The Law of Dreams
The Nature of Dreams
Dream Journal
Dream Hallucinations★★★
June 6, 1999
June 6, 1999
Several times during the early morning I opened my physical eyes while dreaming and the surroundings were right out of the dream, mapped over the physical bedroom. For example, this man was standing there. Looks like a dresser and a lamp, no? Well it was very clearly a man with a rice-picking hat, and next to it, on another occasion, the closet door was an arm raised up high. That became the most likely interpretation of that sense data and gradually it faded to the reality of being parts of our bedroom. How far can the context of a situation stretch its appearance? There’s probablyno limit.
Dream Hallucinations: Here are some more great examples. See how amazingly far context can stretch the raw sensory data? It almost doesn’t matter at all what you’re looking at. It’s almost entirely secondary to context and expectation. The mind only needs to make minor adjustments to account for it. “It’s still a man,” says the mind, “he just appears to have a rice-picking hat on.”