We're All Living a Dream

The point is that we’re all sleepwalkers, says Charles T. Tart, one of the world’s leading researchers into human consciousness. Powerful forces construct social reality – parenting, schooling, television, advertising, dress code, corporate ethos, military drill. They’re all, Tart suggests, variations on hypnosis. Mostly we walk around in a semi-trance. We want what we’re conditioned to want. We’re like the hypnotised subject who happily eats an onion thinking it to be an apple. We only believe the onion to be an apple, Tart says, because we’ve built a mutually reinforcing sense of reality with one another. It’s what makes a football result seem important, what drives fashion, and causes the day to be spoiled by make-believe tragedy in a soap opera. The implication is that we’re all living a dream, a myth, and that if we don’t persist and insist on what C.G. Jung called ‘individuation’ – if we don’t start living our own dream and being authentic to our own deepest calling – then life itself will be sucked away by the energy vampires of consciousness.