In 1980, at Stanford University, researcher Stephen LaBerge demonstrated that it is possible to be awake within a dream, in what is known as a “lucid dream.” He asked lucid dreamers to perform a predetermined sequence of eye movements as soon as they realized they were dreaming. The researchers recorded those movements precisely, showing that although the participants were in REM sleep, they were aware that they were dreaming and could carry out a deliberate instruction. The person was asleep, yet from within the dream performed a conscious action that could be observed from the outside.
Lucid dreaming is a strange state. The dreamer knows that they are dreaming, yet the surrounding world is still experienced as a complete world containing space, movement, sound, and touch. The body lies in bed, while sensory experience unfolds in an entirely different world. Lucid dreaming directly demonstrates that the brain is responsible for all our sensory experience. It can assemble a complete sensory world without any corresponding external world. Everything you see or feel is the product of processing performed by your brain. The room you are in now, the color of the wall, the distance from the window, the weight of your body in the chair – none of these enters consciousness as it is. They are translated into signals and then reconstructed as a single continuous, stable, and convincing experience. Dreaming reveals that this power of construction also operates when there is no external source from which to construct.
In a lucid dream, the dreamer can construct a nonphysical reality – a dream – that feels physical. They can feel a cool breeze or grains of sand slipping between their fingers, without any wind striking the skin, any sand touching the fingers, or any external world corresponding to the experience. This cognitive mechanism confronts us with a radical fact: the system that generates the very sense of an “outside” – space, mass, texture, and depth – does not require a physical world in order to produce a functioning experienced reality. It lies entirely within.
The obvious question, then, is what fundamental difference exists between an experience produced while awake and one produced in a dream. Although the brain can generate physical sensations even when no corresponding external stimulus exists, there is an important distinction. While awake, our experience is connected through stable causal contact to a world that does not depend on us. The world resists us, surprises us, and does not change simply because we want it to. In a dream, that stability breaks down. In a lucid dream, we can become the “gods” of reality. We can fly, transform the scenery, and do whatever we wish.
Lucid dreaming does not prove that the external world is an illusion. The world outside exists, and it does not depend on us. But lucid dreaming does prove, at the very least, that a complete sensory experience can arise without external input. While awake, the brain receives signals from the world and organizes them into an experienced world. In a dream, the brain generates signals and organizes them into an experienced world. The external world is therefore not the exclusive source of signals. Neural activity of the same kind can begin with a photon arriving from a star, or emerge from internal brain activity during a dream through imagination alone. The external stimulus triggers the signal; the system inside constructs the experience. The mechanism that generates “reality” as we experience it is entirely within us. Dreaming demonstrates its existence every night.
In The Matrix, Morpheus reduces what we call “real” to sensory experience – electrical signals interpreted by the brain.
But if “real” means nothing more than what can be felt and experienced, then existence has been defined according to our limited and misleading senses. This falls into the trap of identifying the “real” with the “felt” – confusing the experience with the source of the experience. Even what we call “material reality” does not enter consciousness as matter. It appears within consciousness as an experience constructed by the brain from signals. If “real” is simply whatever can be felt, then a lucid dream is made of something equally “real”: electrical signals.
Our experience is composed entirely of signals. Classical materialism holds that there is no such thing as consciousness independent of matter. According to this position, consciousness is a complex illusion produced by matter – neurons and electrical neural signaling – which generates the illusion of an “I.” In this account, a dream is electrical brain activity: neurons firing. Even if this is correct, the fact that a complete sensory experience can arise without external input, through the internal generation of the signals themselves, raises another question: what is the nature of these signals?
Until now, we have dealt with the epistemic question: how can sensory experience be constructed when there is no corresponding external world before it? We now move to the ontological question: what are the signals themselves – the signals that reach the brain’s decoding system – made of?
What, then, is an electrical signal? Electricity is a physical process, but physical movement does not become a “signal” merely because matter is moving. The electrical current produced by the retina in response to light is not different in kind from the current produced at the fingertips in response to touch – electricity is electricity. What distinguishes a signal encoding the appearance of a distant star from one encoding the roughness of a grain of sand is not the kind of matter involved, but the pattern – the form of organization carried by the signal: its rate, timing, frequency, and relation to the signals around it. All of these are entirely mathematical. They are not additional “substances” hidden inside the signal. They are magnitudes and relations, and they are mathematics – not descriptions of it.
A melody can be played on a piano, heard through a loudspeaker, or seen as musical notation on a page. The material medium changes – string, air, ink – but the structure of the melody remains the same. Materialism holds that structure always requires a material carrier, but it does not examine the ontological nature of the carrier itself. Point to the string, an air molecule, or the electrical current, and try to say what it is beyond the properties that define it: mass, charge, motion, field, frequency, and so on (see the previous post).
Every answer adds another magnitude and another relation, but never reaches some underlying “matter.” And if someone insists that matter remains over and above all of these properties, let them identify what property or difference it explains. A “something” with no property, relation, or role is not an explanation. It is a label attached at the point where explanation ends.
If there is no remainder beneath the relations that can be identified, there is no reason to postulate formless matter standing behind and carrying mathematical structure. There are not two separate things, a carrier and a structure. There is one mathematical structure that appears to our senses as electricity, as air, as a string, and as matter. They are all mathematics. Your brain does not interpret matter; it decodes frequencies – mathematical signals defined by changing relations.
The materialist argument that “everything is electrical brain activity” was a description, not an explanation of what an electrical signal is. Morpheus was right – but he stopped one step too soon: reality is signals, but the signals themselves are mathematical. Electricity is not an independent phenomenon; it is an expression of mathematics. Electricity does not carry mathematics. It is mathematics in motion, translated by the senses into the experience of an electrical current.
From here, it is easy to slide into the idea of a “simulation”: our lives are an illusion, and there is a more “real” world outside the system. Technology enthusiasts and science-fiction fans often enjoy playing with the possibility that we are living inside an enormous simulation. But follow the idea to its conclusion. On what computer is the simulation running? What laws of physics govern the world in which that computer exists, and who established them? And if our universe was programmed by a living, thinking, conscious being – who programmed that being?
Every answer merely pushes the question one step further back: to another computer that requires laws, or another programmer who requires a world. Every component in the picture already presupposes mathematics instead of explaining it. The computer operates only according to structure, the programmer exists only within a world, and the “external” time must itself be possible in the first place. Mathematical structure is not software written by someone. It is the condition of possibility for every computer, every programmer, and every world that could appear. Even if we assume that the world is a digital simulation, what exactly does it run? Algorithms. In other words, mathematics. Even this escape route collapses back into structure.
Instead of asking, “Am I dreaming right now?” or “Are we inside a simulation?”, we should ask: what remains real when the source of experience changes? Whether awake or dreaming, the brain assembles a picture of the world from a stream of organized signals. The status of the matter we touch thereby changes: it is not the ground of being, but the way mathematics appears to the senses. Between waking and dreaming, the source of the signals changes. What does not change is that experience is always made of pattern – magnitudes and relations, all the way down.
What remains stable, objective, and necessary – whether we stand with open eyes before the sun or lie asleep at night in a Stanford laboratory – is the logical structure that constitutes the signals themselves. The signals do not carry mathematics. They are mathematics.
And if structure is what remains – why this structure rather than another?
That is the subject of the next post.
For LaBerge’s study, see: Lucid Dreaming Verified by Volitional Communication During REM Sleep DOI: 10.2466/pms.1981.52.3.727