Is Life a Dream?

The question of the reality of the outer world disappears with my:

• principle of sufficient reason
• relation of subject and object
• the special conditions of sense perception

However, the question of the reality of the outer world is revived by dreams.

Is our whole life be a dream?

How do we distinguish dreams and reality?

Kant answers: “The connection of ideas among themselves, according to cause and effect, constitutes the difference between real life and dreams.”

I answer: The [flow of cognition] principle of sufficient reason has a complete connection in long dreams (life) but not with short dreams..

The only way to distinguish dream and reality is the awake state which breaks off the dream.

The Vedas and Puranas have no better simile than a dream for the whole knowledge of the actual world, which they call the web of Mâyâ, and they use none more frequently

Plato often says that men live only in a dream.

Lastly, Calderon was so deeply impressed with this view of life that he sought to embody it in a kind of metaphysical drama—“Life a Dream.”

After these numerous quotations from the poets, perhaps I also may be allowed to express myself by a metaphor. Life and dreams are leaves of the same book. The systematic reading of this book is real life, but when the reading hours (that is, the day) are over, we often continue idly to turn over the leaves, and read a page here and there without method or connection: often one we have read before, sometimes one that is new to us, but always in the same book. Such an isolated page is indeed out of connection with the systematic study of the book, but it does not seem so very different when we remember that the whole continuous perusal begins and ends just as abruptly, and may therefore be regarded as merely a larger single page. Thus although individual dreams are distinguished from real life by the fact that they do not fit into that continuity which runs through the whole of experience, and the act of awaking brings this into consciousness, yet that very continuity of experience belongs to real life as its form, and the dream on its part can point to a similar continuity in itself. If, therefore, we consider the question from a point of view external to both, there is no distinct difference in their nature, and we are forced to concede to the poets that life is a long dream.

Let us turn back now from this quite independent empirical origin of the question of the reality of the outer world, to its speculative origin. We found that

The origin of the outer world consisted in:

1. The false application of the principle of sufficient reason to the relation of subject and object

2. The confusion of its forms, inasmuch as the principle of sufficient reason of knowing was extended to a province in which the principle of sufficient reason of being is valid.

But the question could hardly have occupied philosophers so constantly if it were entirely devoid of all real content, and if some true thought and meaning did not lie at its heart as its real source.

Accordingly, we must assume that when the element of truth that lies at the bottom of the question first came into reflection and sought its expression, it became involved in these confused and meaningless forms and problems.

This at least is my opinion, and I think that the true expression of that inmost meaning of the question, which it failed to find, is this:—What is this world of perception besides being my idea? Is that of which I am conscious only as idea, exactly like my own body, of which I am doubly conscious, in one aspect as idea, in another aspect as will? The fuller explanation of this question and its answer in the affirmative, will form the content of the second book, and its consequences will occupy the remaining portion of this work.