When I was a small child, my mother used to sing the well-known nursery rhyme to me:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
According to the Wikipedia entry on this song, it made its first appearance in 1852.
Close on its coattails is the Lewis Carroll rhyme, an acrostic poem which spells Alice’s full name (Alice Pleasance Liddell) and ends with this stanza:
Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?
The idea that life is indistinguishable from a dream is at least 2,500 years old, dating back to Plato’s Theaetetus, when early philosophers were first laying the groundwork for epistemology, the discipline that asks how it is possible to know anything for a certainty. (See the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the Philosophy of Dreaming for more.)
Most recently, we have witnessed a blurring of the lines between philosophy and neurobiology to further elucidate (or obfuscate) the problem. See Anil Seth’s latest book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. While he doesn’t specifically address this philosophical problem, his basic claim—that our perception of reality is a shared hallucination—clearly shows us which way neurobiology points. To the extent that both waking and dreaming are perceptual states we all participate in, they share in the basic features of all human perceptual states. Waking or dreaming, it’s all the same. Collective hallucination all the way down. Life is indeed but a dream.
