Let's start with a story.
Last night I had a dream in which I basically missed my 10:30am final. Despite me knowing for a fact that it was a morning final, in my dream, I found myself rushing to the bus stop surrounded by nighttime lighting conditions; it looked a lot more like 10:30pm to me.
The P-Line was just pulling out when I managed to get the driver to stop, and I found myself boarding through the only door on the bus, which was on the left towards the midsection, which is nothing like the actual design of the typical Unitrans bus, or any American-made bus, for that matter. As I got on, I was greeted by the driver, who was an old lady, who asked to see my ID. The driver's seat was mounted in the very center of the front of the bus, and as we began to set off, she got out of her seat and asked me for my UCD student ID card. I reached into the strap pocket on my backpack like I always did, and pulled it out. Upon close examination, she said, "This isn't fake, now is it? Ah, no its not...", and right when she finished her sentence, my ID suddenly split into two layers, as if it was two sides of a UCD ID printed on two card-sized sheets of paper, with a few index cards in between to provide stiffness, and the whole thing was sloppily "laminated" together by clear Scotch Tape (and I'm not gonna lie, I made one of these in the past when my other UCD ID got lost).
As the old-lady driver looked at me in surprise and disgust, I reached into my strap pocket once again, noticing another ID-shaped card in it, and pulled it out, only to realize that it was a card that read, "UCD Alumni Association", to which I recall replying, "What the fuck is this... Dammit." Now mind you, this was all happening with the bus in motion with no one at the wheel; the old lady was too busy looking at my fabricated student ID. "Uhh... maybe you should pay more attention to the road, heh" I said to her. But before I knew it, we were pulling up to the MU bus terminal. I remember seeing a building that looked like a mix between the right-side entrance of Springstowne/Solano Middle School (both schools have the exact same design), and Hunt Hall, which is adjacent to the bus terminal. After that I remember running towards Young Hall, which for some reason was placed where the MU usually is, rushing into the north entrance (the Social Sciences Structure side), and going left into Young 184, where my Psychology 131 class is held, and where my final was supposed to be. When I burst through the door of the classroom, guess where I found myself: in the piano room of my house in Vallejo.
Confused, I ran out of the room, went up some stairs in what I thought was still Young Hall, and went into what I thought would be the right classroom, only to once again find myself in the downstairs guestroom/piano room of my Vallejo home. Confused and panicky, I exited the room and found myself in the family room in my house, next to the door that leads to the garage. There I saw my mom. My mom was talking about some wierd-ass shit (sorry if you're reading this, mom, I have no other way to descirbe it, lol). She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that I was about to miss my Psych131 final, and that if I didn't take it, I'd fail the class. To that, she reponded, "It's ok, your dad is also failing his Master's right now." In my head, I'm thinking, "What are you talking about, dad already has his Master's degree" but I didn't say it out loud. My mom then went on to tell me that she had lost her job, and asked me if Benson maybe had any job openings for working for TIZ (wtf?), and went on to explain that she would rather start job hunting with small-scale companies, because she didn't feel like submitting big fancy résumés to larger-scale organizations.
And that's all I remember.
Anyway, the point is, for most of us, when we have dreams, we don't think about how plausible or realistic our experiences within our dreams are; we just go along with the flow of events, even if, in reality, they would make no sense to us whatsoever, and that was the case for me this past evening. In our dreams, we find it so simple to just vicariously follow wherever our dreams choose to take us, and we do so without question. While there have been a few cases where I was able to come to realize that I was dreaming within my own dream, and as a result just fool around, knowing there would be no real-world consequences (those are the best dream situations, by the way), the majority of the time, we just follow the course that our dreams set out for us, without question.
This led me to wonder, to bring back the whole concept of the Matrix trilogy, if what we consider conscious, real-time awareness of reality, could be just another mindless, vicarious following of wherever the environment might lead us. What's to tell me that I'm not dreaming right now? There are some times when conscious reality feels just as disconnected, fragmented, and unrelated to everything else, as if the world around us is just a bunch of completely random images and actions collaged together to form everything which falls under our senses of perception.
But the biggest difference between dreams and reality is that in reality, we are able to make conscious decisions and actively evaluate our current situations, evaluations which help us to make more decisions, and so on and so forth. In dreams, on the other hand, we just follow along, not thinking about connections, logic, reason, or anything like that; we just hop on a train that already has a set destination, rather than be the ones to drive our own vehicles in the direction that we see fit. On top of that, reality is a lot easier to remember that dreams; probably because we are more able to create connections between past and present events, whereas in dreams, we choose not to do so.
Blah blah blah, I don't know what else to say.
-nesqu!k
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