Dreamwalking off the Cliff
New piece out in Hyperspekulation
“Consider this question: how do you know you are not dreaming right now? When you are immersed in a dream, everything feels real, until—a moment of lucidity breaks the spell. You say, “Oh, I am in fact dreaming”.
But what guarantees that you are not dreaming right at this moment? You might point to consistencies, details, or sensations of the present moment that seem too vivid, too coherent for a dream—but these ‘headful’ arguments falter under deep scrutiny. Can you be completely sure? Or is the chance that you are dreaming always nonzero?
The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi captured this paradox in a simple reflection:
“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither… conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
— Zhuangzi
So, are we real? What is certain is not any one particular answer, but the feeling the question provokes: a strange kind of uncanny (unheimlich).
This word, “uncanny”, is now commonly used in the context of animated films and AI-generated graphics. This type of “uncanny” is in effect what Mark Fisher called the ‘weird’, a nausea-inducing encounter with something alien, robotic, or artificially intelligent that doesn’t belong in our world (‘uncanny valley’). But Zhuangzi’s dream—and the lucid awareness of our limitless uncertainty—creates another longer-tail, breathier, stranger kind of “uncanny”.
As Cioran writes: “When we discern the unreality of everything, we ourselves become unreal.”
It becomes more and more apparent that everything as we know it turns around the axes of the unreal and the unverifiable: the walk of life becomes more and more of a dream-walk. Whereby, everything we think to be practical suffering—per the Buddhist expression ‘all is suffering’—is transmuted into its actual horror: all is nightmare”…
Read the rest over at Hyperspekulation.