Dreams
I woke up at 1pm today. I haven't done this in a very, very long time, and it was because I slept at 6am. And that was because my sunburn was giving me hell. The skin on my chest and shoulders is BRIGHT RED, and the feeling of any cloth on it makes it itch like crazy, and even without any cloth on it, it still itches like crazy because it's healing. To sum up: sleeping with clothes on hurts, and sleeping with clothes off hurts. Ergo, I slept at 6am, after tossing and turning for something like three hours. Why am I telling you this? I'm not sure.
Anyway, I had a dream in my restless sleep that I was playing tennis and I couldn't get my serve right. And then I stopped and looked at my grip and thought that I should buy a new grip, but I didn't have any money to. I find this really tragic. Some people get to dream about being kings and queens, have h0t s3x or star in an action movie, but for me, not only do I have the most mundane dreams about buying a new tennis grip, but even in my dream I am crap at tennis, poor and have no money. I need a new life, or something.
Speaking of dreams, there's a very poetic Chinese saying by a guy called Chang-Tzu that goes something like:
"Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chang-Tzu who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am Chang-Tzu."
I'm sure some of you are familiar with this line of thought...commonly espoused by Descartes, if I'm not mistaken. He said that we cannot trust what our senses tell us, because when we dream, we feel we are experiencing reality...so what separates our waking feelings from our dream feelings? How can we be sure your whole life is not a dream?
I don't agree with this, personally. It leads very neatly into an impossible argument - we could say that we are in a dream, which then presupposes the idea of a reality outside this dream...but how do we know that that reality is also not a dream, and so on, ad infinitum? I forget what it's called, but in essence it's the same paradox that exists when we try and think about the beginning of time and existence. You can say that God made the world, but who made God, and what made that God, etc.? At some point, "something had to come from nothing" (to paraphrase Jostein Gaarder) - unless you believe that God had "always existed", which seems to me to be just as absurd. In the same way, at some point, there must be a "final reality" out of all the dreams, and it's difficult to conceive that there is any way to verify which is a reality and which is a dream.
And anyway, for all Descartes' rationalism, right after he came up with the cognitive gem of "I think, therefore I am", which he considered the first real philosophical truth, he then coined up the second "real philosophical truth" - that there was a God. For someone who claimed to be so rational, that was decidedly irrational, and so I was a bit put off his ideas (romantic as they were). Well anyway. I once had a dream that I was dreaming that I woke up in a dream, and then I actually woke up, and you can imagine how confused I was. Figure that one out, if you can.
In other news, my last two posts have set new records for Longest Comments (Sam's comment on "Progress II" and Will's comment on "Progress"). Although I must say, Sam's comment was actually a conversation log, so I suppose it doesn't really count.