The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

There's an outside world all around us, packed with physical stuff like plants, oceans, rainbows, and Lego blocks. And then there's the inside world where we live, full of experiences like emotions, thoughts, hopes, and dreams. Our inside world often reflects the outside one, but not always. Not when we dream. Dreams are inside experiences untethered from the outside world. Alternately mundane. Exciting. Absurd. You never know what you're going to get from a dream. What kind of stuff are dreams made of? That's easy. Dreams are collections of conscious experiences, entertainment for the ghost that lives in the machine. If dreams are bits of consciousness, what then is that? What is consciousness? That's the hard question, isn't it?

If we look closely at dreams, we discover they are forged from consciousness; if we look closely at consciousness we find a can of worms. It's confusing. 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 fundamental manifestation of reality: it cannot be made from other types of stuff. If we want to probe deeper into the story of consciousness, it will help to first consider a few things about 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 features of reality are apparent. 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 can have weight. "Immaterial fields" are weightless force fields like gravitational or electromagnetic fields, "Transcendence" is a relationship creation property, "Emergence" is the surprising appearance of something new, something for nothing, 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. You need the right recipes, but still.

Transcendence has a vital 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 following the dictum to "be more" they are joining up with each other in all sorts of different relationships. These new relationships form the next layer up from the subatomic layer, the element layer. Elements continue the layering process by combining in different ways to form the larger, more complex relationships of the 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.

"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 feature of reality, is every bit as "real" as any other feature. In its most rudimentary form, it's a small, poorly delineated region of subjective experience. You might imagine its shape to be somewhat like an electromagnetic field. Where Sentience and Transcendence features intersect 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, the sentience-transcendence combo can look like a force. That is, from the outside, Physicists measure "forces" that affect movement; from the inside, those "forces" are felt urges. In every situation, all of reality's features are present and functional. For our current purposes, however, we can simply focus on Sentience. As Sentient bits of proto-mind combine with each other, their grouping arrangements become increasingly large and complex, until finally they reach a level that supports emerging consciousness. That would be you. Everything is sentient, but only a few things are conscious. It's only at the higher levels of size and complexity that consciousness successfully emerges. Along the way, Sentience plays an important role in the creation of life, as well as a multitude of different types of mind, many of them entirely unconscious.

So, what are dreams made of? Dreams are episodes 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. Reality features are firmly connected. After all, they are just different aspects of the same thing. If you shake one feature, you are likely to perturb others. The mind-body "problem" is mostly a misunderstanding about the inter-connectedness of reality features. And that connectedness suggests an interesting possibility about the power of Sentience. "Be careful what you wish for," might just be a more important aphorism than we ever imagined... in our wildest dreams.