Dream Worlds

About 2300 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tau dreamt of a butterfly. He got up in the morning and asked himself a question: “How would I know if I was Chuang Tzu dreaming of a butterfly — or if right now I’m a butterfly dreaming I’m a man named Chuang Tzu?”. French philosopher Rene Descartes, in his vision of understanding what’s real and what’s not, asked an interesting question through a Thought Experiment: “Is someone stimulating my brain in such a manner as to make me believe that I’m here and I’m touching the ground and seeing those people and hiring those sounds?”. Is that too much to ask from approximately 2,500 square centimeters of our brain?

Scientists have been working on getting a better understanding of the functioning of our brain. We, as humans, have just managed to scrape though the surface. We work with finite number of neurons, which need to multitask all the time. This multitasking of neurons have their own issues, as we fail to register the reality as it is but interpret the same, as per our convenience. No wonder scientists have managed to implant false memories in our brains. The human brain develops only in right kind of cognitive stimulations and right proportion of emotional care. No wonder, this process of building the ‘intelligence’ takes around 25 years in humans. The degeneration starts after the brain is 50 years old. All of this leads us to one simple question: What is real and what is not. To address this question, let’s understand the concept of Multiverse.

William James coined the term ‘Multiverse’ in 1895. With this word, he was referring to ‘confusing moral meaning of natural phenomena’. He never used it for what it stands for now. As we understand today, Multiverse is a group of multiple universes. These multiple universes comprise everything that exists at this point in time: the absolute space, the relative time time, the matter (including the Dark Matter), the energy, the known and unknown information, and the physical laws together with the constants that describe these laws. The idea is so weird that leading Cosmologists, Quantum physicists and Philosophers — all have tried to understand the concept and have proposed theories related to the concept of Multiverse. Some claim that Multiverse exists, and others challenge the thought of a Multiverse. The idea of ‘Free Will’, according to me, is indirectly connected with this belief in the Multiverse concept, where at every stage of my life, I can exercise ‘Free Will’ taking the decisions and each of these decisions will have its own consequences, and me, as the actor, will have to live through these consequences. Possibly, in another Multiverse, I would take another route and live the related consequence. For those of us who have read and practiced Scenario Planning would be better placed to relate to this concept. For the sake of taking the conversation forward, Quantum theory predicts a multiverse. According to a study, the probability of us living in a simulation is about 50%. The chance of us creating perception of reality is about 50%. Add to this the fact that according to quantum physics, there’s a possibility that we don’t die but transcend into a different universe after we die, at least theoretically, leaving our body in this universe. So, we have a theoretical ‘proof’ of parallel universes and we move from one to another. Needless to say, we don’t have any reliable witnesses to this phenomenon.

Metaverse, in simple words, is a creation of a parallel universe that would help me escape my existing universe (for the time being) using an Artificial Intelligence platform and Virtual Reality headset. Although in the idea state, it will help me immerse myself in that artificial universe, engage with my friends, make new friends, buy stuff that i need, and get entertained. This idea is a prequel the concept of a Multiverse explained above, where I live a parallel life, possibly with a different outcome. Metaverse helps me create a parallel universe with my consciousness intact in my existing world. I am aware of my duality and I design my experiences in a controlled atmosphere, possibly with the help of a service provider. If you have played games such as Decentraland, The Sandbox and Chromia, you have experienced the initial version of the Metaverse. I will not be wrong if I say that we all have experienced the Multiverse in some way. Now, that’s a controversial statement but think about it for a second.

I go to sleep and sometimes I escape to a different universe, with my body staying intact in my present universe. I call it a DREAM. I dream when I am asleep and there are four stages of sleep: the first three are non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and the fourth one is rapid eye movement (REM) stage. In the REM, the brain becomes more active, the body gets relaxed and immobilized, eyes move rapidly and dreams occur. But the brain does not know its a dream and it lives that experience (of a dream) the way it lives the experience (of reality when I am conscious) for the rest of the day. It’s quite difficult to remember the dream and reproduce it the next morning in detail. Some of us do remember some part of it.

Here’s a thought experiment for you: what if we move to a multiverse every time we sleep and graduate to the REM? When I am in REM, my body gets immobilized but my brain is active and lives ‘that’ life during ‘that’ period of ‘dream’. I completely get immerse in that situation, with my body reacting to ‘the’ situation I am in, the same way as it would, when i am in a similar situation in my conscious life. I ‘live’ that life at that moment. The question here is do I transcend into a ‘parallel universe’ when I dream? What if I give more weightage to the life I live in my dream (a couple of minutes to a couple of hours). This takes us to our argument of giving weightage to unto 2 hours of dream experience versus unto 22 hours in a day. Well, all I can say is ‘Time is relative’.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jhxvDbCSrSY