“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

-Edgar Allan Poe, 1849

Melancholy as he might have been, Poe’s words were my constant companion from the time I first heard “The Raven” at 5 to the time I carried around his collected works with me at 15. His works were the first time I heard of the connection between perception and reality, and the revelation was a revolution:  Can what I think really influence the way the world seems to me? From what we have learned about the cognitive mechanisms behind mental imagery and perception, it very much seems that perception is reality and that what we imagine can influence what we perceive.

People construe the real world through the sensory input processed by our brains, and this sensory information creates a cognitive store of what we know. The more we perceive something, the more we know about it and the more information we recognize:  the same information is there for an expert and a novice to perceive, but the expert notices more because of her greater experience (Shourie, Firoozabadi, & Badie, 2014). In this sense, our reality is formed by our perceptions, and what we know and can imagine is based on what we have already perceived. Try picturing an animal or a face you have never seen before. Your novel animal is stitched together from parts of creatures you know, and your new face is the composite features of people you’ve encountered, isn’t it? You may alter the aspects a bit, but imagination is created by our perceptual experience. As our perceptions change, so too does what we can imagine, like individuals who have lost the ability to see in color and can only imagine in black-and-white or patients who suffer from unilateral neglect and only perceive and imagine things in half of their visual field (as cited in Goldstein, p. 283). Yet the connection between the bottom-up processing of perception and the top-down experience of imagination does not work in just one way:  it is bidirectional.

Just as perception creates imagination, what we imagine is essential to and can influence what we perceive. To Peter Strawson, imagination is “a necessary ingredient of perception itself,” as anything that is not currently in front of us requires our memory and imagination to conceive of it, and we even need to imagine parts of images that are obscured to perceive them properly (as quoted in Nanay, 2010, p. 239-240; Nanay, 2010, p. 249-252). In this way, imagination feeds information into our perception, but it can shape it too. Both seeing and imagining something will influence our subsequent perceptions of it, and the longer we are exposed to either our mental image or physical perception, the stronger the effect (Pearson, Clifford, & Tong, 2008). This could be because the brain processes mental imagery and perception in many of the same ways (as cited in Goldstein, 2011, p. 281-284). In a very real sense, an imagined object is real to our brains and can actually influence what we perceive of the real world.

I may not have understood it when I first read Poe’s poem “A Dream within a Dream,” but cognitive research suggests that reality is an interaction between the cognitive processes of perception and imagination. The experiences I’ve fed my brain—including a steady diet of Poe—emphasize my perceptions which influence what I can imagine, and what I imagine may alter what I perceive just as much as what I’ve experienced does.  In other words, it’s just like he said:  All that we see or seem is a dream of imagination within a dream of perception.

References

Goldstein, E.B. (2011). Cognitive psychology:  Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience. 3^rd ed. Belmont, CA:  Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Nanay, B. (2010). Perception and imagination:  Amodal perception as mental imagery. Philosophical Studies, 150, p. 239-254. Retrieved from http://download.springer.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/static/pdf/609/art%253A10.1007%252Fs11098-009-9407-5.pdf?originUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Farticle%2F10.1007%2Fs11098-009-9407-5&token2=exp=1448059035~acl=%2Fstatic%2Fpdf%2F609%2Fart%25253A10.1007%25252Fs11098-009-9407-5.pdf%3ForiginUrl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Flink.springer.com%252Farticle%252F10.1007%252Fs11098-009-9407-5*~hmac=b1f0186f37b9bdeed585b3b1484aa329539ac6f88de04e450208d54ea3609519

Pearson, J., Clifford, C.W.G., & Tong, F. (2008). The functional impact of mental imagery on conscious perception. Current Biology, 18.13., p. 982-986. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2008.05.048

Poe, E.A. (1849). A dream within a dream. Reprinted by the Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237388

Shourie, N., Firoozabadi, M., & Badie, K. (2014). Analysis of EEG signals related to artists and nonartists during visual perception, mental imagery, and rest using approximate entropy. BioMed Research International. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/764382