The Grand Gallery of Consciousness

I dreamed that I was at a school that was an amalgamation of all the schools I've ever experienced. There were aspects very much like my high school, others like the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool, and others that reminded me of North Seattle College. There were some aspects of the dream that were reminiscent of our daughter's K-12 school and some that I can connect to the public and private schools I attended while growing up. In this dream, I was a teacher. My classroom was at the far end of a very large campus/building and I needed to get back to it, but kept finding myself distracted, derailed, and detoured by people who needed my help. 

There was a time when my dreams about school were of being a student again. Usually in these dreams I was late for class or had forgotten an assignment or was surprised by a test. And yes, I've had those dreams when I suddenly realize I'd forgotten to wear clothes, leaving me in my underwear, or even in my all together, in front of classmates and teachers. Sleep experts tell us that these kinds of school dreams are very common and speculate that they have to do with anxiety, stress or unresolved issues from our time in school. Some suggest that this "return" to school may have to do with a desire to go back to a time when we felt happy and secure, although the most common theory is that these dreams have more to do with our feelings about being judged or evaluated. 

If return-to-school dreams reflect anything at all (and it may well be that dreams are nothing more than random neural activity), I imagine it's mostly that: anxiety over being judged, which is the experience of schooling for many of us. Researchers find that these dreams often occur when we are feeling judged or evaluated in our waking life.

David Hockney

I have no idea what my most recent school-based dream means. It wasn't stressful. In fact, it was a "good dream" in the sense that it felt good knowing that all those people needed me. What struck me most about this dream, however, was how clearly I saw. I mean, my eyes were closed of course, yet my inner eye produced clear and vivid detail as if I were seeing actual people, places, and things.

Giulio Tononi is a professor of psychiatry and sleep medicine as well as the Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science at the University of Wisconsin. He writes, "The eye is just the door through which (the sun's) rays enter our mind. Vison is in the mind, not the eye."

It sounds crazy until you realize that we see when we dream. We also hear. Some people report smelling scents, tasting flavors, and experiencing touch, temperature, and even pain in their dreams. In other words, our dreams demonstrate that it's all in our heads. As Tononi puts it, "When we are awake, and our eyes are open, they tell the mind what it ought to see -- they look outside and then select, out of the varied collection in consciousness's grand gallery, which painting should be shone with the light, but they don't do the seeing, no, that's something for the mind alone. For even though the eyes may be shut, as when asleep, or injured . . . the mind still sees, and of its own accord decides what's to be seen . . . (W)e see what we can imagine."

Looked at through this lens, education, learning, is a process of expanding the grand gallery of consciousness: of increasing the store of what we can imagine.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to visit a school I attended for three years in a suburb of Athens, Greece. It was a discombobulating experience. I was at first convinced that we had come to the wrong place. I asked if maybe they had relocated during the intervening fifty years. Had the old buildings been replaced by new ones? But no, I was assured it was the same place, that the buildings were largely unchanged, but it was emphatically not the picture that hung in my own grand gallery.

Dale Chihuly

It was a struggle to make what I was experiencing fit my memories. By the time I left, I'd puzzled enough of the pieces into place that now, as I envision the school to write about it, my memories and my more recent experiences form into a single picture once more, one that I can "see" because I've imagined it so.

"(I)nformation is what the consciousness requires," writes Tononi in his book Phi. Most of what comprises reality swirls around us unnoticed. We can't see it because we can't imagine it. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinkler says, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that are life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness," which is to say that we are oblivious to almost everything that doesn't impact our survival. And even when we're told, say, that time doesn't exist or space is curved, we can't imagine it. Another cognitive psychologist, Donald Hoffman, asserts that it's a near mathematical certainty that what we "see" is not actually what is there, but rather our mind creating visions that help us survive.

It takes great effort, and great imagination, to see things that are not already hung in our gallery. Einstein famously attributes his general theory of relativity to thought experiments, including imagining himself riding on a photon. He "saw" himself doing something that no other human had ever seen. Today, there are countless humans who include this theory in their grand gallery of consciousness, but it was this singular man who first hung that picture.

Of course, Einstein was a certifiable genius, but his leap in perception is exactly the kind of leap every preschooler makes every day. From the moment we are born, probably even before, the doors of our senses admit massive amounts of information that their minds must sort into comprehensible sights, sounds, tastes, scents, and other sensations before they can be hung in the grand gallery of our consciousness. Every day, children perform these grand acts of imagination on par with Einstein's.

The more I learn about learning, the more inadequate I find the methods of standard schooling which is, after all, based on manufacturing models more than anything else. If left to their own devices, our children's minds are perfectly adapted for the task at hand, operating at a level far beyond any hierarchical system of direct instruction. 

Learning isn't a mechanistic process, but rather an act of imagination, one that has far more in common with our dream world than the classroom. And it's our great privilege to have young children in our lives to remind us that even as our own grand galleries may be fuller, there is always still room to hang more paintings.

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