The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Tonight. It will happen again. You may be able to avoid it for awhile, but it's inevitable... eventually, you will dream. Hopefully, it's the happy kind. Happy or sad, dreams are brief bundles of consciousness, inner fantasies we entertain while we sleep. By "consciousness" I mean inner, or subjective, experience. For example, I might say that your consciousness is what it feels like to be you. Where "feels," refers to an inner experience available only to you.

If we look closely at dreams, we discover they are forged from consciousness; if we look closely at consciousness what do we find? It's complicated. Let's start with the blindingly obvious. Consciousness is not something that's just in your head, it's real. It's a genuine part of reality. Moreover, while it comes in different varieties, consciousness is actually a basic manifestation of reality: it cannot be created from other types of stuff. If we want to understand consciousness better than that, it will help to understand a few things about the nature of reality.

To begin with, reality has layers, like an onion. Each layer being assembled by its members. Member features important in that construction include size, complexity, and the properties they bring to the party. Let's take a closer look. Obscured in the mists of infinitesimally small size, neutrons, protons, and electrons are members of the innermost layers, the core of the onion. Even at this scale, the basic aspects of reality are operating. These include at least seven kinds of stuff: space, time, material substance, immaterial fields, transcendence, emergence, and sentience. What is meant by "space" and "time" is more or less obvious. "Material substance" is anything that has weight. "Immaterial fields" are weightless force fields like gravitational or electromagnetic fields, "Transcendence" is a relationship creation property, "Emergence" is the surprising appearence of something new, and "Sentience" is rudimentary mind-stuff, the simplest variety of consciousness. As far as we know, these are the basic ingredients that make up everything in the cosmos. Of course, you need the right recipes, or for you nerds, algorithms.

Transcendence has an important role in layer creation: establishing relationships. It has one rule: Be More. In conjunction with Sentience and Emergence, that rule often yields an urge to "reach out and touch someone." To see how this might work, consider the subatomic layer, whose members include neutrons, protons, and electrons. Picture this: we have a bunch of subatomic particles scurrying about, and in an effort to "be more" they are joining up with each other in all sorts of different relationships, thereby creating the next layer up from the subatomic layer, the element layer. Elements continue the layering process by combining in different ways to create a molecular layer, with its own emergent properties. This layer creating process repeats, with each new layer being more complex, with larger member organizations, and new properties... ultimately creating our universe. Of course, as the layering process creates increasingly complex arrangements of material stuff — subatomic, elements, molecular, etc, it is also creating increasingly complex arrangements of sentience. Without a doubt, sentience is glorious. But it comes at a cost: the lonely prison of subjectivity.

"Panpsychism" asserts that Sentience is everywhere. That's because Sentience, like other foundational properties, exists from the smallest to largest scales, from subatomic particles to galaxies, and beyond. "Sentience", can be described as the ability to experience feelings. Or simply, subjective experience, experiencing from the inside. You are Sentient. You experience what it feels like to be you. No one else can. When you look at a friend, you visually experience them from the outside, i.e., objectively. But you do not experience what they are feeling on the inside, i.e., their subjective experience. If, for example, the two of you are sharing a meal, you do not know what the chicken tastes like to your friend. You cannot access their taste experience. (Pro tip: it tastes like chicken)

Sentience, as a foundational aspect of reality, is every bit as "real" as any other aspect. In its most rudimentary form, it's a small, poorly delineated region of subjective experience. When Sentience and Transcendence are combined in the midnight kitchen of reality, one result is an inner experience, an urge, to form relationships. That's what it "feels like" on the inside. But every inside has an outside. From the outside, Sentience can look like a force. That is, from the outside, Physicists measure "forces" that can make things move; from the inside, those "forces" are sentient urges. As sentient bits of proto-mind combine with each other, their grouping arrangements become increasingly large and complex, until finally they reach a complexity that supports emerging consciousness. That would be you. Everything is sentient, but only a few things are conscious. It's only higher levels of complexity that that can support consciousness. Along the way, Sentience structures create life and a multitude of different types of mind, many of them entirely unconscious.

So, what are dreams made of? Dreams are islands of consciousness. We tend to think of them as imaginary, as in, not real. But it turns out, in reality, they are totes real, just as "real" as anything else. Like the faces of a solid cube, reality aspects are firmly connected. If you shake one aspect, you are likely to perturb others. And that suggests something about the power of thought. "Be careful what you wish for," might well be a more important aphorism than we ever imagined... in our wildest dreams.