Sometimes my dreams are so real that I wonder: what if, when I wake up, the world I am living in is not real?
Fantasy, as a factor in evaluating human psychological health, can create a bizarre standpoint because we do not know what happens to people who lose touch with reality.
Language is not just a means of communication; it is also a prerequisite for thinking. Maybe it depends on the person, but I think most people use language more than images in their thought process. But what is language? Isn’t it a set of agreed-upon shapes and forms that are common internationally? Language itself is a series of compromises and shared symbols.
“Isn’t it true that the eyes are the windows to every soul? Therefore, everything you watch becomes part of your internal world.
In this post, I aim to explore the world that surrounds me through the lens of language. I focus on the written words of individuals who have experienced the connection between consciousness, language, reality, and our perception of the world.
1: The Nature of Reality, Language, and Thought
The experience of hyper-real dreams raises profound questions about the nature of reality and perception. If our dreams can feel as real as waking life, then how do we determine which is the “true” reality? This line of inquiry has been explored extensively in both philosophy and psychology. René Descartes famously questioned whether we could trust our senses at all, proposing that an evil demon might be deceiving us. Similarly, in Eastern philosophy, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once dreamt he was a butterfly and, upon waking, wondered whether he was a man who had dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man.
From a psychological standpoint, the nature of dissociation and altered states of consciousness complicates our understanding of what it means to be in touch with reality. People experiencing derealization or lucid dreams often find themselves in a liminal state where the boundaries between waking and dreaming blur. Neurobiological research suggests that different states of consciousness are governed by distinct patterns of brain activity, but the subjective experience remains deeply mysterious.
Another layer to this discussion is the role of language in structuring our perception of reality. Language is not merely a tool for communication; it is the foundation upon which much of human thought is built. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the language we speak influences how we perceive and think about the world. A person who speaks a language with no future tense, for instance, may conceptualize time differently than someone whose language explicitly marks past, present, and future.
But what is language, fundamentally? It is an intricate system of symbols—arbitrary yet shared—developed through collective human agreement. The written word consists of marks on a page that we have collectively decided represent sounds, which in turn represent ideas. Spoken language itself is a system of sounds that, devoid of context, hold no intrinsic meaning. This semiotic structure of signs and signifiers, as explored by Ferdinand de Saussure and later Jacques Derrida, suggests that meaning is always deferred, never fully grasped in a fixed state.
Thus, language acts as a filter between reality and human consciousness. It shapes our thoughts, but it also confines them within its structures. If one loses touch with reality, does it mean that their language has also fractured? This is a question explored in psychiatric studies of schizophrenia, where disruptions in language often accompany disruptions in perceived reality.
If reality is, in some way, an agreement between human minds, then both language and perception are tools we use to construct it. But if our dreams feel just as real as waking life, who is to say that consensus reality is any more “real” than the worlds we construct in our sleep? Perhaps reality itself is just another shared symbol—a compromise between individual minds, much like language.
2: Jung on ‘the importance of the internal world’
I must confess that I haven’t heard good things about Jung and Freud from most of my teachers, but I still didn’t give up on them. I know that the best way to assess a thinker is by evaluating their behavior because behavior demonstrates how deeply someone’s beliefs truly matter to them.
However, most thinkers are no longer alive, so I would rather examine their writings. I believe that if someone’s thoughts are clear and thought-provoking, and their analysis of reality is engaging, we should be careful not to believe easily what we hear or read about them.
Let’s look at some quotes:
1- “Your inner world is as real as the outer world, but has far more influence on your well-being.”
2- “Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.”
3- “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Jung tries to explain how our thoughts, emotions, and unconscious processes shape our reality. He believed that much of our behavior is driven by unconscious forces and that true freedom comes from bringing them into awareness. If you integrate the unconscious into conscious awareness, you have taken a step on the path of ‘individuation.’
3: Piaget on ‘our understanding of the world’
With simply reading these sentences from Piaget, you can figure out what he means by ‘Cognitive Constructivism’:
1- “Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered for himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.”
2- “Knowledge is not something given as in classical epistemology but something that must be discovered or constructed by the cognitive subject.”
3- “To understand is to invent.”
Piaget believed that learning is an internal process shaped by personal discovery, rather than just passively receiving information. we internalize knowledge by actively engaging with our environment. Our understanding of the world comes from internalizing and reconstructing experiences in our minds.
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