Once there was a king. One night, he dreamt that he was a beggar. When he got up, a confusion took hold of him. He wasn’t sure what was real and what was a dream. Was he really a king who dreamt of being a beggar or he was a beggar who was now dreaming of being a king.
This story doesn’t end here but I am not going to reveal the end. It’s an interesting thought experiment though.
The more I think about it, the more I feel that our waking state is very much like a dreaming state. There are a few differences. One is about taking in the sensory inputs. While our dreams do get influenced by the inputs being sent by the senses, the mind is hardly attached to those inputs.
And the other difference is that of calibration. In a dream, the mind creates the world without any inhibitions. Anything can happen and there won’t be any questions like “how’s that possible?”. However, in a waking state, the mind keeps calibrating the world that it creates with the sensory inputs as well as with how other people perceive the world.
But at the end of the day, the mind lives in a world that’s created by itself. It’s a very private world. A dreamy world.