Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Not to harp on the whole dreams-that-don't-make-sense thing, because honestly they very rarely do make sense, but I had another truly deranged one last night. And yes, I was in Richmond except it didn't look like the city at all other than the presence of a river and lots of bridges.  Lots of very complicated bridges, in fact. Let me explain that the actual city's bridges aren't very complicated because all they need to do is cross the James, which is a pretty basic thing to do.  The closest thing to a complex bridge structure is where 95 joins the Downtown Expressway.  In my dream of course were at least ten big flyovers and all kinds of weird on/off ramps, many of which seemed to lead down to the riverbank where they ended in mud.  There was also a building there that I knew to be the old Liggett-Myers factory but which, of course, looked nothing like the real thing which is long gone. 

The strange thing to me is that, even after I woke up, I was convinced that some of the things people in my dream had said were of earthshattering brilliance, and that I should write them down.  Since this was at about 3am and I went right back to sleep, I didn't write them down, but now that I'm thinking about it, none of these things made any sense whatsoever.  

What weird aspect of the human psyche leads people to believe that? I know I'm not the only one because other people have mentioned it.  I suppose that since, while you're dreaming, it all seems perfectly logical, when you wake up your brain is still a little bit in that dream world and so you still believe that anything in the dream was of vital importance.  

I was feeling a little existential on the way in to school today though and I reached the somewhat depressing idea that dream worlds are representative of our entire belief systems.  We believe that the dream world is important because as long as we're in the dream, it is.  What if our own view of reality is that skewed? After all people went happily about for centuries believing that the sun revolved around the world.  (Apparently there are still some people who believe that. If you are one of those people and I have just disrupted your harmony, I am sorry.) Naturally in the past couple of centuries we've made amazing scientific progress and we know a lot more about the universe than people in the sun-revolves-around-us age.  But...what if these are things we only think we know, and all of our incredible advancement turns out to have been wrong?  That's just really disturbing.  I don't like to feel all secure in my knowledge of something and then discover I had it all wrong.  

I think back to my childhood mispronunciation of "Adirondack." I'd only ever seen the word in print and had never heard anyone say it, so I went on happily believing that it was pronounced "a-DYE-run-dack" until finally I heard it on the radio or something. My pompous belief in my own correctness was shaken badly. 

Sorry, this has been an extremely strange post.  I'll get back to snarky commentary and cocktail evaluations soon. 

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