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Dreaming of Japan (and Other Imaginary Lands)

July 10, 2023

Japan is obviously not imaginary; it’s a real country, it exists – if you’re looking for countries that don’t exist, Finland is the one you’re looking for 😛. But my Japan is imaginary. I’m dreaming of a Japan that simply is there only in my imagination, being an entirely subjective, partial, and factually extremely flawed version of the realWe’ll come back to this later; it’s intriguing. Japan.

My Japan is no more (or less?) real than the afternoons of my childhood, smelling Greek coffee, and overall constructing a version of a reality that is, shall we use the term, questionable.

Whenever I’m reading about Japan, seeing photos or videos from there – including its huge cat culture, one must admit – I immediately feel calm. I feel a sense of longing for something that, again, isn’t there. More still, it never has; it’s not like I used to live in Japan and now I miss it.

So what does dreaming of Japan – and other imaginary lands – reveals to us about the way our mind wanders?

dreaming Japan — I tried to find the most stereotypical Japanese image you can think of, and this qualifies. I’m dreaming of a Japan that isn’t real – or, to put it this way, is a drop of reality in an ocean of factual details I deliberately ignore

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“More than a Sum” – Short Story

March 25, 2019

Fiction

consciousness, dream, fiction, Kafka, perception, short story, symbolic

The text that follows, “More than a Sum”, is a short story I wrote after a particularly vivid dream. Many great stories begin this way, so my advice to fellow authors is to note down such dreams as soon as they wake up.

The story might remind you – at least in terms of style – of another short story published here. I think “More than a Sum” is less Kafkaesque than that one, but I do detect some similar topical traces.

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Continuity of Experience in Dreams

March 2, 2018

Philosophy

dream, experience, life, musings, time

Dreams and Waking Life

Here’s a question for you: Which are the major differences between your dream consciousness and your waking life consciousness? Pondering on this, you would perhaps come up with some of the following answers: a) you can’t (really) control your dreams; b) limitations don’t exist in dreams; c) dreams aren’t real. This latter possible answer I consider controversial, but let’s leave that aside for another day. Let’s instead focus on another major difference between dreams and waking life: the continuity of experience.

How would it be, if there was continuity of experience in dreams?

You see, when you wake up in the morning, you still remember what you did the day before. You remember your plans for the present day. And if you left a book in the middle before going to bed, you can pick up from it remembering the plot that far.

The same almost never applies for dreams. With extremely rare exceptions, when you dream you don’t just continue doing what you were doing in a previous dream. There is no continuity of experience in dreams, unlike waking life.

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