Sagan, renowned astronomer from Cornell, goes on, “In dreams we are sometimes aware of that small portion of us placidly watching; often off in a corner of the dream, there is a kind of observer.” He calls this observer a “watcher” and then reports that “In one marijuana experience, my informant became aware of the presence and, in a strange way, the inappropriateness of this silent ‘watcher,’ who responds with interest and occasional critical comment to the kaleidoscopic dream imagery of the marijuana experience but is not a part of it. ‘Who are you?’ my informant silently asked it. ‘Who wants to know?’ it replied(.)”

Sagan terming this intelligence a “watcher” is quite synchronistic. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a guide for those preparing to depart for the unmanifest, includes prayers to the “gods” and “spirits” to see the recently deceased past the “watchers,” who, by implication, might prevent one from escaping this plane of existence.

Experiences of coming into contact with your “watcher” while dreaming would be logical if sometimes in dreams the dreamer in fact is able to punch through the veil of this illusory material reality and into what we might call the realm of the “dead,” as is suggested by the movie “Waking Life.”

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Certainly the thinker should strive to distill the terminology used to describe this realm. Carl Jung reports that during dreams the mind is able to tap the collective conscious, which normally in waking life seeps into the mind through the unconscious. The unconscious, Jung says, communicates in symbols, images, that, Sagan might conclude, are intuited by the right brain, which deciphers patterns.

One might then conclude that this “realm of the dead” is really more aptly described as the “Great Unmanifest,” a swirling cloud of consciousness that seemingly from moment to moment takes on patterns but is otherwise wholly dynamic.

Terrence McKenna could be said to assert as much in his book “The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History.” He asserts astutely that when on “magic mushrooms” one become sensitive to various overlapping consciousnesses, at least one of which could qualify as the “Overmind.” He describes the experience, rightly, as one of telepathy, whereby thoughts clearly originating elsewhere are received by the individual’s mind. By imbibing even more powerful hallucinogens, such as DMT, one is sometimes able to parle directly with some of the abovementioned “watchers.” And they are plural. There are many of them.

The “watchers,” and some might refer to them as “guardian angels," like babies and kittens, one might presume after reading Sagan.

Sagan says that while the average individual experiences numerous sporadically arising and departing dream segments during each night of sleep, babies dream ceaselessly whenever they are asleep. So do kittens. In fact, Sagan reports, en utero the infant dreams from the moment the cerebral cortex is activated until it is born. We’re talking about months of nonstop dreaming.