An intriguing paradox concerning dreams and the nature of reality was described by the British writer Eric Bond Hutton in 1989.
As a child Hutton often had lucid dreams in which people and things seemed as solid and real as in waking life. This led him to wonder whether life itself was a dream, even whether he existed only in somebody else's dream.
Once in a while he would have a pre-lucid dream (in which one suspects that one is dreaming).
He always found these somewhat disturbing, but one day hit upon a magic formula to be used in them: "If I find myself asking 'Am I dreaming?' it proves that I am, since this question would never occur to me in waking life."
Yet, such is the nature of dreams, he could never recall it when he needed to.
Many years later, when he came to write about his childhood fascination with dreams, he was struck by a contradiction in his earlier reasoning.
True, asking oneself "Am I dreaming?" in a dream would seem to prove that one is.
And yet that is precisely what he had often asked himself in waking life.
Therein lay a paradox.
What was he to conclude?
That it does not prove one is dreaming, or that life really is a dream?
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5 comments:
hey.. can i know u.. i want to study more on Hutton's Paradox.. thx
contact me...
greens_ciel@yahoo.com
Ironically, you may already know each other....
hutton's paradox relies on the idiotic principle that you cannot ask yourself if you are dreaming whilst awake. The fact that this has no basis and he proves it wrong, means its not a paradox but a false premise. Hutton was an idiot if I may say so myself.
I do like your blog and think I may start one myself. o/
Hutton was not an idiot. Him making a rule of when someone can ask a question is just a model to get the average person to appreciate this logical loose end. How do you KNOW you're not dreaming? The fact that your brain regularly fools it's consciousness means that there's no objective way to prove that I or we are not all dreaming.
I don't necessarily understand this paradox, as one can conclude that memories are the basis for dreams. I can't dream about being a soldier during WW2 if I have never been educated on it while I was awake. To make another point, I can't learn about something in a dream if I hadn't learned about it while being awake. The very act of me reading this blog post on a paradox I have never heard of doesn't necessarily make sense if I'm currently dreaming. It's impossible to make come up with something unfamiliar from what I know. This paradox seems fallacious, as in order for me to understand this paradox, I have to support the belief that we learn in dreams.
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