BellaOnline Forums Religion and Spirituality Philosophy Can we trust our senses?

When my son was much younger, he asked, "What if life really is a dream, and we are all sleeping, and when we die, we wake up?" (Yeah, and how do you answer that to a 6 or 7 yr old?!) I somehow doubt we are asleep -- yet often, in a dream, everything seems as real as waking time.

Then add to that the existence of false memories (our brains just hate those empty places, and love to fill in the gaps), the fact that we don't all experience pain the same (same stimulus to two different people would be rated differently) -- and who knows what else... how much can we trust what we perceive?

My daughter says similar things. She's now 9. At 6 she said, "Mom, I hate being old." She also references dreams as being her real life and her living life as illusion,"Like a magic trick (not real)." It inspired the article, "A rose in Winter."

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You two have amazingly intuive and accurate children. As young children they are still in touch with the part of themselves that still experiences other realities (other than the time-space reality we are currently focused in). Ms A's son was quite right when he stated the observation that this reality often seems like the dream to the self that is a part of the dream reality.