I woke this morning from a dream in which I could not find my granddaughter Cora.
I was calling my son Devin, trying to find out where she was and what he knew, but he was not answering his phone. I kept looking for her, yet I was also getting distracted. Somewhere in the background of the dream, I sensed that she was probably safe. Still, I did not know where she was, who was watching her, or whether anyone was taking responsibility.
The dream felt real while I was inside it.
When I woke up, I knew immediately that Cora had not actually disappeared. The facts of the dream dissolved, but the emotion remained.
I felt unsettled, uncertain, and responsible.
That feeling was not difficult to connect with my waking life.
Devin and Victoria are in a custody dispute involving Cora and her brother, Tucker. I love both children deeply, and because I have helped care for them throughout their lives, I carry a strong sense of responsibility for their safety and well-being.
Consciously, I know that they have parents and that I am their grandfather. But somewhere deeper inside me, I do not entirely trust that the adults responsible for them will always place the children’s needs above their own conflicts, distractions, and emotional reactions.
The dream seemed to take that complicated waking concern and reduce it to one emotionally precise experience:
Cora is probably safe, but I do not know where she is, who is responsible, or whether I can reach the person who should know.
Perhaps my sleeping mind was doing what my waking mind does so often—trying to understand an unresolved situation, anticipate what could go wrong, and determine what I should do.
But when I woke up and began thinking about the dream, another question appeared.
What is dreaming, and who is doing it?
The Brain Does Not Turn Off
We commonly describe sleep as rest, but the brain does not simply shut itself down.
It cannot.
Even while we sleep, it must continue regulating breathing, heartbeat, temperature, hormones, immune function, and countless other processes necessary to keep the body alive.
What changes during sleep is not whether the brain is working, but how it is working.
During waking life, much of the brain’s activity is organized around external reality. It receives sensory information, monitors the environment, moves the body, evaluates risks, makes decisions, and continually updates its understanding of what is happening.
During sleep, much of that external engagement decreases and the brain enters different operating states.
During dream-rich sleep, particularly REM sleep, emotional and visual systems can become highly active while systems involved in orderly reasoning and reality testing operate differently.
That may help explain one of the strangest features of dreams.
A person who died years ago can walk into the room. One house can somehow be three different houses. We can be young and old simultaneously. A missing child can seem to be both in danger and somehow known to be safe.
And inside the dream, we rarely stop and say:
This makes absolutely no sense.
We accept the world being generated.
Perhaps sleep, then, is not simply the brain resting from activity. Perhaps it is partly the brain resting from the constant demands of managing external reality.
The maintenance crew has not left the building. It has simply closed the front doors so it can work inside.
Dreams as Internal Simulations
Science does not yet know exactly why we dream.
Dreaming may participate in memory processing and emotional regulation. Dreams often combine fragments of recent experiences with older memories, people, places, fears, desires, and concerns.
Some researchers have proposed that dreams may also provide a kind of internal simulation in which threats, emotions, or possible responses can be rehearsed.
None of this means that the story of a dream should be interpreted literally.
My dream was not evidence that Cora was in danger.
It was an internally generated experience built around themes that already mattered to me: uncertainty, responsibility, unavailability, distraction, and concern.
That distinction seems important.
The facts of a dream may be imaginary while its emotional concerns are real.
Dreams do not appear to come with a universal symbolic dictionary. A missing child does not necessarily mean the same thing to everyone.
But the emotion within a dream may tell me something about what matters to me.
When the Dream Follows Me Into Morning
Some of my dreams feel extraordinarily real.
When I awaken from one, the story can disappear almost instantly while its emotional momentum continues.
A disturbing dream may leave me anxious or unsettled. A peaceful or inspiring dream may leave me confident, loved, reassured, or energized.
The dream ends.
The feeling sometimes doesn’t.
Once awake, my conscious mind begins interpreting that feeling. I replay the dream and connect it with people and circumstances in my waking life.
And this creates another distinction I find useful:
The emotion may be evidence that something matters to me. My interpretation is a hypothesis about why it matters.
If I awaken afraid after dreaming about Cora, it does not mean she is actually in danger.
It means that her safety and well-being carry emotional weight within me.
The dream may reveal my concern.
It cannot establish the facts.
That allows me to take dreams seriously without taking them literally.
When the Subconscious Becomes Conscious
This may be where remembered dreams become most valuable to me.
An unresolved issue can operate beneath my ordinary awareness. I may distract myself from it, minimize it, rationalize it, or simply remain too busy to examine it.
Yet it can continue influencing my mood, expectations, decisions, and relationships.
Sometimes something brings it forward.
A conflict.
An unexpected emotional reaction.
Anxiety.
Restlessness.
Or a dream.
Once I can see it, I have choices that I did not have while it remained invisible.
I can ask:
- What am I actually afraid of?
- What part of this situation belongs to me?
- What responsibility have I accepted that may not truly be mine?
- What am I trying to control?
- Does this emotion call for action, understanding, a boundary, grief, forgiveness, or acceptance?
A remembered dream does not necessarily provide an answer.
It gives me something to examine.
That is what my dream about Cora did.
It brought my uncertainty into the light. It revealed how responsible I feel for Tucker and Cora and how uncomfortable I am knowing that ultimately I cannot control their lives or guarantee their well-being.
The dream did not tell me what their custody arrangement should be. It did not establish that either parent is incapable.
It revealed something about me:
I am carrying a protector’s burden, and I do not know where that responsibility should end.
That I can work with.
Reflection or Rumination?
There is another danger here.
I have always been strongly driven to understand what is happening inside me.
I want to make sense of life, consciousness, relationships, suffering, happiness, and the experience of being Scott. When something hurts, I want to understand it. When something inspires me, I want to follow it.
My preferred method is sustained self-observation.
That can produce growth.
It can also become rumination.
Introspection is not automatically wisdom. Thought can endlessly analyze thought and create the sensation of progress without actually changing anything.
So I have developed a fairly simple test:
Does my reflection eventually make me clearer, more accepting, more flexible, more compassionate, or more capable of acting wisely?
If it does, perhaps I am processing.
If I simply keep constructing increasingly elaborate explanations for why I feel the way I do, perhaps I am circling.
Productive introspection changes how I live.
Rumination repeatedly changes only how I explain myself.
I am capable of both.
The point of bringing something unconscious into consciousness, then, is not merely to understand it.
It is to gain another degree of freedom in how I respond to it.
The Different Levels of Me
This is where dreaming leads me into a much stranger question.
When I observe myself closely, I seem to encounter several versions—or levels—of me.
There is Dream-Scott.
He inhabits an internally generated world. He searches, fears, loves, escapes, worries, and reacts without usually realizing that the reality surrounding him is being constructed within his own sleeping brain.
Then there is Waking-Scott.
He says:
This is my body. My history. My family. My problem. My achievement. My fear. My life.
This is what I usually call my ego.
The ego is not my enemy. It maintains my identity and helps me function. It protects me, anticipates threats, pursues goals, compares outcomes, remembers consequences, and tries to navigate the physical and social world successfully.
Then there is Reflective-Scott.
He can observe Waking-Scott and ask:
Why am I reacting this way?
What am I believing?
Is my interpretation accurate?
What could I do differently?
And then there appears to be something quieter still.
It does not always argue, control, explain, or solve.
It notices.
I have called it the soul.
Science might describe aspects of this experience as metacognition, self-awareness, or an observing self. Other philosophical and spiritual traditions use different language.
I cannot prove that this observer exists independently of my brain.
The experience of observing myself does not establish the existence of an immortal soul. The brain may be capable of constructing both a sense of self and another level of mind that observes that self.
But even if science eventually described every neural event occurring when I become aware of my own thoughts, another mystery would remain:
Why is any of that activity accompanied by the experience of being someone?
I know awareness is present.
I do not know what awareness ultimately is.
Is Scott the Avatar?
Sometimes it feels as though Scott is an avatar in an extraordinarily advanced virtual-reality experience.
He has a body with biological needs, a personal history, social programming, ambitions, fears, relationships, memories, responsibilities, and a limited view of the world.
He experiences everything from inside the character.
The desk feels solid when he touches it.
Pain hurts.
Love matters.
Loss changes him.
Time appears to move in one direction.
Other people seem separate from him.
So I sometimes wonder:
What if the deeper consciousness I call the soul is the player?
Perhaps it is temporarily experiencing physical reality through Scott. Perhaps physical life provides experiences involving choice, fear, love, separation, consequence, relationship, and growth.
And perhaps dreams are simulations nested inside that larger experience—virtual worlds arising inside whatever this already astonishing experience of being human actually is.
I find the possibility fascinating.
I do not know that it is true.
Calling the unknown player “soul” gives the mystery a name. It does not solve it.
But a metaphor can be useful without being literally true.
Seeing Scott as an avatar gives me some distance from temporary emotional storms. Failure becomes less final. Uncertainty becomes more tolerable. Experience becomes more interesting.
There is also a danger in the metaphor.
If I decide that life is “only a game,” I could use that belief to minimize suffering, avoid responsibility, or dismiss consequences.
So perhaps the healthier version is:
Play as though this world and its consequences are real, while remaining open to the possibility that reality is larger than the character can perceive.
The Ego Wants to Ring the Bell
There is something funny about all of this.
My ego wants to figure it out.
If there is an end goal, it wants to reach it.
If there is a lesson, it wants to learn it.
If there is a scoreboard, it wants the best score.
If there is a final level, it wants to get there and ring the bell.
Even my interest in consciousness can become another ego project:
Understand life.
Master the game.
Resolve every negative emotion.
Become enlightened.
Win at transcending the need to win.
The ego will accept almost any assignment, including becoming the world champion of egolessness.
Perhaps this reveals something important about the difference between the ego and what I call the soul.
The ego asks:
Am I winning?
The soul may ask:
Am I experiencing? Am I learning? Am I loving? Am I fully here?
The ego wants to know the rules so it can control the outcome.
The soul may simply delight in playing.
The ego wants to reach the destination.
The soul may be interested in the experience of traveling.
Perhaps neither needs to be eliminated.
The ego operates the controls.
The soul—or observing awareness—offers perspective.
Perhaps they are not opponents.
Perhaps they are partners.
Waking Inside the Dream
And that brings me back to Cora.
When I was dreaming about her, I was completely immersed in the experience.
I was searching.
Worrying.
Calling Devin.
Trying to solve the problem.
Then I woke up.
The dream world disappeared, but I remained.
A different level of me recognized that what had seemed completely real moments earlier had been a dream.
Something remarkably similar occasionally happens during waking life.
I become lost in fear, anger, desire, resentment, or the need to control an outcome. The experience fills my awareness. My interpretation feels identical to reality.
Then something within me steps back.
I notice the fear instead of only being afraid.
I see the ego instead of speaking entirely as the ego.
I recognize that my interpretation is not identical to reality.
The circumstances do not disappear as a sleeping dream does.
But my relationship to them changes.
Perhaps this is another kind of awakening.
In a sleeping dream, I awaken from an internally generated world.
In waking life, I can sometimes awaken from complete identification with the story I am telling about the world.
That does not mean physical life is unreal.
It means my mental version of life is never the whole of reality.
The ego lives inside the story.
Awareness can notice that it is a story.
The Dreamer Behind the Dream
I began with a simple dream about being unable to find my granddaughter.
Science can explain parts of what happened.
My sleeping brain remained active. It drew upon emotionally important concerns, memories, expectations, and relationships. It constructed a world in which uncertainty became a missing child, responsibility became a search, and unavailability became an unanswered telephone.
Then I woke up.
I remembered the dream, felt its emotional residue, and connected it with concerns in my waking life.
That explanation is reasonable.
But it does not completely exhaust the mystery for me.
Why is there an experience at all?
Why does the activity of a sleeping brain become a world containing sights, people, danger, love, fear, and a version of me living inside it?
Why does waking consciousness feel continuous with the person who was just dreaming even though the two worlds obey completely different rules?
And perhaps the strangest question:
Who recognizes that the dream was a dream?
Is the observer another function of the brain?
Or is the brain somehow an instrument through which something deeper experiences both dreaming and waking life?
I do not know.
Perhaps the brain creates consciousness.
Perhaps consciousness expresses itself through the brain.
Perhaps the individual self is an emergent process that has somehow become capable of observing its own construction.
Perhaps the soul is the player, Scott is the avatar, physical life is the game, and dreams are simulations within the simulation.
Or perhaps that entire explanation is another beautiful story generated by a human mind that cannot tolerate leaving the mystery unnamed.
I don’t know that either.
But from inside my experience, a few things seem undeniable.
There is awareness.
There is an experience occurring.
There is a character named Scott trying to understand it.
And somehow, within that experience, there is a capacity to step back, observe the character, reconsider his interpretations, and choose how he will respond.
I may never know whether that observing awareness existed before Scott or continues after him.
I may never know whether consciousness created the game, emerged inside it, or merely imagines that it is separate from it.
Perhaps the bell does not ring when I finally explain everything.
Perhaps it rings quietly each time I become conscious of how I am playing.
Maybe the purpose is not to escape the dream, prove who the dreamer is, or achieve a perfect score.
Maybe it is to live fully inside the experience without becoming completely lost in it.
To take the consequences seriously without taking the character too seriously.
To let the ego learn how to play skillfully while allowing the soul to delight in playing.
To meet both pleasant and unsettling experiences with curiosity.
To turn fear into understanding when I can.
To accept mystery when understanding reaches its limit.
To act with intelligence, love, courage, and awareness while I am here.
I do not know who or what is ultimately dreaming the dream.
But for now, I am awake enough to wonder.
And perhaps wondering is part of the awakening.