DREAMLAND

I woke before I slept, in a reality within a dream. The room appeared larger than I remembered, yet also felt nauseatingly smaller, as the sound of rain against the window threaded the night with the precision of a seamstress who hated fabric. The door handle was missing at first, as I pondered if it had always been, but once I flicked the light switch, it appeared, yet somehow, I knew the handle was now offended. Hanging from the handle by a piece of string was a note that read “Careful, the way back is slower than the way there”. As I left through the door, I found myself entering the same room, except now everything in the room was pretending it had never met me before. And I kinda liked it, I felt free from judgement, for who I was not only now forgotten, but it didn’t even exist. At last! I thought, I could finally be me.

The flip between reality and dream differ in description more than in substance, like twins who dress differently to confuse the neighbours. Both arrive as parcels of sensation and thought, and those little emotional traumas that keep your anxiety in check. Both can bully you into belief, both can hand you joy like a free pork pie or drop terror down your throat like a rogue olive stone.

If the brain is just the overworked receptionist who signs for everything, stamps it, and files it under “I’ll Explain Later,” then from the inside, there’s no watermark that says DREAM in pink neon or REALITY in His Majesty’s font. It’s all just content to consciousness – same cinema, different ushers.

Dreams do tend to glitch – you can’t run, the office morphs into your home, and your childhood teacher is head of HR, while waking life sells itself as the premium subscription: continuity, memory, people who disagree with you. But that continuity is an inside job. It’s just memory traces, feedback from your meat suit, and the group project we call “consistency” where everyone swears blind the sky is blue and that they’ve read 1984. And of course, the waking stream mostly rhymes across time and between witnesses, which makes it wonderfully useful for not walking into traffic, but usefulness is not a divine credential. A dream that coheres like a good lie could feel, from the pilot’s seat, identical.

So if your experience – whoever your suppler, is the only goody bag you’ll leave this life with, then being a millionaire in a dream and being a millionaire in daylight differ only by label, like a pair of Reebook Classics from the market.

Likewise, that wine you had last weekend is gone now, all you have left is the memory. The only thing separating that memory from dream is the wine stain it left on your favourite top.

“Lucid dreaming is when you know you’re dreaming” she said

“So what’s reality when you know it’s reality called?” he asked

“… being poor” she said

This nudges us, unwilling and undercaffeinated, toward a tidy little scepticism. If all access to “the world” is mediated by you, absolute certainty about the external is as reliable as the weather man, and experience doesn’t come with a return address. The “brain-in-a-vat” thought experiment comes to mind, and this subject does dance around it, with a pocket full of posies before falling down.

But scepticism needn’t fold into nihilism, which is just despair with a philosophy degree. There are anchors, humble, municipal little anchors, that justify treating one stream as the public square, repetition, predictability, testimony, the way independent reports overlap like badly aligned photocopies. These aren’t cosmic proofs, but they’re working criteria. They upgrade “probably” to “good enough to cross the road”.

Dreams, though, are not mere intermissions with targeted advertising. They’re alternative jurisdictions, internally complete, indecently vivid, and stubborn in argument. So, no matter how bad your life gets, and if you’re reading this, then it’s not looking great, at least you have your dreams, because in a way, you aren’t dreaming about what you want, you’re dreaming about what you have.

:: REFERENCES ::

• Wikipedia – Brain in a Vat