Hutton's Paradox

A paradox concerning dreams and the nature of reality was described by the British writer Eric Bond Hutton in 1989. As a child Hutton often had lucid dreams, in which everything seemed as real as in waking life. This led him to wonder whether life itself was a dream, even whether he existed only in somebody else's dream. Sometimes he had pre-lucid dreams, in which more often than not he concluded he was awake. Such dreams disturbed him greatly, but one day he came up with a magic formula for use in them: "If I find myself asking 'Am I dreaming?' it proves I am, for the question would never occur to me in waking life." Yet, such is the nature of dreams, he could never recall it when he needed to. Many years later, when he wrote a piece about solipsism and his childhood interest in dreams, he was struck by a contradiction in his earlier reasoning. True, asking oneself "Am I dreaming?" in a dream would seem to prove one is. Yet that is precisely what he had often asked himself in waking life. Therein lay a paradox. What was he to conclude? That it does not prove one is dreaming? Or that life really is a dream?