Dreaming Reality : How Neuroscience and Mysticism Can Unlock the Secrets of Consciousness

A cutting-edge neuroscientist and a leading clinical psychologist look to religious, mystical, and mind-altering experience to challenge scientific orthodoxies concerning consciousness.

We are nothing but a pack of neurons, Francis Crick once said. Vladimir Miskovic and Steven Jay Lynn show that this way of thinking is both limited and an obstacle to understanding consciousness. In Dreaming Reality, Miskovic and Lynn connect the latest findings from neuroscience—which studies the brain from the outside in, as a purely physical object—to the insights of the world’s mystical traditions, which chart elaborate cartographies of the mind from inside out through experiences of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. We can tackle the biggest questions surrounding the nature of consciousness when we place objective scientific research alongside the phenomenology of “altered” states.

Dreaming Reality offers a rich synthesis of brains and minds, new and old, that challenges many cherished notions of how we experience our worlds and selves. Instead of privileging the experience of waking life, Miskovic and Lynn take this only as the starting point of a progressive disentanglement of consciousness. Delving into Buddhism, Vedanta, and Christian mysticism, they find that we have much to learn from dreams, hallucinations, visionary states, ego death, mind wandering, sensory deprivation, psychedelic experimentation, meditation, and minimal phenomenal experiences of consciousness.

Each chapter brings us closer to understanding how we dream reality into existence and how we might transcend impoverished materialist models, whose unacknowledged effect is to drive us toward nihilism. Instead, we arrive at a model of consciousness that is more capacious and compassionate than biological sciences alone can imagine.

MEDIA REVIEWS

A fascinating journey through empirical science and contemplative wisdom, Dreaming Reality illuminates how our sense of self—our sensations, perceptions, and even actions—can be extended beyond the limited modern view of the individual to an expanded state of belonging and a broader experience of who we are. - Daniel J. Siegel, MD, author of IntraConnected and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute

This is a remarkable book. Written by two authors with impeccable command of scientific modalities and an intimate familiarity with meditation traditions from around the world, Dreaming Reality invites readers to an exciting and exemplary new dialogue between neuroscience and religion. - Martin Laird, author of An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

A necessary and welcome departure from the classic intellectual, nihilistic, materialistic, and reductionist view of the mind and the brain. This book takes a fresh look at what is possible when scientific approaches and contemplative traditions are taken together to better understand human consciousness. - Marc Wittmann, author of Altered States of Consciousness

Nothing is more commonplace than our daily experience of thoughts, emotions, objects, and dreams, but no scientific theory can yet explain even one specific conscious experience. Dreaming Reality explores our elusive consciousness from the vantages of neuroscience, evolution, spirituality, psychedelics, and dreams, providing a genial and captivating guide to the fundamental mystery at the core of our being. - Donald D. Hoffman, author of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes