangelo is quoted to have said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." This is in effect how Reality works.
This perspective on Reality is a game changer. Because what this says is that each and every individual is creating and interacting with a completely unique and separate reality. Because in every moment no two peoples' Consciousness are the same.
Now imagine a group of artists in an art class painting their own picture. There is a nude model in the center of the room and each artist is attempting to paint as exact a rendition of the model as they possibly can. Once the paintings are complete, they all get together and compare. Because all their paintings are so nearly identical to each other (varying only in perspective but in 100% agreement of the details) they all agree that their paintings represent reality. This is what we mean by "consensus reality"- (a reality in which is perspective is unique but the details are uniform). It is the reality everyone 'agrees' exists. But then sitting alone in a corner of the room is an artist who seems unusually quiet. And so the rest of the group shuffles over to see what he has drawn and instead of a nude model they see the painting of a vase. When questioned on it, the artist claims that this is what is sitting in the center of the room. The group labels him insane and attempts to correct him. Or perhaps, the artist's canvas is blank and this is what he perceives in the center of the room. Or perhaps, the artist's canvas is the picture of a nude model standing with her dog. In each case, because the lone artist's view of reality is so completely out of synch with the consensus reality, the rest of the group labels the artist: in the first case as hallucinating/dreaming, in the second as an amnesiac, in the third as a schizophrenic. So what is really in the center of the room? Can this question even be answered? Given the information I have provided you, if you were to answer in accordance with the larger group, perhaps you also believe in reality being a consensus reality. However, if you were to allow that all the possibilities exist then what you are allowing is that reality itself has no real-ness to it. The real-ness is what the individual feels.
And so the only answer we can attempt to the above question is: none of them and all of them.
The Source of Reality
In working with this paradigm, we find that Reality is in fact the creation of an individual's consciousness. It then becomes evident that each person's reality is entirely their own and is completely disconnected from another person's reality. In fact, this Universe you live in and experience daily is not the Universe. It is your Universe. You are the sole creator of this entire infinite expanse of galaxies and solar systems, the Sun and the Earth, the Oceans and Continents, the Plants and Animals, all the people on the planet, your family and friends, all of it. Everything that exists is the creation of your own individual Consciousness. This may be too absurd to fathom but think of this instead:
Imagine you have a dream and in this dream you live an entire lifetime. In this lifetime you are a particular person, you grow and you age, you meet people, you have a family, some die, you experience joy and illness and eventually you perish. Waking up from this dream you realize that it was all a dream. But within the dream it all felt real. So what was it that felt real? What was that quality of real-ness and where did it come from?
Now, you will agree that you created the entire dream world. Each character and their story, each event, the details, the places and things you saw, it was all your creation. Yet simultaneously, you identified yourself as only one character in the dream, the main protagonist. You imagined yourself as one single person interacting with the environment and the other characters you experienced. But on waking you can see that it was all you. You were not that single character in a Universe of others, rather were the entire Universe, even though the real you doesn't exist in that Universe. The real-ness of the dream Universe that you felt was really your own sense of existence which you then projected into your dream world. What felt so real, what lent the whole experience of real-ness was your Consciousness. Real-ness (what we may also refer to as Existence or Presence) is a quality of Consciousness.
(the Buddhists have a term for this that they call "suchness". It is the quality of the existence of everything. We often separate this sense of existence by separating this "suchness" from the experience of "am-ness" which is the sense of your own personal existence. However, this sense of am-ness and suchness are really one and the same. In fact, your sense of being is what imparts the sense of existence to the entire Universe)
Everything that Consciousness creates is experienced as real, just like everything water encounters is experienced as wet. Wetness is a quality that identifies the interaction of water, similarly Presence or Real-ness is a quality that identifies the interaction of Consciousness. In other words, everything that exists only exists because Consciousness that has created and permitted its existence. You literally create the Universe in each moment. By "you" in this case I am not referring to the "person" you identify yourself to be, but the Consciousness that is creating the whole experience, just like in the dream analogy above. While your point of view may for the moment be fixated in the reality of being this one person, your true identity is more linked to the Consciousness that is feeding that reality.
Chuang Chou was both the man dreaming of the butterfly and the butterfly dreaming of the man, and yet he was neither the butterfly nor the man.
