Is there really a clear line between the so-called dream worlds and the waking world? Isn't wakefulness another form of dream? Isn't waking another form of sleep in the sense that much of our waking life is a life of low consciousness (historical, psychological, epistemological, ethical)? Perhaps we are facing a continuum of experience that only the roughest forms of sensitivity polarize into two well-separated worlds. The aesthetic experience seems to confirm this hypothesis, and it should not surprise us since human beings are symbolic creatures. Only basic emotions are literal insofar as they point to some survival action. The rest is symbol. If we consider reality as a complex symbol, the traditional border of sleep-wake psychology vanishes. And what scene do we have before us then? What is experience? Our experience is a shared myth built from successful survival actions. But beneath these actions is the mystery of life itself, towering over something equally mysterious t...
On the symbolic constructions of human identity.