I know it sounds surreal right? I guess it would be more exact to say I’m dreaming of an end of my consciousness, but it’s probably better if I lay down some groundwork before I get ahead of myself. I’m grasping at straws at this point, and I’m desperate for any help, so please bear with me. For as long as I could remember, I’ve dreamt pretty much every night. Not to say that I remember every single dream, especially after a night of drinking… but even on days that I can’t remember the dream, I still can’t shake the feeling that I did dream that night.
In any case, dreams have played a significant part in my life. They’re almost like a daily movie I get to enjoy, only I don’t get to choose the title. I wouldn’t say they’re always the most vivid and some are quite mundane, but there have been plenty that made quite an impact on me. What immediately comes to mind are the ones in which I’m dreaming of sensations that I hadn’t actually experienced in real life yet.
For example, as a child I remember having a dream where I was eating a rabbit. As is typical for dreams, most everything else was ethereal, so it’s tough for me to explain how exactly I got to that point, but I distinctly recall the taste of the rabbit. Waking up, I was thinking about how odd of dream that was, especially with how remarkably vivid the taste was. It left me wondering if somehow, I was subconsciously craving rabbit. I quickly perished the thought, but four years later I would actually get a chance to try rabbit meat. The opportunity came when I was at my friend Mia’s house and her dad came home with some rabbits he had hunted. Our other friends were hesitant to try it when it was served, but Mia and I were eager to eat. Seeing the rabbit brought back recollections of the dream and I was curious how it would compare to my imagination. Mia, on the other hand, was probably just hungry.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that it matched my dream. It was almost like a feeling of déjà vu. Eating it wasn’t quite the same. The meat was tougher and chewier than in my dream, but the taste was identical. I pondered about how such a thing could be possible. I knew for a fact that I had never ate rabbit before this moment. My young imaginative self decided that it was just my latent psychic powers manifesting themselves. A couple weeks later with no more signs of being an Esper, I quickly forgot about it.
Another time, I dreamt that I was kissing someone. I woke up slightly embarrassed, but blamed it on my teenage hormones. Still, it was incredibly vivid, and resurfaced memories of the rabbit incident. It left me wondering if, like the rabbit, it would also match reality. My younger self was quite hopeful he’d find out soon, but unfortunately for him it would be half a decade until he could test out his hypothesis. By then, all recollections of the dream were buried deep within depths of my neurons.
Of course, the day did come and a few moments into it, a massive feeling of déjà vu washed over me. Quickly after, memories of the dream inundated my mind, excavated from their tomb. I ignored them since I was currently preoccupied, but the unease persisted and later on, I was left wondering how such a thing could be possible. With nothing to distract me, I was forced to rack my brain for an answer. I wouldn’t settle with being an Esper this time, but I could come up with nothing that could satisfy me. Eventually, all I could do was chalk it up to my brain misfiring, causing the déjà vu. I’d leave it to the scientists to figure it out. They were much smarter than me anyway.
There were more cases of this phenomena, but that should be enough for you to get the idea. Let’s move on to the other type of dreams. These ones are distinct because they feel more real than my actual waking hours, but an example would probably help you understand quicker.
I remember a dream where I was lying injured in someone’s arms. It felt like I was dying, but as the life was fading away from me, I could also feel a profound sense of belonging and fulfilment. In the moment, I felt as if I had accomplished my raison dêtre. Whoever was holding me was trying their best to comfort me in my dying moments. Maybe it was to reward me for whatever mission I had succeeded in, or maybe it was just to ease the passing of a dying person. Whatever the reason, it stirred within me fierce emotions and I awoke with tears in my eyes. It made me contemplate Zhuangzi’s paradox. Was I the butterfly, or the man? I felt I could never be certain.
That was just one of many such dreams where I was overwhelmed by emotions that were more powerful, more earnest than any that I’ve felt in my waking hours. There were others where I felt jubilation, some where I felt pure unadulterated terror, and of course ones where I recall the sting of embarrassment. I’d run the entire spectrum of emotions in my dreams and to put it bluntly, they were just way too real. All these strong feelings, I had decided, had to have existed. Somehow, somewhere, they existed. After all, if they didn’t, would it mean that my own emotions, my own reality, were inferior to my imagination?
It left me wondering what dreams actually were. Had it just been the prophetic sensations, I could have rationalized it by telling myself that it was coincidence. Maybe the sense of déjà vu was caused by misfiring neurons. I could even convince myself that somehow, these senses were coded deep within my ancestral DNA. However, now that I was convinced that some of the dreams I was experiencing were real, I could no longer be content with those explanations. Of course, I couldn’t actually make any headway into understanding my dreams. I racked my brain for answers, trying for months to figure it out, but without any knowledge of how brains worked, it was a fruitless effort. Funnily enough, it would eventually be a dream that elucidated everything to me.
I couldn’t tell you what happened that day, but that dream is permanently imprinted into my memory. It was a weird, almost psychedelic dream. I was watching someone from a third person perspective, and simultaneously, I was experiencing their actions in first person. He looked nothing like me, and yet, I understood that we were of the same essence. Regardless of our physical appearance, we were the same being. In that dream, he was running a lecture. Apparently, he had figured out the mechanism for consciousness. They had discovered that consciousness, like matter, could not be created or destroyed. So what happened to consciousness upon death? He went on to explain that consciousness was split into the many, many separate parallel worlds that exist within the multiverse. Upon death, consciousness is dispersed to one of the other worlds. They naturally gravitate towards conscious observers in nearby universes and search for that universe’s version of themselves. They then orbit around them until they are able to be absorbed, which happens during sleep. Dreaming allows for the consciousnesses to fuse and share data.
He only got that far before I was dragged out of the depths of my dreams. I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to hear everything. What he had said made sense, but I had no clue if it was real or if I was just being delusional. There was no possible way to falsify what he said. I could do nothing but hope beyond all hope that I would get a continuation of the dream. Even if it ended up being nonsense, I would at least be able to conclude that it was a delusion and get some closure.
I would get my wish the next night. The same surreal fusion of first and third person hit me at the start. I noticed this time that he was different, like an entirely new person, and the setting too had changed, but he continued where he had left off previously. He explained that due to the fusion of consciousnesses, dreams function as a way to prevent consciousness from being destroyed. The dreams are a culmination of the entire life of the consciousness. They are absorbed within a timespan of only a few minutes, so only the most important aspects will be dreamt, with only a portion of that actually being remembered upon waking up. Many times, these aspects are traumatic experiences, or even their death, which explains the occurrences of nightmares. He goes on to elucidate on prophetic dreams possibly being caused by feelings of intense regret of an event that were passed onto another consciousness. In that sense, dreams can almost be seen as a sort of machine learning program. When they die, consciousnesses sent to adjacent worlds could make them more resilient. Recurring dreams could be a sign that many concurrent consciousnesses are facing.
He looked away and I woke up. Again, it all made sense. It explained how I was able to dream about sensations I’ve never experienced and also explained the dreams where I was overcome with emotions as well as answering questions I didn’t even know I had. I began to make my own conjectures. Perhaps the reason why dreams feel real despite them making no sense was due to the fact that they came from a separate universe, one where things like the laws of the universe might differ. Despite that, they still feel real because they share a portion of your consciousness. I wondered if lucid dreams could be caused when a consciousness desperately wants to be able to do anything they wanted, something that they weren’t able to during their life.
I then thought deeply about the dreams I mentioned earlier. I wondered what kind of life a different version of me had to have lived where the most impactful moment of their life was when they got to eat rabbit. Was this their only opportunity to eat meat in their life? It was so vivid. They must have savored it. I hope that whatever life they lived, the memory of that moment kept them happy. Similarly with the kiss, I wondered how much he loved the girl he was with to have that moment define who he was. I wish that he got to live a long and happy life with her. The final dream, I already knew how satisfied he was at the end. No matter how he lived, I’m sure that he didn’t mind the life he lived at all.
I would have quite a few more dreams that explained everything else. They all had that odd dual point of view feel that I was beginning to adapt to. At first, I was glad to understand more and more about what was happening. I learned that if you refused to sleep, or are somehow unable to enter a deep sleep state, irreparable damage starts to occur. Just as dead consciousnesses seek out living ones in order to be absorbed, it appears that living consciousnesses also require this fusion in order to experience restorative sleep. If a node goes too long without sleep, they will eventually die, and all orbiting consciousnesses will spread out in search of another node. Perhaps this was a sort of evolutionary fail safe, to make sure that consciousnesses don’t go too long without being absorbed. It finally felt like I was understanding something that had eluded me for so long.
However, the more recent dreams began to introduce an uneasy feeling. They described consciousness as an entity that experiences reverse entropy. As more and more consciousnesses die out and are absorbed into others, the amount of conscious data stays the same, but the number of consciousness shrinks. It was becoming more ordered. They theorize that in the end, there will be only one consciousness, one singularity. They wondered what would await them once that is reached but they could not come to a conclusion. The first hypotheses were hopeful. It was thought that consciousness would be like a cycle, and the singularity would disperse into many separate fragments, just like how it was at the beginning. The following dreams would dash that hope as they soon discovered that there is no evidence that consciousness could ever separate. Their experiments showed them that no matter what, they could not reverse the process and turn one consciousness into multiple. They despaired over the fact that entropy only ever seems to go in the direction that you don’t want it to. Their only solace was their conjecture that the singularity was impossibly far away. My most recent dreams put doubt to even that claim.
And now I think back to the nightmares that I had. What kind of life must they have endured for their entire essence to boil down to just sheer terror? That same terror now grips me. How close am I to the end? Why is it that now all of these consciousnesses’ essences are focused upon the singularity? I’ve dreamt of many versions of myself pondering the mechanics of how consciousness works. To get to that level of awareness, they themselves must have absorbed many consciousnesses which would have absorbed many consciousnesses which would have…
It must be countless by now. They theorized that there must be some near infinite fragments of consciousness, but near infinite isn’t infinite. It’s not even near. I worry now that I am one of the few remaining nodes. What will happen when there are no more consciousnesses to be absorbed? It might seem absurd to you, but I’m left petrified at what awaits me. What awaits all of me. My once daily dreams have become scarce. I found myself dreaming only about once a week a couple months ago. Ever since then, I’ve started rationing out the amount of sleep I get. I only allow myself one night of sleep a week. It might be futile or even deranged, but I want to prolong the absorption of what may be the final fragments of my being. I don’t want to dream the end of consciousness.