Dreams: Unveiling the Connection Between Body and Consciousness

What is the difference between dream and reality if we look at it strictly from a biological standpoint and focus on consciousness itself? To sharpen the question even further: for consciousness, do dream and reality travel along two separate routes, or do they follow one and the same circuit?

After all, in both cases the brain is what produces the experience. In one case it “imagines”, in the other it relays - or rather encodes sensory information before turning it into a new code more readable for consciousness. The question is worth asking: are these two “planes” of existence truly separate, or simply two versions of the same process?

The answer, in fact, is fairly simple: dreaming and waking life arise from the same mechanism. They are two internal productions generated by a single neurobiological chain. And that seemingly banal observation opens the door to dizzying implications.

For it means that once we bracket the existence of the external world - that is, if we limit ourselves to what consciousness receives and processes - then the worlds of dream and waking life are phenomenologically identical. The place where you are right now, reading these lines, is the same type of place as the one you were in last night, lost in your dreams. Nothing has fundamentally changed for your consciousness.

And this takes on huge importance when we remember that…the dream world is entirely fabricated. Absolutely artificial. So…?

Reality is just as fabricated!

Humanity has long hesitated between two world‑views: a materialist one in which consciousness is a mere cerebral epiphenomenon, and a spiritualist one in which the body is an obstacle or a vehicle for an immaterial soul. Yet neither captures the precise mechanism by which body and consciousness mesh. The key lies elsewhere, and it is in plain sight - or rather, in our dreams, before the eyes of our awareness.

For it is in the dream state, that gentle nocturnal “madness,” that the body stops receiving signals from the outside world yet continues to produce an inner world just as tangible, structured and sometimes overwhelming as the one we experience while awake. This simple but radical fact overturns our ontology. It tells us: consciousness does not perceive the world; it perceives what the body builds for it. It always perceives what the body builds for it.

Dreaming is the moment when the body, freed from sensory input, keeps doing what it always does: generating an “inner” world. Which leads to this extraordinary conclusion: we have only ever lived inside inner worlds! It is not just the dream that is fabricated; everything we live is fabricated. Dream or reality, same process from consciousness’s point of view. Same thing!

Dreaming: a copy without matter but not without reality

In a dream the images, sounds, sensations and emotions are indistinguishable from those of waking life. The dreamer sees, hears, acts, feels. Yet no external material data stimulate the senses. No object is there. No outside stimulus arrives.

And still everything seems real. Why? Because the brain replays the same activation patterns as during wakefulness. The body, for its part, simulates a whole world from itself, in a closed loop. Consciousness has no access to the source of the signals - it perceives only the constructed content.

Conclusion: what makes a world “real” to consciousness is not that it exists outside her, but that the body presents it as such. Which is exactly what it also does for dreams. The brain offers us a world to inhabit. Whereas we tend to think dreaming places us on another plane, this theory states: not at all. It is the same plane. And that conclusion is frightening for anyone who takes the time to ponder it.

It is as if we always live the same way, and in dreams there is no external world while in wakefulness there is. The very word “wakefulness” loses its meaning, because we are also awake in dreams (even if the psychological states differ). The whole vocabulary needs rethinking. What we call wakefulness should rather be seen as waking life “in the presence” of an actually existing outer world, and dreaming as waking life “in the presence” of a fictitious outer world.

Waking life is nothing but an externally assisted dream

What we label “waking reality” is, in truth, only a dream fed by nerve signals. Consciousness does not know whether what it perceives comes from the outside world or from an internal generator. What it experiences are forms, perceptions, coherences - never the matter itself.

Thus, for consciousness, wake and dream differ neither in the structure of experience nor in its texture, but only in the source used for the signals. And for the brain, the only difference is what it uses to craft a world: external stimuli or “imagination/creation.” In fact, the two are often mixed in both states - daydreams while awake, or the sound of an alarm clock slipping into a dream.

Dreaming is a world generated with no data. Waking is a world generated with data. The two frequently blend. Yet in both cases consciousness deals only with the final projection. It never encounters anything but a projection. Every world is a projection.

Dreaming as the body’s confession

We could therefore say, accurately: dreaming is the moment when the body confesses what it really is, for consciousness - a world‑builder. Which quite logically means: we have never engaged with the real world.

During wakefulness the brain pretends to be a channel. During dreaming it reveals itself as a generator. And in both cases it is only a generator, for even in wakefulness it is little more than a coder and decoder, a translator.

The real is not a thing, it is a function

What the dream reveals is not that the world is illusory (the image we hold of the world certainly is, since it is only an image, not reality itself) - that would be a lazy conclusion. What it reveals is that consciousness is never in direct contact with matter. It is in contact with the flow produced by the body, whether that flow is informed (wakefulness) or self‑generated (dream).

The body does not transmit reality - it constitutes it. Always.

Dreaming is therefore the stripped‑down version of what the body does continuously: create an inner stage for consciousness.

The dream is not a strange parenthesis of awareness, as we tend to believe. It is the naked version of the usual mechanism. And this is undeniable: we have never been directly in the world. Only the brain and body are there. Consciousness itself dwells elsewhere. What it sees are always images, nothing more.

We have always lived in fabricated worlds, created or copied by an organ of flesh. Perhaps the real question is not why dreams exist, but why the body stops using them during wakefulness.