Writing practice 9/29/2017

Postulate – Dreams are not real. Prove it.

Suppose that dreams were real. Then wouldn’t there be an inherent contradiction between dreams and reality? We would have never needed to come up with a new term to describe them if they were real. They would simply be “I lived last night,” instead of “I dreamed we were climbing a mountain wearing orange bicycle shorts, and jaguars carried our packs on their backs, their long, lean tails swish-swishing against the new-fallen snow. We trudged up miles of the mountain, and one time you stopped to take a picture. But what you were holding was a coffee cup, not a camera, so instead of taking a picture you ate the cup.

Then we continued on and the jaguars had become my Aunt Debbie and Uncle Steve, and they didn’t want to carry it any longer, so we had them put down the packs. And when we turned around the mountain was no longer a mountain, but it had transformed into a train station – huge, with soaring ceiling inlaid with stained-glass windows, and at least a dozen platforms and all kinds of people rushing about – people from Victorian England, and feudal Japan, and sub-Saharan Africa in the 5th century AD, and even Julius Caesar was there. He was addressing the crowd – gratefully, thankfully, luckily, I don’t know, he was speaking French. You translated.

You said that he was happy to be there on a momentous occasion. You said he said he was a teapot. Then you said he felt yellow, and that’s when I knew it was time to wake up, so I blinked my eyes twice and I was awake!”

You see? All of that is nonsense. There is no way that could have ever happened. There is no way that “reality”, that “irreality”, that dream theater could ever play out in real life.

So what is real life? Why is it not a dream? Maybe the world in which jaguars transform into relatives is real, and then when those people sleep they dream this world.

Why would they? Escapism – the same reason we dream of them. They must, somehow, find an order, a semblance, a pattern in their lives. Can you imagine, every moment is a contradiction? Every instant you know not whether the thing you are holding at the moment will remain that thing, that object, even that idea, or will transubstantiate into something different – something other – not anything better or worse – but just not what it was before. Can you imagine the toil that would take on a person – on a psyche – living through such experiences?

No wonder they would dream of regularity. No wonder they would invent magical, mystical worlds in which people got up every day at the same time, put on the same clothes, drove to the same building, said the same things, ate the same sandwiches, departed and went back to their same houses, slept in their same bed. Same. Safe. Sound – Regular. Predictable.

Comfortable, because of all those things. Not scary, or intimidating at all. Peaceful. Serene, a rest in a world of chaos. A break form the norm, and a way to reset their mind to be able to handle, to compensate for all the turbulence in their regular world.

So – why are dreams unreal? Because –  I can’t tell who it is that’s having them.