I had a dream not long ago about other people – no one in particular – that I mentioned to my psychologist. The general idea is something I wrote down in The Illusion of Freedom.

She mentioned that Erickson – a psychologist – speculated that when we dream, other people are reflections of our self. I restrained the urge to read up on him, rather going internal to gauge it.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, independently, from getting to know myself. I hold models of people in my mind. I believe we all do. Our minds, if they are hermetically sealed¹ from external influences other than our senses, only have these models to judge by.

Are the models accurate? That’s where we get into labels versus identity, where who we think someone is may not reflect who they actually are but our experience with that person which, in turn, is colored by our biases. When someone does something unexpected, we re-calibrate the model in our mind. We might even re-calibrate it more often.

So each person in our mind has a label. However, each person has an identity, and our label may not reflect anything but our experience. For example, despite having heard from friends about who my parents were as peers, I still have them labeled from my bias of them being my parents.

Therefore, when we dream, it does seem true that the labels of these people in our mind are reflections of our own biases and experiences with them – but it seems a little simplistic to think that they are simply ourselves in different skins. It seems more nuanced to that for me.

Yet this got me thinking of the identity versus labeling more, and how often that can be confused even in conscious settings. People aren’t always who we think they are, or our experience with them is not always a good definition of who they are.

Food for thought.

1. While I believe our minds are sealed, it doesn’t mean that they are. I’m not into the supernatural and don’t endorse it, but if we’re going to be thoughtful, we should allow for our biases to be wrong. ↩︎