Ugachaka, uga uga ugachaka (insert dancing baby...)

Hughes touches on the idea of dreams being routine sorting of everyday activities, thus suggesting dreams are "neither creative nor meaningful." This leads me to the question, "What is so mundane about real life?" Getting back to earlier discussions from Pearce and our mindset, I don't see everyday, commonplace activities as mundane, however, I do feel if we robotically interact and react to the stimuli around us, it can be seen as nothing more than that. Americans especially are trained to "go, go, go" and take little time for digestion or comprehension of the outside world unless they are required to by some outside force. We see the everyday world as our backdrop, not as a constantly changing, engaging environment full of new experiences. Some of the most creative people I know don't take for granted this wealth of knowledge at our fingertips. Anyway, as far as dreams are concerned, I think (if there is some inherent value/importance) to them, the simplicity of their motives should not be overlooked.
On the other side of that idea is the fact that dreams allow you to break from reality and allow you to experience non-traditional situations. It is said, "If you dream it, you can be it," and in a literal (subconscious) sense, you can. Hughes states, "Our subjective consciousness accepts improbable dream scenarios as experiential reality because the brain is deprived of external clues with which to construct an orientational framework." As I said, I think there is much to learn in the everyday, but I think there is an equally insightful quality to letting your mind escape its confines. If we are able to experience things that we could never allow ourselves to in reality, we can gain a perspective which surpasses rational thought.
Pearce points out that there is an underlying sameness to our thought process. As he states “the function of question-answer is an expression of the ontological, reality-shaping process itself.” I think as humans this framework becomes necessary and is used to correlate our own reality to the reality of the world around us. Pearce suggests that our irrational thoughts are challenged by the presence of others but that the thoughts that remain allow us to “change the very framework and criteria of what makes real and what makes fantasy.” This goes back to the idea of dreams and the concept of using their insight to escape traditional thinking. I think the idea of altered states is becoming more clear to me and I am realizing they may be closer to our everyday lives than we think.