A Dream Within A Dream?

Last night I had a long experience which involved feeling my body passing through membranes that were the borders of universes. At least that's what it felt like. At one point I felt my face pressed up against a sheet that flexed like rubber, a clear and vivid sensation of a border between spaces that are not visible or possible to sense in a normal state of mind. Then I also sensed the 'texture' of reality itself, as if it were composed of this flexible, almost gelatinous substance that takes on any form that we want it to.

All of which can of course be merely an illusion, my mind interpreting hallucinations in a believable way. That would be the right answer for a rationalist to reach.

However, this is the part that puzzles me, the part that doesn't fit into that rationalist's box:

At the end of it all, as often happens, I felt the space around me distorting, a visible distortion of the room around me, a twisting, a flexing of space itself, or so it seemed. It progressed through me and I saw it getting larger, more pronounced, and then I heard a series of panicked grunts.

My dog, resting on the bed a few feet away from me, saw it too. I mean, there can be no doubt. I was paying attention to the 'field' of distortion, and saw it moving toward the dog, and fully expected him to react (which he has many times in the past, as chronicled here on this blog) and he did not disappoint. He rolled his eyes in near-panic, and made those grunting noises as the 'field' approached him. I know my dog. He was clearly afraid. And he was also clearly not looking at me, but at the distortion that I too could see. He even moved back as the edge of the 'field' approached him.

I've been looking at this wrong, I think. I keep putting it in terms of 'universes' and 'multiple realities', insisting to myself that it must somehow fit into the paradigm of what science has decided is real or at least hypothetically real, but lately I'm coming around to the idea that all of that is just illusory, all of science is just illusory, all of human knowledge is just illusory. Oh, it works just fine when applied in our particular communal dream world where we've agreed on the rules, but it's useless in even attempting to describe the deeper nature of reality because it is rooted in our *belief* of how things work rather than how they actually work. The scientific mind-set is still of great value, but the data and all that prior experience is not of much use at all outside our little box, and will merely serve to further deceive us in most cases.

This is a dream, a consensual, communal dream, and so all that other stuff that we like to assign to it is ultimately false in the larger picture. Science, that enormous edifice of knowledge, that pyramid of observations and data and experimental results and advanced theories, is something truly beautiful that we have built, and we should be proud of it. However it is I think something that we have also created, hewn out of the infinitely malleable "substance" of this particular reality. We have built upon what has gone before, layer by layer, and then decided that it is true, 'proven' that it must be true, and so it becomes true to us. However, this is still Maya causing us to deceive ourselves, only on a global, long-term level.

Maya deceives, and what's left after all the deception? The deceiver itself. Maya. Reality is deception by nature, for the simple reason that it gives us what we are expecting it to, every time, and at all levels of examination, from the smallest to the largest. Given that, we cannot help but deceive ourselves.

Even perhaps while on salvia. One must be careful to not be too quick to accept anything to be true on first blush.

The idea of me sensing different universes is all well and good, but how does the dog see them too? That's the sticking point. I'm the one on salvia. Logically, he should not be able to sense anything, even if hypothetically I am actually sensing what it seems that I am sensing.

So I asked myself, what *would* the dog be able to sense? What kind of disturbance could I hypothetically create in my room that a dog can see, just by me seeing it?

If I see the borders of universes or distortions in space because I have sufficiently altered my senses and changed my perceptions of reality so that I can see them, that's me seeing them. Good for me. However, the dog would not see them, because he doesn't normally see them when I'm not seeing them, or at least it certainly doesn't appear that he ever does. My being able to see them does not in any way translate to my dog also being able to see them. So perhaps that's not what they are.

What can they be? What would the dog sense as well? Only one possible answer as far as I can see.

Distortions in the communal dream itself.

If we all co-create reality, it logically follows that if one of us suddenly alters their expectations of said reality on such a basic level that it alters their contribution to the dream itself, produces a "ripple" in the communal dream, a subtle distortion of the gestalt experience, that would be the kind of thing that hypothetically a dog might be able to see or at least sense. Or a sleeping person, like all those times that my sleeping wife reacted to it as well.

If these things were actually multiple universes, or distortions in space, how could me seeing them on salvia possibly cause my dog to see them too?

Not possible. Not even remotely possible.

However, if this is all a communal dreamlike state in which we, all observers, even animals, contribute to the "final product", then a sufficient alteration of my contribution to the experience might hypothetically distort the communal experience enough for another being to sense something amiss.

This is what I'm coming to. All the quantum physics research that points to multiple realities is a blind alley, or perhaps at best a shadow of the truth cast upon the wall of our dogged insistence upon a belief that all is and must be as it appears to be. It's just what happens when we look at the dream closely enough, in enough detail. Reality, which it so say the Dream of Reality, is merely giving us what we expect it to in that context: Apparent possible explanations for the inexplicable. That's why they make little sense to us. Because we're trying to define and examine a reality that isn't there, and the dream of reality is allowing us to find things that seem to explain it.

But that's all just us trying to define the box from inside it. Not gonna happen.

If we always get what we expect to find in some way, then the only way to see the truth is to realize that they truth is merely that we always get what we expect to find, and knowing that, one can deduce that the true nature of reality is just that and that alone, no other frills attached.

That's it. We're done here. No need to go further into it. It really is just that simple.