Ancient Chinese Puzzle [2]

Reality is hiding in plain sight; just look at it.

Chuang Tzu once wrote about a man who dreamed he was a butterfly. It was a long dream and he was very happy to be a butterfly. Then he awoke from his dream and he was puzzled: is he a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or is he a butterfly who is now dreaming he is a man?

Someone else once wrote about a man who fell asleep and dreamed that he was wide awake. In this dream he fell asleep, and once again he found himself dreaming that he was wide awake. Then he awoke, but he could not figure out whether he was awake or was still asleep and dreaming that he was awake.

There was another man who slept normally. One day he was wide awake, but suddenly he was awakened and he realized he had been sleeping all along and only dreaming he was awake. But now he wonders if he is still asleep in some even longer dream and if he will very soon awaken again to be even more awake than he is now.

Then there was a man who was wide awake, living an ordinary life. “Here around me is my whole world,” he said to himself. One day he falls asleep and dreams he is floating in empty space where he has no body and there is nothing around him at all to cling to. Within that dream he falls asleep again and dreams about the world he used to live in. He thinks to himself, “Here inside me is my whole world.” When he was asked about that dream within a dream, he said he can’t remember waking up; and even if he did suddenly wake up again right now, he would not know whether this world is all inside him or all around him.

Recently there was an old man who was known to be living in a small village near a big lake. When someone asked him where does he live, he said, “I don’t seem to live anywhere at all.” Then, when asked where is his home, he said, “It is inside me, of course.” Oh? “Yes. If it were outside of me, how would I ever know what it really was?” When asked if home were perhaps both inside him as ideas and outside him as the world, he said, “If it were both inside and outside, how would I ever know which is which?” When asked if he was sure about that, the man said, “No, of course I am not sure about it; it’s just a lot clearer this way.” When asked if he knew what ideas were, he said, “Yes. I think I do; ideas are what the world is made of.”

 

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How is this story related to reality and unreality?

We normally do not have great difficulty knowing whether we were awake or asleep; so, what does dreaming represent in this story?

Among these five dreamers, which would agree with the statement, “At least something seems real”? What could that something be?

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In context: 2 - Reality and Unreality