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I believe I may have been the one that argued that the forest in your dream is as real as the one everyone else can see.

I agree with you, Eden, that there there is an obvious difference between the "real" forest and the dream forest. But I do question the concept of "real". We have learned to accept those things that we see in the real world as real because society and/or other teach us from young that this is the realm of the real.

Yet, I think we need to recognize that the dreams are just as likely to be "real". We certainly experience them intensely. They produce profound effects in our body. We also know that sleep which includes "dreaming" is more regenerative.

Finally, let me truly play devil's advocate. How do we account for shared dreams? It is not unknown that two individuals might have the same exact dream. How can this be explained? How does the normally isolated world of the dreamer become shared?

"A shared dream is where you, and one of your friends or family, perhaps even a stranger meet in a dream share the same dream content and setting and wake up with enough clear, undistorted memory to verify it with the other party involved." (http://www.geocities.com/lucidmetro/DREAMS.htm )

For all we know every dream that we have is simulataneously experienced by another person in the world. If this individual is a stranger we may never know that how dream has been shared. Alternatively we may forget the dream in the morning. And, even if our shared dream was with a family member the contents of the dream may never be verified with the other participant.

If we return to the decapitated worm mentioned in an earlier class, whose nervous system was responsive after being separated fro the body, I think we need to recognize the possibility of dreaming. If over 99% of our neuronal cells are interneurons, rather than sensory or motor, it seems to me that the 'real world' must lie here—not in cursory sensations elicited by our sensory neurons.

Here are some links on shared dreams:

• http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/keithhearne/Shared.htm
• http://members.aol.com/dreampsi/archive/mutualdreaming.html
• http://www.lucidcrossroads.co.uk/dreamshared.htm