Dreams

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." --Shakespeare

"No more worries; rest your head and go to sleep. Maybe one day we'll wake up and this will all just be a dream." --Eminem

^Up yours to anyone who says rap isn't poetry.

But that's a side note. This post is about the movie Inception. I watched it online earlier today, and those two quotes popped into my head as soon as the movie was over, while I was struggling to come to terms with reality. I remember in 2004 when that Eminem song came out--for those who don't know, Mockingbird, one of his best, go inform yourself--sitting at the table in my high school having a conversation with my friends over french fries, about how mind-blowing a concept that was. What if the entire life we have, everything we know and everything it feels as though we have ever known, is but a dream that we will someday wake up from? What if one day we woke up and our bed wasn't our bed, our hands weren't our hands, our reflection featured a stranger blinking back at us? What if our parents weren't our parents, our friends weren't our friends, and we were no longer the ourselves? If everyone from Shakespeare to Eminem to Christopher Nolan can become fascinated by the same idea (the most resilient parasite, after all), is there a possibility that this world which feels so really is just a product of our abundant imaginations? I'm sure it's not, but chew on that one for a while, haha.

Side note: I can't see people's faces in my dream. It's not like people are mannequins or weird faceless blobs...Everything's just a little too blurry for me to make out the details. Faces, places, all of it. Like, I know where I am, and I know who is with me (even if I don't actually know that person(s)....I rather often dream of strangers who are entirely known to me in my dreams...the products of my subconscious, I suppose), but none of it is entirely clearly visible. Almost as if it's from a "real world" I can't quite remember? (If the third level was ten years, we could spend lifetimes in a fourth level...a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream...)