Storytelling and Dreams

Stories are successions of causality resulting in meaning; causality itself being fictional (being “invented” by our mind, in a way that is determined by our biology, certes, but aren’t other fictions also that? which is, circularly, what I am currently demonstrating), stories and meaning are also determined by our filter, are expressions of our sieve patterns, about a world, sure, but they do not say the world, they say what the sieve is. And that there is a world, unknowable through a sieve.

The most recent studies on brain activity while dreaming (refs) suggest that story telling, building narratives to interpret our experience of the world, is a default function of our brain, which operates freely during REM sleep (what we know as “dreaming”).

When we are awake, this narrative function is constrained by the input that we receive from reality: we cannot interpret our experience in a way that is completely contradictory with, say, physical reality. I cannot walk through walls in my waking life, while I completely can in my dreams. Other forms of reality — what we could call collective or consensual reality (that which a group of people agrees exists, is real, whether it is an object or an idea, or even a moral rule), also the internalized version of this collective reality, relative to our belief in what may or may not exist, which would be called credential reality — similarly apply more constraints that define the stories (or interpretations of the world and our experience in it) that we tell ourselves and that compose, in practice, most of our experience of the world.

All of this “reality” is a construct (except, in part only, the physical), and in particular abstract collective realities (social and moral norms) strongly limit our narratives, sometimes more than our actual situation justifies. In this case, the free narrative activity of the brain during REM sleep may provide us with a solution or an alternate route or vision, by reagencing the elements of our problems without any constraints.

• dreams, give example from letter

This shows how our narrative building is an internal brain function that runs, by default and when sleeping, by combination and association without care for reality ; and when awake, various realities come to constrain that functioning into more limited narratives, which is what we live by. We don’t know reality any more by it, except negatively: it is that which comes to limit our dreams. But we can’t measure that negative contribution, since most of our brain activity is unconscious: we can’t actually know how much and how reality limits this brain function, so we have no actual, specific knowledge of reality, except that it is there (that there is something there).