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.As with most questions we ask, there is a huge philosophical component to this issue of the nature of the dream world.The philosophical questions revolve around this: we take our waking experience as our point of departure when we talk about our experiences in the dream world.And in our waking experience we move through this physical world, a world which is revealed to our conscious awareness through the agency of our senses.Our senses include seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting, which are the five commonly known senses.But we have other senses in our body too: we can sense temperature, pain, up and down (i.e.gravity), the motion of our bodies and limbs, we can feel vibrations, and pressure and there are many unconscious senses constantly monitoring the internal organs of our bodies.It is through all of these sensory modalities that we know of the world we inhabit while we are awake.And the most important point is that we take all of this very for granted.We simply assume that the world that is revealed to us through our senses exists as an objective world that exists outside of us, and we assume that we perceive this world truly as it is.Now these really are important philosophical questions that have plagued philosophers throughout the centuries.Philosophers like Kant and Descartes, and many others, have worried about the reliability of our senses for revealing to our minds about the nature of the world, and they have worried about the seeming objectivity of the ideas we create to describe the world in which we find ourselves.What I find of great interest is that asking the question "what is the world of dreams?" has an awful lot to do with these philosophical questions.Again, we assume the world of waking is real, solid and objective.And we move through this world as we live our lives in time, never giving any thought at all (unless of course you are a brain scientist!) to the marvelous bio-machine in our heads - our brains - that make life as we know it possible.But the fact is, it is because of the properties of our brain that we can perceive the world of our waking experience.It is because of the properties of our brain that there is continuity in time to our waking experience.Even though every day of being awake is interrupted by a night of sleep and of dreams, we wake in the morning and continue on with our waking life, continue the events of yesterday, looking forward to the events of tomorrow.The continuity in time of our waking lives is due to the fact that our brain stores memories of the things it experiences.If our brains did not store memories, then we would not remember what happened to us, nor would we remember the things we were planning on doing and the things we strive to achieve and for which we hope.In fact, there are types of brain damage that people can suffer where their brain losses the ability to form memories.Such people live constantly in the present.They do not remember yesterday, nor do they remember to plan for tomorrow.Likewise, as we take our memories for granted to a large extent in our day to day lives, so too do we take our brains ability to perceive the world of our waking experience for granted.Don't you ever wonder just how it is that you can open your eyes and see the world? Seeing happens quite automatically.You don't have to do anything, it just happens.Nor did you have to learn to see.The ability to see is built into your body; built into your eyes and the nerve connections between your eyes and your brain.You were born with the ability to see - it is a gift that God has given you.Although the how of seeing never enters into our minds as we go about our day-to-day business (again, unless you are a brain scientist who studies vision!), the fact is, there is a very complex set of processes that underlie our ability to see.What I want to do now is explain a little bit about the hidden and unseen (one could even call them "occult") processes that are happening every time we look at the world.First off, what allows us to see is light.Light exists in the world of our waking experience, and it exists as waves of infinitesimally small particles called photons.These photons/light waves move around through space at massive speeds - the speed of light is the fastest speed of anything we know of - and these photons/light waves bounce off of things that are made of matter.They either bounce off of material things, or they go right through them depending on the frequency of the light waves and the nature of the matter they encounter.Now, as these light waves bounce off of things, some of the light waves enter our eyes.And inside of our eyeballs, the whole back wall of our eye ball is made of cells that respond to the light waves.These cells make up a region of the eye called the retina.And the cells of the retina that detect light waves are called rods and cones.The rods and cones do not respond to all light waves, but only to a very narrow range of light waves that we call visible light
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