Dreaming Reality

How Neuroscience and Mysticism Can Unlock the Secrets of Consciousness

Vladimir Miskovic, Steven Jay Lynn

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674299542
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Matter of the Mind
• 2. A Brain That Talks to Itself
• 3. Looking Directly at the Mind
• 4. The 500-Million-Year-Old Virtual-Reality Simulator
• 5. Adding Feelings to the Mix
• 6. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
• 7. The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of
• 8. Psychedelics, Sensory Isolation Tanks, and Dreamy Mental States
• 9. Dreaming Reality
• 10. The Imaginative Brain and the Origins of Myth
• 11. Who Is Watching the Show?
• 12. The Emptiness of Being
• 13. Nonduality and Reality Beyond the Dream
• Coda: Toward an Optimistic Neurophenomenology of the Future
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index