If Your Perfect Dream Could Be A Reality, Would You Want It To Be?

I wanted to post a discussion that a good friend of mine introduced. “Would you want to wake up from a perfect dream…. if you can’t ever be certain you’ve woken up?” We’ve all had those mornings, waking up from a dream that we wished we could dive back into. This might not be so far out there. With the advances of brain mapping, technology, and optogenetics, it might be possible to foresee a time where this dream reality could be our reality. We could alter and change our brain patterns in order to, in a sense, manipulate all the things we see as disorder or malfunctions. Every reaction we have, each one of our behaviors is being caused by our primary chemical functioning. As we better understand this process, we can better understand how to change them.

Now of course my immediate reaction was normal, how is it real if it isn’t “real?” And then I stopped to think. We live in an objective universe that exists based on our subjective view. Everything we do, or don’t do only means what we assign it to mean. I also had the proper social work response of “well human interaction is what truly makes our experiences worthwhile” but even that is a little cracked. If we could still get that, then what is the difference?

Now let me backtrack a bit further. With the advances we are looking at we would be able to alter our brain patterns to decrease or eliminate things such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia. In addition, we may be able to introduce other things like a heightened sense of pleasure or reward feeling. Now this reward principal, what if we could alter that in humans so society would gain a much bigger sense of reward for being nice and doing good to our fellow man. Or what if we just created a world where that was already true?

Matt may disagree with me on this, and no doubt I might be in for a lecture on connections to other people. But connections are both what we strive for, and the cause of suffering. Our joy, our meaning of our lives and the purpose we look for are all subjective. We give our lives that meaning, nothing else. So I’ll ask you, if you could live the perfect dream, would you?