Our present science, the one developed since the European Renaissance on, is founded upon a tacit axiom: the final referent to consider something as "real" is the experience that is presented to our natural and artificial senses, the experience of perception, be it from our human senses or from the instruments that our intellect can elaborate following the space-time intuition in which our senses operate. Reality is what can be empirically tested. As any other axiom, its proposition is unprovable, it is an ontological assumption, and conditions our entire building of knowledge, the whole of science, a set of theoretical and empirical propositions that is supposed to determine human experience in terms of dual logic. But it does not. During the mid 20th Century, Mathematical-Logic collapsed under its own theorems: arithmetic collapsed, though the whole of science pretended that nothing happened.
This axiom condemned psychology to behaviorism, conductism and neuroscience investigation. But mere neurochemistry and lab experimentation barely help to understand the outer shells of the Human Soul. One of the areas of the human psyche which suffered the most by application of the general method of empirical science to our life experience was the Realm of Dreams and Imagination, also called Mundus Imaginalis or Alam al-Mithal. The tacit axiom mentioned above relegates Mithal to unreality. An unreality in which we live, at least, one third of our existence.
I am not going to go into the criticism of neuroscientific theories that reduce the world of dreams to a recycling of information, a neural system in the process of exaption (reconversion into something evolutionary new) that fulfills the functions of cleaning and adapting emotional experiences. To begin with, if this were the case, we need to consider that such cleaning and adaptation of emotions is per se a full emotional process, something we also do while awake, so the proposal of neuroscience is basically a getting rid of the problem of dreams. Neuroscience does not have tools to enter the realm of meanings which is Mithal.
Dreams have the structure of myths, and their action occurs at the three levels of the Tripartite Soul (Volitional, Emotional and Intellectual). At the level of the Volitive Soul, in particular in its animal physiological dimension, the exaption of the neural systems that affective neuroscience speaks of, does not tend to produce the disappearance of the Mundus Imaginalis, but rather the action is the opposite: it is the Imaginal World, Mithal, the one that produces evolutionary changes and accommodates physiology to the increasing complexity of the Symbol.
Myths generate their symbolic objects, and for a moment - which can last the entire existence of a human community - we find ourselves outside the biological world, in a human world built on ideas that seem to apply accelerated exaptation to neural systems and turn them into another thing.
Is there a clear line between the so-called dream worlds and the waking world? We can say that dreams are related to wakefulness, they are another form of such state, but we could also say that wakefulness is another form of dream. Actually such a statement has been said many times in many different cultures. Let us add a layer to that proposition. Isn't sometimes waking another form of deep sleep in the sense that much of our waking life is a life of non-acting consciousness (historical, psychological, epistemological, ethical)? If a person is ignorant of the development of social forces that has led to the current social situation, is she not in a state of deep sleep in relation to things that directly affect the reality of her daily life? If you ignore the origin of writing and the human symbolization process, every time you write you act as mechanically and automatically as your body when it is in deep sleep.
On the other hand, our present sensory personal experience is being affected not only by past sensory experiences but also by conceptual constructions, identity narratives, and the rich world of our psychological life, affected by the volitional, emotional, and intellective spheres, in complex interactions. We live in a continuum of conscious experience that only the roughest forms of sensitivity polarize into two well-separated worlds. The aesthetical experience seems to confirm this hypothesis, and it should not surprise us since human beings are symbolic creatures. Human consciousness is not the performance of a mere computation, a corollary to Gödel's theorems, nor is it a mode of brain expression called the waking state. Moreover, the continuity of consciousness, as already understood by the Rishis of the Mandukya Upanishad, extends not only to the world of waking and dreaming but also to that of deep sleep.
We live in the Reality of Symbols, in an intermediate Realm between two unknowns: matter and meaning. This Realm has been called Alam al-Mithal or Mundus Imaginalis. Life is the bridge, but the bridge can only reach both sides when life is fully awaken, when the frontier between wakefulness, dream and deep sleep has been dissolved. Life, as waking human life, is the bridge.
Symbolic Reality then has a triple configuration that corresponds to the three dimensions that life integrates in its evolution towards the realms of meaning. These are the dimensions of volition, feeling and intellection, the triple distinction that the Perennial Philosophy already expressed and that in the Western world has been present since Plato. The waking world freely displays the intellective dimension based on the senses and the sequential rational thought of the fundamental temporal intuition of life as an expression of material processes. The world of dreams freely unfolds the world of feeling, without the restrictions of material inertia or the conditioning of the physical laws that apply in the material world. The world of deep sleep expresses without restrictions the volitional dimension, and it does so in a double way. On the one hand, as an impulse independent of the other two (of feeling and thinking) that connects with more fundamental realms of consciousness expressed in Symbolic Reality. On the other, as a clear reflection of the foundation that unites the symbolic continuum in its three realms: the Presence of "I Am" The clarity of the reflection is not evident from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, it is not something within everyone's reach, just as the physical ascent to the Everest is not within everyone's reach, nor is the clear memory of dreams within the reach of anyone. Not every human being remembers his/her dreams, and even smaller is the number of humans capable of giving meaning to dreams. And fewer still the number of humans capable of keeping a light on in deep sleep. This does not reduce the relevance of the experience, just as the fact that not many can understand Gödel's theorems makes them less valuable. A person with normal intellectual abilities can apply himself or herself to the understanding of Gödel's theorems if he dedicates effort and is helped to do so. A person with normal intellective, feeling and volitional abilities, if helped to do so and applied with dedication, can understand the world of dreams and wake up in deep sleep. In both cases, it may be a matter of days, months or years, but the goal is achievable.
With this I do not mean that traveling the depths of Mundus Imaginalis is merely a matter of effort, but simply that if what you want is to find pearls, at least walk along the beach, and if you can, learn to dive.
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