I Prefer Dreams Over Reality

Sounds pretty bad, I know, but bear with me. Everything here is based only on my own experiences and explained with my own, arbitrary choice of words.

For the sake of clarity:

• Vivid Dreams: Extremely clear and detailed dreams that can be remembered for a long time.

• Lucid Dreams: The dreamer is aware they are dreaming and may have some control over the dream, characters, and environment.

My Dream Experiences

My dreams are almost always vivid, often lucid, and I am very grateful for this because I know that this isn’t the case for nearly everyone. I do not have any tips on how to achieve this, it’s just like this for me. The only effort I make is that I replay the dream in my head when I wake up so I do not forget it, which tends to happen otherwise. This is also kinda neat since I can decide what dreams to remember. When I replay the dream after waking up, it really feels like my consciousness is still connected to the subconscious where the dreams are supposedly rendered. During this, I can remember the dream in extreme detail. After replay, I feel a strange dissociative feeling for a while, sometimes realizing that I can still replay the dream in detail even though it has been an hour after I’ve woken up. When this feeling is gone, the details are lost, and I can only remember the things I paid attention to while replaying it in my mind.

Most of the time, I see the most incredible dreams, regarding the visuals and the whole environment. Sometimes thought, my dreams aren’t visual or based on a time continuum; instead, the contents revolve only around feelings and they tell a story, which is very interesting. I also have nightmares every now and then, but these have become more or less irrelevant since I can just wake up whenever I feel like it, most of the time at least. Sometimes, when trying to do this, I wake up from another dream (a dream inside a dream, I suppose) and lose the grip of the lucid aspect. This can happen multiple times in a row, which is kinda terrifying.

Life Through Dreams

I think that you can experience life through dreams in the same manner as we do in real life, especially with lucid dreams where you are in control, at least of yourself. Of course, all dreams are a sensory-deprived environment, but even with vivid dreams, all the stress and anxiety of the real world are gone. It really feels like you have been let out of some kind of a cage and you can express yourself as you truly are. This inevitably led to a question: which one do I prefer? I think you know the answer to that, but life can also be pretty awesome from time to time.

Fiction and Reality

This also led me to wonder why we, as humans, like to create and immerse ourselves in fictional stories. Through books, movies, or video games, we seek adventures and experiences that this reality does not provide. Why is that? Isn’t the world enough at its current state? Well, that might be too far-fetched since I certainly believe that there are realistic locations and situations where people would like to be in, some at least. But what keeps the humans of the Digital Age from reaching them most of the time? Are we too pessimistic, lazy, or too overwhelmed by obligations?

Conclusion

I want to mention that I see things from a nihilist point of view. Nihilism is often considered a negative mindset. In my opinion, it can be considered both a negative and positive thing at the same time, and I am not in favor of neither of those until the context is considered. A philosophical superposition, if you will.

Before diving deeper into such topics, consider the idea that consciousness, at some point, might become more of a curse than a gift.