Life Is but a Dream ...

Row, row, row your
boat Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream

Many ancient traditions of thought hold that life is a dream or an illusion. Chuang Tzu, a famous Chinese philosopher, wrote about the great Chinese emperor who dreamed that he was a butterfly. Upon waking, the emperor said that he couldn't be sure whether he was an emperor dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was an emperor. Ancient Hindu thought tells us that life is an illusion, which they call maya. Many spin-off traditions, such as Buddhism, insist that not only life but also self is an illusion. They argue that the flow of events tricks the mind into thinking that a separate self is present and that all suffering is a consequence of this belief in separate self. Christianity tells us to look for fulfillment not in this world but in the kingdom to come. Jesus encouraged us not to worry or lay up treasure in this world but instead to prepare for an eternal life that was more important and more real. Plato in the Greek tradition said that life was like having your back to a fire in a dark cave and thinking the shadows on the wall were real. Why did the greatest philosophical minds of history see such truth in this position?

Until recently modern science took the exact opposite stance. The scientific materialist tradition asserted that only what could be measured was real. All phenomena had to be explained in terms of cause and effect. Interestingly enough, what was considered measurable 150 years ago is very different from today. Our technology has advanced so much, and we measure things that were not even thought of when science was young. The idea of brain waves was highly ridiculed as preposterous when Hans Berger first discovered them in the early twentieth century. Today we topographically map brain waves for diagnostic purposes without a second thought. In recent times, quantum mechanics has forced us to reassess the meaning of cause and effect. The equations and measurements regarding the difference between waves and particles are challenging our ideas about what is matter and what is energy. The difference between what is solid and real, and what is ephemeral appears less significant than what we previously thought. What is real has become once again, as Steven Hawking (1988) notes, a metaphysical question regarding quarks.

Many scientific thinkers today are again finding value in the traditional philosophies of the past. Fred Alan Wolf (1994) has proposed that the universe dreams itself into existence, and he supports his theory with some intriguing arguments grounded in the new physics. Michael Talbott (1991) builds on the work of the famous neurosurgeon and researcher Karl Pribram to explore the idea that we live in a holographic reality constructed by the brain itself. More recently physicist Leonard Susskind has found powerful evidence to