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

Dreaming Reality looks to mystical traditions to challenge orthodoxies of brain science that model consciousness in purely physical terms. Instead of privileging the experience of waking life, the authors study visionary states, ego death, meditation, prayer, and other phenomena that bring us closer to understanding how the mind makes experience.

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. But while there may be some truth to this way of thinking, it is also an obstacle to understanding consciousness. Dreaming Reality responds by connecting the latest findings from neuroscience to the insights of the world’s mystical traditions, which chart elaborate cartographies of the mind through experiences of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. Vladimir Miskovic and Steven Jay Lynn show how we can tackle the biggest questions surrounding the nature of consciousness when we place objective scientific research alongside the phenomenology of “altered” states. While neuroscience privileges the experience of waking life, Dreaming Reality finds that we have much to learn from dreams, hallucinations, and visionary states. Miskovic and Lynn delve into Buddhism, Vedanta, and Christian mysticism, addressing questions of selfhood from the standpoints of ego death, mind wandering, sensory deprivation, psychedelic experimentation, and minimal phenomenal experiences of consciousness.