It’s been a couple of days when this interesting experience came to me. I was sleeping (or should I say dreaming?). In the dream, I saw a few people. And I was also there. I don’t remember now what the situation was but it was just a normal dream-like dream. Nothing fanciful about the contents of the dream itself. And then I woke up.

When I woke up, a question crossed my mind. It went something like this: I saw many people in the dream and I was one of them. How did I know which one I was. I mean, let’s say there were five people in the dream and I saw one of them as me. But how the hell did I know which one of those five people was me?

I posed this question to one of my colleague the other day. “How do you know which person is you when you see multiple people in a dream?”. His response was that the person through whose eyes dream situation is being seen is he himself. It’s a logical response but I find it incomplete. Because one thing that I clearly remembered from this dream (and many others that I’ve seen), I was part of the situation in the dream as much as other people in the dream were.

Then I started probing this further. And I found that I was anyway there “dreaming” the dream. So, in a way, the dream was the situation and I was already seeing that situation through me. But it’s like I had forgotten during the dream that I was dreaming the dream and mistook someone within the dream as myself.

And from here, more and more questions start originating. For example, can I be dreaming right now? From within the dream, it’s impossible for me to say that it’s a dream. And there are more along these lines.

The questions are amusing and disturbing at the same time. And the answers are eluding me.