Dreaming is what happens when the lunatics take over the asylum

Em continuação do que falamos na aula lembrei-me de algo que li:

"One does not dream, one is dreamed

I am sometimes confused as to whether I actually did something, or thought I´d done it, or whether I  was dreaming I did it. I guess you know what I mean.

Philosopher René Descartes was bewildered when he realized there were no conclusive indications to distinguish whether he was awake or asleep. He would have been more confused had it occurred to him he might have been a character in someone else's dream. That happened to Chuang Tzu who dreamt he was a butterfly. And when he woke up he didn´t know whether he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly that dreamt he was a man. Hindus believe they are in Brahma's dream, just as Aborigines believe they are in dreams of deities. The Aborigines' problem is that if the deities wake up they won't exist.

A contemporary version has it we are a dream in the circuitry of a sleeping computer. And when the computer runs down (after a billion years or so) we will wake up to find we are a different intelligence from what which we had been dreaming we were - when we were a dream in a machine. An alternative thought is that maybe we are only the shadow of somebody else, in someone else´s dream."

Alan Fletcher