Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality
Interpretation
This quote suggests that our conscious experience of reality is akin to dreaming, albeit influenced by the tangible world around us.
Oliver Sacks' quote emphasizes the idea that waking consciousness is shaped by external factors much like how dreams are formed by our subconscious mind. It points to a philosophical perspective on the nature of reality, implying that our experiences and perceptions, while rooted in physical reality, are also creatively interpreted by our minds, resembling the fluid and imaginative nature of dreams.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of reality in a philosophy class.
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.
Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.
To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.
The real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons.
It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
See the brotherhood of all mankind as the highest order of Yogis; conquer your own mind, and conquer the world.
The foolish man conceives the idea of 'self.' The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of 'self;' thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.
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