Drawing by Neil Hague
In its grasp I lay, powerless and fearful. Its deep black eyes take hold of me as I try to escape. Large, black and menacing they pierce my flesh like the blade of a knife. The walls tremble as more faces emerge from the dark - their eyes fixating on me as if attempting to feed on my fear. Pieces of the ceiling crumble and fall onto the bed beside me as more and more faces break through the walls. Their voices echo through my mind, causing my head to ache. The volume of their chant increases as more faces emerge. Now I am surrounded by several beings and disoriented by their presence. I close my eyes as fatigue encompasses my body and I feel myself falling through the air. Right before hitting the ground I wake up drenched in sweat. It was only a dream.
Ever since I was a child, I can remember having vivid dreams that seemed too real to be true, almost as if I were actually experiencing a different reality that was as real as the world outside my dreams. They were whole worlds different then the one that I lived in. Often my body would become susceptible to the anxiety, emotion, and pain that I was experiencing in my dreams. I could be painting a picture of a beautiful woman and listening to a classical symphony all while sleeping in my bed. Every moment I spent dreaming was a moment filled with adventure and mystery. What were these realities that I was experiencing? Were they real or just creations of my mind and my imagination?
The dream hypothesis suggests that these sense qualities that I experience in my dreams are contributed by me. That is to say that when I see a red rose and smell it and feel it, in my dream, I am receiving that information from my senses. This dreamed activity causes chemical reactions to occur, thus stimulating those senses. It is not a new experience that is occurring but rather the memory of my senses smelling, feeling and seeing the red rose. My mind contributes these experiences and I am tricked into believing that I were really holding a red rose in my hand. But if this hypothesis is the truth and dreams can be as real as the real reality, then how would I know when I was dreaming or awake? The Dream Hypothesis also suggests that an inability to rule out that I am dreaming is due to the fact that all the external objects in the environment create the reality and are not just content occupying space.
The mind is a very powerful instrument that functions as the central element in our complex arsenal of intellectual prowess. Without it, we would diffidently be in the dark. But can we truly say that the mind is just an organ that processes and holds information or is there more to what the mind does and can achieve? It is true that scientists are only now beginning to understand the human mind and how it operates and processes information. When we use our senses to perceive objects, science explains that chemical reactions occur in our brain that receive and transmit the information to the eyes, eardrum and skin to produce the sensation of smooth surface or a red apple.
The egocentric predicament argues that an object viewed by two different people could appear identical to both minds, but how could we possibly know for sure what each person is seeing? The argument suggests that each of us can only indirectly relate to another’s thoughts and experiences. This means that we can never, for sure, know what another person sees, feels and perceives of the world. We only have access to our own thoughts.
