Philosophy Now Forum

Do bearded dragons dream? Researchers describe the existence of REM and slow-wave sleep in the Australian dragon, with many common features with mammalian sleep: a phase characterized by low frequency/high amplitude average brain activity and rare and bursty neuronal firing (slow-wave sleep); and another characterized by awake-like brain activity and rapid eye movements. [source]

Like Jung who dreamt of himself being in the dream of a yogi man, who are we to judge if something else is dreaming?
And a more general question: who can judge the experiences of another person?

By judge does this mean interpret?

I mean how can we "know" that the other being has dreams? How can we be sure for anything we do not experience ourselves?

skakos wrote:How can we be sure for anything we do not experience ourselves?

I don't think we can, even though we might try to relate to it based on our own experiences.

I'm also guessing that we cannot be completely sure about anything we experience for ourselves... because so many things can be steering and disrupting our perception. External influences, emotions, fears, patterns, programming, hormones, ignorance, and human limitations ALL affect our perception.

You know how some dreams are muddled and nonsensical... while other dreams are sharp and clear? I think wakefulness can be like that. Sometimes we're slogging through mud, mentally... and other times we're flying free. And whatever state we're in, that's typically all we can see at that time. So we don't even realize it until we somehow move beyond it. The mud mind can't see beyond itself. Like a dream that one is stuck in. Others may be trying to shake us "awake" or "out of it"... because they see our eyelids flickering and our feet moving and hear our muffled "woofs", but we're not going anywhere.

So, although our wakefulness seems "real" enough -- certainly more substantial than our sleeping dreams -- I think many variations of clarity are reflected in both, "wakefulness" and sleep. "Wakefulness" is not a guarantee of anything. It, too, can be like dreaming. We're each having our own experiences moving through mud and clarity... which not only others cannot "know", but which even we ourselves may not truly know.