Hardboiled Dreams of the World
I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t want to be anything.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams of the world. –Fernando Pessoa
A good friend, hip-hop poet laureate Jocee Kipp, is disappointed in God (The Creator, Supreme Being, Allah, Yahweh, The Force, etc.) today. Jocee just figured out part of the ultimate puzzle; the piece he solved is: The world’s a dream.
I asked Jocee why he was so righteously pissed off.
“Well,” Jocee said, “you know, God is supposed to be this formidable story teller–he’s invented so many strange characters, exotic milieus, and he’s just a genius at interweaving disparate plot strands. Only now, I find out the Almighty’s based his masterpiece on the “reader discovers that all the previous events were a dream” twist ending. That’s one of the lamest surprise endings of all time!”
I agree with Jocee — the “it’s all a dream” twist ending has been done so often, it’s a cliche right up there with discovering the main character is schizo (Psycho, Fight Club, Secret Window) or undead (The Sixth Sense, The Others).
The “it’s all a dream” twist ending was employed most notoriously to negate the whole 7th season of Dallas (1985). I’ll give David Lynch movies their due, and the final episode of Newhart (1990) uses this device and still remains one (if not THE) best final episodes of all time. But, I guess after investing all of his life (so far) in the story in which we’re all playing a part, Jocee just expected more from the most famous Author. Instead he got one of the cheapest plot devices known to fiction (unless it’s done well, and there is an argument that The Force has done this well, but I think the cat’s already out of the bag…)
Anyway, it took Jocee long enough to figure this out considering there are clues scattered all over creation. Just to list a few, here are my own favorite Top Ten Clues the World Is a Dream:
10. “Row row row your boat…” The last line of the song isn’t a clue — it’s a freebie, a literal giveaway.
9. Car keys — who hasn’t lost their car keys, looked all through the house twice, and then found them right out in the open in a spot they knew they’d already checked? Some people have actually had their lost keys suddenly appear in their hand in mid-search. Dreams slip and morph that way.
8. “We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe.” ~John Archibald Wheeler, colleague of Einstein, and the physicist who coined the phrase “black hole.”
7. “We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche.” ~Carl Gustav Jung, The Real and the Surreal, 1933.
6. “Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” ~Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel Prize winning physicist.
5. “Nature is visible thought.” ~Heinrich Heine
4. “An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.” ~Niels Bohr, widely considered one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century.
3. “You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist.” ~Winston Churchill.
2. “All that you see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.” ~Edgar Allen Poe
1. “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” ~Albert Einstein
Happy dreaming,
–Joe
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“It’s all a dream we dreamed/ One afternoon, long ago” - “Box of Rain”, lyrics by Robert Hunter, music by Phil Lesh.
And it’s just a Box of Rain, I don’t know who put it there
Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare.
Yes, it’s just a Box of Rain and a ribbon for your hair
Such a long, long time to be gone
And a short time to be here.
The real pisser is not so much that it’s a lame device, but the frustration one feels in trying to apply lucid dreaming to the thing; that is, mold it consciously. Ah, but intention is only the latest buzz word. The Buddha said, in effect, “It’s all about not wanting to not want.”
Alternatively, “Dreamers, Awake!”
Thanks for the deep thoughts, Chuck!
You know, you gotta be careful about trying to lucid dream in this here particular dream. I think I’ve seen a lot of people try to make the dream lucid, but they actually wake themselves all the way up instead (looks like they bite the dust from this viewpoint.)
Another deep thought…the physical brain is an organ that limits our mind in this dream. This might be why savants with damaged brains can have extraordinary talents, or why some folks have near death, out-of-body experiences when their brain temporarily goes flat. It’s a different way to frame things…the brain as a schackle on consciousness. Meditation, hallucinatory drugs…things that allow consciousness to take a journey are all things that shut down part of the brain, right? Just an interesting thought to throw out there…a different slant on reality. Don’t get me wrong, though, I likes my healthy brain and am not advocating screwing with the old noodle too much.
Wow, deep post. Must ponder. Reminds me of a lot of what I heard in the Unity church. They have a heavy metaphysical slant, or at least the one I went to did. (Unity, not Unitarian).