A New Theory

So I could be standing atop an Aztec temple dressed in priestly robes with thousands of naked women throwing little pickles at me if only my mind were free? (You may think that's cute, but do you get the reference?)

Your theory implies that people whose minds are free of constraints could bend reality to their will. In other words, if you truly[/B] believed you could, say fly, then you would, in fact, be able to fly. Well, people under the influence of hallucinogenics sometimes believe just that (you occasionally read about them taking swan dives out of high windows) and yet remain subject to the laws of gravity and physics like everyone else.

Our mind has no limitations. Our concious thought does, but not the mind. I think dreams prove that.

If you were able to rid the conciousness of all constraints you would probably not be able to soar, but then again, you would not feel the desire to do so, since it is a desire that stems from limitation.

The mind's limitation is its inability to bring about all it imagines or dreams into the shared reality.

Hmmm... there is no such thing as "the shared reality". An illution same as the idea of objectivity. Reality is vast, and dreams are a part of it, since the creature dreaming is a part of reality.

As for bringing dreams into the waking world, that happens all the time. Takes some skill though, but many people do it. Musicians, writers, poets, artists, the list goes on.

Of course there's shared reality. It's that little sliver of foggy swamp land where our individual realities overlap one another. True Reality--that's the illusion, pragmatically speaking, since none of us can actually perceive it. I will concede that skillful artists do an admirable job of manifesting the stuff of dreams, but what they do is still merely a shadow of their dreams--a reflection of their individual realities, not those realities themselves.

I didn't state that nothing dreamed of or imagined could be fully manifested in the external reality--architects, engineers, and inventors sometimes do this, I mean, Doc Brown did invent the Flux Capacitor after dreaming about while unconscious after falling off a toilet didn't he? Oh wait, that was just a movie...

Ironically, the god that the Greeks most feared was Morpheus, god of dreams. He represented and brought men down to their degenerate animal state, not to what they aspired to become.

Well...there was that time I dreamed I was being attacked by a swarm of wasps and wound up knocking my girlfriend out of bed.... :wink:

Thalion, I aways thought that one was "...safe in the arms of Morpheus..". Then there is morphine for the control of unbearable pain.

C.S. According to Freud, dreams are wish fulfillment. I have had some really vivid dreams, but I'm not certain about your theory. It's as plausible as any, I suppose.

Mills, yes that was just a movie. But paul mccartney once dreamed a song. I don't remember wich one at present, but it was one of the many hits the beatles had. He just woke up one morning with the song in his head.

And besides, what are we working for if not the realization of our dreams? I think the inner life of each individual has a greater impact on the "shared reality" than you realize.

Letty, morphine, just as any painkiller, does not actually remove the pain. It just cloaks it so that your senses doesn't pick it up. It is an escape into illution, and the safety and comfort of it makes us stop fighting.

In the same way the greeks, who relished enlightenment, would consider Morpheus dangerous, because he could lull you with illution and make you stop your growth out of sheer satiation.

Perhaps one day we can each live in our own virtual reality and have the power to do as we wish...

And you just gave me a really cool idea for something to write. Thanks. (the cool idea wasn't the idea of the people living in the virtual reality but what they leave behind maintaining it. Imagine if the robots that are created to maintain the VR chambers are built to develop over time and build up a civilisation worshipping the sleeping gods who created them. Then again imagine if they weren't and just go right on harvesting materials on other worlds, even other worlds with life... oh there are a hundred different stories you could tell about that.)

Cyracuz:
In "Imagine," John Lennon expresses his dream of an idyllic world, but that was an expression, not a manifestation, of his dream. I sense that we are not discussing the same thing. My interpretation of CarbonSystem's initial post was that humans would have unlimited or nearly unlimited power to shape reality if only they could unfetter themselves from the constraints they believe reality has placed on them (ala Neo in the Matrix). I'm not arguing that all things dreamed of are impossible. My argument is that not everything dreamed of is possible, and that is a limitation, and that simply not believing in that limitation doesn't make it go away (i.e., the fact that one cannot fly without external help does not change because one believes he or she can, in fact, fly without external help).

But since we're already on the topic of reality, what makes pain 'real'? Pain is nothing more than one's brain's interpretation of neural signals, thus if those neural signals are blocked, then the pain ceases to exist since it only ever existed as neural signals to begin with. Now the source of those neural signals, that's another story...

The song I was referring to wasn't imagine. But anyway, point taken.

What makes pain real, you ask, and I am tempted to give another matrix answer. The mind makes it real. What I am saying is that sometimes the expectation of pain may contribute to worsening the sensation. Have you noticed that if someone throws a ball in your face it hurts much more if you knew it was going to happen?

The brain's sure a funny organ that way, and its true limitations are probably fewer than we suppose. I recall hearing in an undergraduate psychology class about an experiment where subjects developed blisters on the backs of their hands while under hypnosis. In that highly suggestible state, the researcher told the subjects that the back of their hands had been burned, and the subjects' bodies reacted as if they had actually been burned.

Of course, one must be careful of seemingly mystical occurences which have perfectly prosaic explanations, such as walking on hot coals without getting burned.