Gnonthgol Posted:

You are not sensing in a dream but you can experiance the sensation of sensing.

Surely the “sensation of sensing” is a tautology – I experience sensations when I sense stuff in the real world, the only difference between dream sensations and waking sensations is that dreams don’t correspond to anything in the actual real world.

From within your own head, there is no real difference – your consciousness is presented with images or sounds or whatever that, while you’re experiencing them, seem real. It’s only when you wake up that you can look back and think “you know, it doesn’t really make sense that everything changed when I turned around, and that fish turned into a monkey”.

What’s interesting is whether dreams can draw on all forms of sensation (like touch, smell, taste etc.) or just a limited subset of what we experience when awake. If the latter, then we would be able to know for sure that we’re awake by testing those senses – sniff something or pinch yourself. If dreams can be, in effect, a complete simulation of reality then we lose the ability to distinguish and have to chalk a point up to Descartes.

tl;dr – Whether it’s coming from memories or sensory neurons, it seems the same at the time you experience it.