Is This the Dream?

While I would hardly call the movie Inception an authority on the nature of reality, it does make an interesting suggesting.  As Leo teaches Ellen Page to navigate the dreamscape, he instructs her that one clear method of discerning dream from reality is the notion of a sequential timeline.  If you cannot recall just how you arrived in your current circumstances, chances are that there was no progression, that you were simply dropped there by a manic subconscious, that it is all but a dream.  Minutes ago I sat and listened to this song...



For whatever reason the 10,000 Maniacs always conjure my high school's art room in my mind's eye.  Many a time I have considered that perhaps I was locked within an awkward fantasy, significantly less tangible than it appeared.  Maybe I am just asleep at some watershed moment.  Perhaps at some instant that remains cloaked to my perception, the journey simply paused and continued in a fashion attuned to the insecurities of my battered psyche.  Consider the possibility that my mind needed to be callused for a coming challenge, that there was no opportunity to do so in the waking, walking world.  What if the miraculous myriad of synapses firing across my brain pan took it upon themselves to steel my resolve?  Could I be establishing, here with all of you, the skill to take the next step while the endgame awaits me upon the far side?

The questions might seem moot, mere idle armchair philosophy, but I simply cannot clearly recall the sequence that has brought me to this moment.  Now I know that my memory is not all it once was; I can accept this.  Regardless, many of my memories seem no more concrete than those I have come to define as the ashes of dream.  Some of these recollections are, in fact, far more ethereal.  Did I take a job or hold a hand, did smell a breeze just because it is ordered in my mind that I did so?  As my past whispers away, like smoke from a dying fire, I cannot be sure.  I cannot be sure.  This song seems real, seems to exist on the other side of some artificial threshold.  Can I taste, touch and feel this melody because it is "real," while so many that I have heard since are not?  It frightens and thrills me.

This is an exercise.  Just as it all is.  The game is to learn, to hone one's aptitude.  No matter the quantification or classification, soon comes a reckoning.  I want to be ready.

Cheers.