My friend Alex was a Yogacara Buddhist. She believed everything was a dream. I said to her “But why is there science then? How come we can build a rocket and it can land on the moon? If everything is a dream, why does it obey scientific law?”
Alex said “There are two possibilities. Either there are laws of dreams. Or we dream that there are laws.”
Here’s the possibility that tantalizes me. In dreams, we experience situations that we’d instantly recognize as absurd if we were awake, but in the context of the dream, they seem perfectly sensible.
If you give someone a post-hypnotic suggestion to see a closed door as being open, they can try to walk through the doorway, collide with the door, and still fail to see it.
If we’re in some kind of designed reality (“VR,” though that’s not really accurate in such a case), then we might be programmed to ignore obvious aspects of our world that would disrupt the “illusion.” Those facts could be right in front of us and we’d still fail to see them.
I’m a pretty savvy customer. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t fail to see them!
As attending ER doctor, question #1: what the hell is the universe on?
Does she dream in her dream? Or is it *the* dream.
It would be interesting to explore the grammar more. There look to be so many starting points I wouldn’t know where to begin.