For the first time I can ever remember, last night I had a dream about having a dream.<\/p>\n
I didn’t remember this when I first awoke. Rather, it was only when, after becoming really awake (at least, I hope I’m now really awake), I found myself in a situation that reminded me of my nested dream. Then it all came rushing back to me. The interesting thing is that I can remember the dream within the dream in vivid detail — obviously it made an impression on me. So much so, that I felt moved to describe it, moment by moment. to my dream friends, who were all greatly amused.<\/p>\n
I have no idea who those dream friends were supposed to be — generic stand-ins, I supposed, for the “group of people I know who are listening to me recount a dream.” Very pleasant people they were, though admittedly a little blurry around the edges.<\/p>\n
I realize this will all remind most people reading this of Christopher Nolan’s recent film Inception<\/i>. It certainly reminds me of Inception<\/i>. Except of course that Nolan wasn’t really describing dreams, but rather “lucid dreams”, in which you know you are dreaming, and can utilize all of your waking free-will.<\/p>\n
This wasn’t like that at all. At each level of my dream, I can recall being quite convinced that I was awake — a particularly ironic state of mind to be in while dreaming you are describing a dream. My experience was very much like a series of one-way mirrors, since each of my dream states could be seen into from the outside, but not out of from the inside.<\/p>\n
This of course raises the usual philosophical questions: Was I having a dream within a dream, or just a dream? Is Hamlet’s play within a play more fictional than Hamlet himself, with characters who are somehow “less real”? I haven’t the faintest idea, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to guess.<\/p>\n
Or maybe I would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the first time I can ever remember, last night I had a dream about having a dream. I didn’t remember this when I first awoke. Rather, it was only when, after becoming really awake (at least, I hope I’m now really awake), I found myself in a situation that reminded me of my nested … Continue reading “Two levels down”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5235"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5243,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235\/revisions\/5243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}