"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...)
Follow me, this one is fun.
So my music player is on shuffle, and "A Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton just came on. (Don't judge me, 90s music is awesome.) So I was contemplating the line from the chorus, If I could fall into the sky, do you think time would pass us by?
Falling into the sky was the part that was interesting to me for a moment.
It made me think of Falling Up, the book of poems by Shel Silverstein, whose books were among my favorites during childhood. (The Missing Piece is still a pretty accurate description of my life as a whole.)
Thinking about Shel Silverstein made me remember this awesome thing that happened to me when I was visiting my dad in Florida last year. We were driving somewhere, probably just to Walmart or something, and I saw the best sign ever.
So for the longest time I've had this recurring random wonderment. It's often rather difficult to explain to people...so much so that, as of late, I'd rather stopped trying.
It's like, when we're little kids, our preschool and kindergarten teachers point to some colored squares and say, "That's blue," "That's green," "That's red," etc. And we nod our little heads and say yes. And we go home and our parents do the same thing with our favorite ball and our jacket and the grass outside and the sky, and the colors of all these things are roughly the same as the colors on the squares our teachers showed us, so we nod our little heads and say yes. But how do you know that little Bobby sitting next to you in class sees the green square (and thus, the grass) as being the same color you see it as? What if little Bobby thinks what you both call "green" is actually the color you see as "red" and visa versa? What if your green is purple to him? HOW COULD WE EVER FIND OUT IF WE SEE THE SAME THINGS THE SAME WAY???
...One of the really and truly incredible things about this online dating thing is that it has matched me with other people who, in their I spend a lot of time thinking about box, list that exact question (in their own words, of course). ...I didn't even include it on my profile because I thought it was too weird. Mysterious forces are at work here, verrrrry mysterious forces.
if he spends his whole life in a cage? How can he be brave? Does he even know he's supposed to be a king?
