The Story About Dreaming

Part One

Waking up is hard to do. It's not necessarily that you didn't get much sleep, no, usually it is that you got way too much sleep. Too much sleep and no incentive to wake up is the problem. The dream was so intense, the sleep so deep that each time you had the chance to wake up, you rolled over, pulled the pillow over your face and went back to sleep. The day ahead seemed much too hard for you to wake up and go through with it. Even if you did wake up enough to have a productive day, you still stayed asleep enough to warrant going back and doing it again that night. Every day it seems harder to wake up and every night it seems easier to slip into that comatose state and continue the dream from the night before. 

When I woke up, I knew I wanted to stay awake. It was hard to do. I had been asleep for much too long and it was like I needed something to keep me awake, to keep me interested in what I had to do. The day ahead would not have a night to end it, to push me back into that comfortable sleep, but still I wanted it, still I begged my mind to forget the light that had awoken me and plunge me back into darkness. No matter how much rest I had gotten from the sleep I had had until this moment, no matter how enthralling the dream was, I could not go back to sleep once I had arisen, stretched and gone to face the long, unending day ahead.

Let me take you back to a time before all that has happened since. Let me take you into the dream I had for so long. Let me show you how I woke up. Let me show you how to wake up yourself and let the light of morning inspire you to stay awake, never to dream again. Let me tell you why sleep and dreaming is a terrible thing, why pulling the pillow over your own eyes mirrors the reality you see every day in your own dreams. 

It is July of 2014. I work for a living. I pay my taxes. I have a girlfriend. I have an ex wife. I have a mountain of debt and never seem to get ahead. I am just like millions of other people. I work in construction, but it's not my calling. I know this because it is not what I enjoy doing. In this, I am also like millions of other people in the world. I don't enjoy what I do, but I do it because, like everyone else, I am broke. I need to pay for food, a home to live in, the luxuries I enjoy and the lifestyle I live yet it iseems what I make is barely enough to cover just the necessities. I work hard, I make money, but I rarely see more than 20 percent of that money stay with me. It goes everywhere else first.

I have never owned my own home, except for a time when I lived in the woods in a tent shared by my best friend. It was not long ago, actually. We lived there for a few months, undetected even while still within the city. We rarely showered, we barely had enough to survive. We stole to feed ourselves sometimes. We lived mostly carefree, away from the tedium of the daily grind, save for the short amount of time we worked to support ourselves. It was good. But we were still slaves to the system. We still had no money and no way to get by unless we worked. We still had mounting money problems. All the optimism in the world is no match for a lack of money.

We moved back in with our parents and that is where we are now. I am just like so many other people who get filled with optimism that they are going to go their own way only to be trampled down by the reality that their dreams are just out of reach, inaccessible. In this world it seems like the only way to truly get ahead is to have already been ahead. If you are not ahead, you are behind and have likely always been behind. You're the last in line.

I met a man like me who told me a story. This story was one I had heard before, but the eloquence with which he told the story was so powerful that I could not ignore it. He told me that there are people out there who want nothing more than to profit from people like me. This is old news. Anyone who has ever heard of Walmart or McDonalds or the federal government knows that anyone with the power to exploit people will always do so. It is called leverage for a reason. It is akin to the idea of using a lever and a fulcrum to lift a heavy object. The weight is displaced by the lever and the fulcrum provides a balance point for that weight. A man can lift his own weight without using much force simply by exercising this basic simple machine. In the same way, the power brokers of our world use money and influence as a lever and fulcrum to displace the weight of the world so they can have it for their own gain.

The man who told me this story disappeared not long after. It was like I had never met him. Maybe I didn't. But his story inspired me to look deeper into the way the world works and find a way to exploit it for my own gain. It took me the longest time to realize that it was not me who had to gain from the message of this story, but the rest of the world, the displaced weight, and untimately the people who displaced that weight. To do so, I had to identify and obliterate, first the fulcrum, then the lever. No simple machine to do the work, no means of exercising power and control. The fulcrum: influence. The lever: money.

I met a girl who sang the blues. It was like something out of a song. She smiled when she met me, turned away. I could tell she was shy about me and that was alright. I was shy too. As I said earlier, I have an ex wife. She rarely talks to me. I have many ex girlfriends. I don't talk to any of them. I have this way with women. That way is usually that they like me at first and grow to hate my guts. I like them too, at first. And usually the dislike is mutual by the end of the relationship. I have little time to devote to making a relationship work. We can either be friends or lovers but never both. If it gets to both, it ends. Not abruptly either. Usually it is a drawn out process that involves wanting to see each other, but hating being in the presence of the other. 

This girl I met, as I said, sang the blues. She sang other genres too, but she sang really nice blues. She had a sweet voice that reminded me of a gentle wind, but with strong and ferocious gusts. A subtle zephyr blowing through leaves in a forest, with the occasional gale force gust shooting past the leaves as if they weren't there and hitting you with a warm but powerful blast. 

She caught me by surprise. More over, I was surprised by my own reaction to her. I was attracted to her, yes, but in a way I couldn't put my finger on. As beautiful as her voice was, as beautiful as she seemed to me, she wasn't sexually attractive to me. Any other girl, I am sure I would have loved to have a good roll in the hay with. But not this one. She attracted me in a different way. As if I knew I was destined to do something great with her that didn't involve copulation. 

Copulation was certainly the last thing on her mind as well. I am sure she thought about it, as did I, but it seemed like neither of us saw that as a way to take our friendship to another level. The level it seemed our friendship would take was more of an intellectual adventure, one that would launch very soon.

I should take this opportunity to advise the reader that my mind wanders greatly even during a single session of writing, even during the time it takes to write a paragraph. Time is of little use for me at this point and I very often will drift between temporal reference points even in a single sentence. If you notice this happening, kindly advise me of it and I will try my best to ignore you. Not difficult when I am communicating to you across time, space and a piece of paper. Thank you for understanding.

In all the time I have been alive, I have done a few things religiously. religion is not one of those things. I have gone to church before, I have been a member of a congregation. I was baptised. I was confirmed. I ate a few stale crackers and drank some potent wine. I inhaled my fair share of incense. I experimented with differing variations of the same prayers. I called on the same god in so many different ways it became old and stale quicker than the communion wafers. Religion for me was anything but religious.

The things I have done with religious fervour include learning. That is about it. I am tenacious about it. There is no getting around the fact that I have near infinite drive to learn and to increase the base of my knowledge and understanding of topics that interest me. School was a hassle for me. A big hassle because there was little in school that I was interested in learning. It was in school, however, that I learned one of the most important lessons of my life. This was the lesson that taught that what is taught in school is pointless if there is no application for it. If there is no reason to apply the knowledge we obtain in school, why would we be shepherded into it for twelve or more years of our formative periods? If we cannot learn what drives us, why should we learn at all? 

The truth of it is that we do learn. Every single day we learn. The old adage goes that we learn something new every day. This is true, but it is also true that we relearn much of what we have already learned each day. We forget so much of what we do on a second to second basis that by the time we have to do it again, much of it is lost and we have to relearn it. There are hints, of course, buits of retained memory that help us along the way, but by and large, we have to make a conscious effort to hold on to that knowledge or it is gone. We have to WANT to learn what we learn or we forget it. 

Many people have gone to school for the compulsory ten or twelve years and learned so much there that they have forgotten the day after it is learned. There is no application, no incentive to remember what is learned. Grades are poor incentives. they arbitray indicators of actual understanding. Retention of words and phrases is easy enough, but when we are in school, we are at the ages where we are sponges for words. The actual meanings of those words is not solidified until one has to use them in a sentence and fully justify the use of those words. Application. 

If I ever had to apply some of the things I learned in school, it would be three: writing and use of language, basic mathematical operations and human sexuality. The rest of it flew right out the window, the window of course being my mind. One could assert that gym class is retained by almost everyone, but being active is just a normal part of life, not one that has to be taught or learned. We learn to run innately when we are small children and most of us do not forget how to do that. The ones who seem to forget are usually the ones who are so sedentary that they cannot run for their own lives. The others who forget are usually dead.

The reason, it seems, that we learn anything at all in school is so that we can be productive members of society. So that we can succeed in a 9 to 5, or 7 to 3 or midnight to 8 kind of job. Grunt work. The ones of us who excel are herded towards college and university to be the ones who herd the rest of us in the jobs we have chosen. These are called managers, business people and politicians. At varying times in my life, I have heard the call to become on of these managers, businessmen or politicians.At other times in my life, I have harboured other aspirations. I have aspired to military service. I have aspired to superstardom as a musician, a writer, a spiritual leader and other such insane dreams. 

There are varying theories as to why anyone at all would aspire to any of these career choices. My answer is that there is subtle manipulation all around us. We see it, we know it exists. We comment endlessly on it's influence on us. Yet we fail to do anything concrete about it. We are simultaneously disgusted and enthralled by it. We hate it and support it all at once. It defines us and we let it define us. We forget who we truly are because of who we are told to be. We end up becoming two different people, who we think we are and who we are told we are. In truth, there is a third person. I am going to show you that person. In truth, I already have. In truth, it wasn't me who did a thing. In truth, you will read this and know already everything that I have told you because you told yourself so long ago you can't remember doing it. I am going to count back from five to one. When I snap my fingers, you will not hear it because you are reading this and not listening to my mind dictate to my fingers as I type this. No matter, it will affect you all the same. Wake up. Stay awake. The sleep is killing you and I will show you how, why and the difference between the dream and reality. Five, four, three, two, one. Snap.

Part Two.

It was hard to see through the fog. The drive was incessant and the fog was so thick I felt like I was literally floating through it at a hundred kilometers per hour. I felt as though I could stop the car and get out and a walk five meters in either direction would take me right off the edge of the known world into a foggy white abyss. I didn't know where I was, who I was or what I was doing in a car driving at a hundred kilometers an hour straight into the endlessly thick fog.

I drove so far into the fog that I was certain I would poke through the other side and begin to see reality again, but I was sorely mistaken. The fog literally was endless, a void of misunderstanding, of misplaced hopes and dreams, of a life I thought I had been living. I began to feel trapped by the fog and soon, feeling its familiar embrace, I began to accept it and it became home.

The longer I lived in the fog, the more at home I felt. The fog was warm and soft, like a pillow all around me, cushioning me from every direction, protecting me from the world outside it. I forgot that there even was a world outside it. All I wanted was the fog and all the fog wanted was my silent obeisance. The fog was my master and I obeyed all the fog asked of me, which was only to not question the fog and to stay where the fog could see me. I lived for the fog and the fog lived for me.

Until the day I wandered too far and began to see the fog wasn't coming after me. Not too suddenly, it happened. I walked farther than I had before, away from the centre of the fog, and it began to abate. It was like a great weight lifting from my mind, from my soul. I saw the fog from a distance and realized there was so much more to my existence than existing only inthis fog. My mind felt restless, not because I wanted to go back into the fog, but because the fog had blinded me for so long my mind had not been stimulated in such a way until just now.

As I began to leave the fog behind, I heard it's anguished cries calling me back. Telling me I was nothing without it. Telling me I would never find solace and comfort like I had within it's suffocating embrace. It was the memory of that suffocating embrace that told me I did not need the fog anymore. While it had protected me and kept me, it had sheltered me and showed me no more than I needed to see to be its obedient tool.

Clouded no more by fog, I traveled in a single direction until I found civilization. The civilization I found was much like the fog. They took me in, fed me, clothed me, gave me shelter and gave me education, but when I wanted to leave, they asked me why. Why would I want to leave, they said, when I had everything I needed from them? For the price of a few hours of work every day, I could have all my heart desired. But I hadn't known then what I do now. I felt like there were things I may not know and I knew that if I stayed with these people, I would never find it. I traversed on.

I went another direction from the one that had led me to this place. This direction, a road my feet made just by trampling the ground, led me to another group of people. These people were hostile. They wanted no intrusion by outsiders and I clearly was an outsider. They yelled epithets at me, threw stones, hit at me with sticks and pitchforks. I barely escaped with my life intact. 

There was one more direction to go without going back to the fog or the civilization that coddled me. I could not stay in this place and I would not go back. I had to keep going. I made my own road once again and this time, it took much longer than I expected to reach any sort of civilization. The road I made for myself was long, arduous, full of pratfalls and devoid of anything that might help me. No food, no water, no shelter from the hot sun. I began to with away. I began to die. I began to melt into the carpet of the desert that I walked. 

I began to hallucinate. A city sat before me. A great, massive, powerful looking city. There were skyscrapers, which I had never seen. There were lights. Fire inside great bulbs of glass. There were people. There were vehicles, man powered and others powered by a force unseen. There were children, adults, old men, all of various colours, wearing various clothing. The buildings were different sizes, shapes, colours and housed differing people, things and goods of all kind for sale at all kinds of prices. The vision was not going away no matter how much I told myself it was in fact a vision. It got closer the more I walked. I began to enter the vision. Then I realized it was not a vision at all, but reality. The city took me in with open arms, but made it clear it was not there to coddle me, to shelter me, to drive me away. It was there to be my home so long as I lived there, but it would not help me unless I helped it. It would not give me what I did not give back. All it asked of me what I asked of it. It was perfection.

I woke from my dream not knowing whether I was still in it or if I had been mad and had suddenly snapped out of it. As my brain adjusted to the reality of being awake, I forgot much of what had happened in my dream, thus revealing that it was in fact a dream. It had been so intense, so real, that I still, even now, could not be sure I had not lived it. But I had not seen that city before. I had not been in that desolate and comfortable fog, I had not encountered the coddlers, I had not met the shut-ins. They had all been parts of a dream so real that I still to this day cannot be sure I didn't live it in some alternate plane of existence. 

What did it mean? Why would I dream something so real? Why would my dream take me on such a convoluted journey, but with such cut and dried outcomes? Why did the city seem like such a gossamer vision even though it turned out to be reality? Why would there only be four directions to travel? These questions remained with me for many years. I forgot about them at different points, but somehow I always remembered them eventually. The questions, the dream, the feeling that the dream was real and that reality was a dream and that both were less than real in any sense at all. I began to go mad. I realized I had been mad all along.

Dreams have a way of shaping our reality. We are haunted by nightmares. We are tantalized at the perception of clairvoyance because we have had a seemingly prophetic dream. We see dreams as mirroring reality like the collections of curved mirrors at a carnival would mirror skewed images of ourselves. We see what the mirror tells us to. The figure in the mirror must be you because after all, who else could it reflect? But is the mirror itself a good conveyor of information? Does the mirror really reflect with all the splendor it says it should, that you expect it to have?

What happens when you spend your whole life looking at a warped mirror? Does it not follow that your perception of your outward appearance would be forever skewed to align with whatever bias the mirror projects? If we look to our dreams to decipher our reality, what is the mirror that serves as the basis for the dream image? Or is it like being in a changeroom where the mirrors on either side endlessly reflect the images in each mirror, forever producing smaller copies of the same base image. The two realities, the dream and the real, mirror each other. Say both mirrors have distortions. Now the mirrors are reflecting the distortions of each other mirror to the end that the base image and all the reflections now carry small copies of each imperfection along with endless copies of the initial image. But wait, the original image. If the dream and the reality are both endlessly reflecting images of the reflections of either mirror, what is being reflected toward both mirros in the first place? There has to be an awareness perceived for the awareness to be reflected, no matter in which direction, how strong the reflection or how many imperfections are given to the reflection and thus to the reflected reflections. 

Perhaps we don't know which image to present to the mirrors. Perhaps we seek out an image instead of seeking the true image. Perhaps we allow ourselves to be told what image to portray and regardless, we portray that image. Perhaps the mirros we are given only reflect certain wavelenghts, so what we see is not necessarily what we are. Perhaps our mirrors reflect an image tht is too wide, or too slim, or too tall, or that is malproportioned or misshapen. Perhaps The image doesn't project itself accurately and the mirrors don't reflect accurately. What then? How do we trust that the dream is the real reflection, or that the reality is the real reflection? How can we be so sure the base image isn't itself a reflection?

This is possible too, is it not? Say there are three mirrors. Two are placed in such a way that they will reflect evenly the reflection from the opposite mirror. the third is placed underneath the two, with its face angle din such a way that it is able to project an image onto one of the opposing mirrors, without projecting that image to the other mirror. The two mirros are reflecting an image of an image neither of the two share in common, which is not the same as the previous situation. Now one mirror is a receiver and a sender of an image it was nto the original reflector of, and the miror receiving the mirrored image from this second mirror is not the mirror that originated the image either. They seem to be reflecting independent information. This is, of course, not the case. The case, really, is that there is a third party that is a little out of view, projecting an image onto the mirror which reflects that image to another mirror and so they pass it back and forth. The reality, the dream and the incessant back and forth that tells us the difference.

The difference is not always easy to discover. In fact, it never is. The difference is so often very  minutely different that taken as a whole, it appears to be completely unchanged from the original. Even if you can see where the reality is and where the dream is, there is still the problem of trying to reconcile the two. Certainly they have the same base materials to be reflecting such nearly perfect images of one another. But there is an image reflecting back and forth that does not seem part of the original image. One that comes in from somewhere else and make itself part of the original, makes the original something new altogether. This is the reflection from the side of the mirror that reflects one image one way and in doing so ensures it will be reflected back and forth and become a part of the new and endlessly reflecting reflections. Now this new composite image gets to keep reflecting, taking all the imperfections of the mirrors and reflecting those right along with it. 

So now you have you, going through your life constantly dreaming and constantly trying to figure out where you fit into all this reality nonsense. As if that weren't enough, you also have a media who subtly and overtly makes you think you are somehow different. That somehow they are the mirror that you look in and they make you see that you aren't who you think you are, offer you a life you never thought you could have, make you work for it and in the end you crumble at the feet of the gods who show this power but never make it accessible to you. You know the mirrors you look in, do they really reflect this? Is this really what you see? What you do? What you are? You are the mirror. Both sides of the same mirror reflecting their images back into themselves, creating the real you, your reality self and youe dream self, the equation of the two. But always with that secondary reflection coming in and being manipulated to reflect both ways, that unrealistic part of you that wants what you know you don't need, but you pursue it nonetheless.

The dream is over. The reality crumbles. The mirror is left shattered. All that's left in the base image. The image that was stuck inside the mirror for so long, letting it's essence be bounced back and forth between mirrors, taking with it all the imperfections, all the misplaced reflections, all the secondary information needed to reflect and image that stopped being itself the second it was first reflected. If all that is left is the object, there can be no subject. If there is no means of reflection, there is no need to define the limits of the nature of the object. There is no need to define the object at all for there is no reference point and no other parties to ascertain that reference point.

Part Three

In all my dreams, I see myself. Not as you see me and I see me in a mirror. I see myself as if I am floating above myself, taking in everything from a video game over-shoulder view. This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that I do not see reality in this way. My reality is never anywhere as weird as my dreams are. Not only is there never that over the shoulder point of view, there is also no being able to fly. No, not fly, float. It is like flying, but no real initial energy goes onto it, just me on the ground one moment and rising effortlessly the next. I can take huge bounds with no expenditure of energy, touching my toes on the pavement before rising again, no resistance or friction. It goes on for hours.

There is no sense, in my reality, that I know all, that I see all, that time is irrelevant. Why should such fantastical elements of no reality I have ever seen be a part of my dream world, a world which, aside from the all the extraordinary things that happen there, is really quite ordinary. Why would reality so closely parallel the fictional dreams that only order, logic and reason would be the things to get messed up? Perhaps it is because order, logic and reason follow rules that are nonexistant in the dream world. Perhaps anything that cannot happen here can happen there simply because it holds two sets of rules, ours and the exact opposite. Perhaps each world acts on the other world. Perhaps the logic, order and reason of one world is known to the opposite world but chooses to use those rules only to the opposite effect. Thus, the initial condition, free from reflection, would have to be a purely neutral state, getting bias from one mirror and transfering the reflection of that bias to the other mirror.

It gets rather boring to discuss the nature of dreams when one has not yet discovered the nature of reality. But when both perceptions are reflections of a separate base image, what does the base look like? How is either reflection to be regarded as any better than the other when the original should be perfection? Does each reflection view itself as the base image itself? How does an image know if it is a base or a reflection? Is there any way for the reflection to also be the base? Is the reflection just a single piece of the whole, is the combination of all reflections a representation of the whole, is the whole completely represented in all the reflections and, mostly the most importantof all, if taing all the answers to these questions as being YES, do the imperfections of the mirrors, bias of the light and secondary reflections contribute back to the source of the image?

Do we become what we see in the reflection simply because that is what we see? Do we take the image for granted even if we know the mirrors do not always reflect accurately? Do we look at our skewed reflection so often that we know the afterimage more closely than the object originally reflected? If confronted with our true selves, would we be shocked to realize it is us because we see ourselves a totally different way?

It takes a long time to realize the mirrors are poor reflectors. It takes an even longer time to realize that while the mirrors are terrible reflectors, they are also reflecting an image that shouldn't be reflected. It takes a very long time to understand what is creating the secondary image and how to get it to stop. It takes an incredibly long time to understand how the mirros are flawed and how to fix them so they reflect a smooth unbroken image. The longest time is spent in pursuit of the way to break the mirror.

The mirror must be obliterated to stop the reflections. Herein lies a fundamental problem. If one breaks the mirrors around him, he breaks one mirror into a billion pieces. He breaks two mirrors into two billion pieces. If he breaks the secondary mirror as well, there are three  mirrors now all reflecting tiny images, nothing with the same image oan it. You can see the same image of yourself looking back at yourself from three hundred shards of the same broken glass, all looking different directions, all with some features intact, some cut off, some distorted, some perfect, some exaggerated, some just there. All these shards are now mirrors. Instead of getting rid of the problem, we have just created billions of new ones.

Which mirror do you reflect now? Can you hope to find a shard with just the right reflection or do you think you shouold just pick up the shards, avoid risking getting cut or cutting someone else? Regardless of what you do, the mirrors are never gone if you simply shatter them. Only now, the fragments of your mirrors conflict with my mirrors, still intact. As I come into contact with you, the reflective mess left behind by your mirror destruction sprinkles light in my mirrors' direction. I get some of your resididual bias in my reflection and it colours my own reflection. I get the idea that I want my mirror to shine like yours. I break my mirror as well. 

Now our mirror fragments are reflecting fragments of light and image everywhere, reacting with the fragments of other fragments. Everyone's mirrors are shattered and light and image are being scattered in all directions, endlessly reflecting a refraction of what seems to be nothing. Wouldn't it be nice if all the fragments were made into one single mirror? That way we could all measure to the same standard instead of the endlessly discordant rays that are being lasered back and forth across the dream of reality.

Part Four

I have been to this point where reality and the dream are very difficult to separate. It has been for quite some time, which is almost no time at all. Taken as concrete reality, this threshold is quite simply breathtaking. Very simple yet very complex all at once. It takes one's breath away quite simply with it's simply complex simplicity. The border between sovereign states. Consciousness. Subconsciousness and superconsciousness rarely mix. They meet only for a moment when connecting the realms of reality and dream. Strange things are bound to happen in this realm. It is almost never remembered that one even was in this realm, until one is there the next time and even then, it is very difficult to remember just by being there. 

Some people are fairly adept at navigating this pseudo-reality, this semi-dream, this dramatic realization that you are aware that you are. When we can simply be, our spirits allow us to be much more than we could ever be by trying. We don't need to try when we can just be. We cannot be because we are only trying. That is the reality of living for most people. Unless we can figure our way out.

Some people are very in tune to a reality that lives parallel with ours, yet is imperceptible from where we stand. Our observation point is simply too far removed for us to be able to perceive beyond a certain point, but some can see beyond that point. Some naturally and some who have to wear a set of what appear to be giant spectacles for the mind. Some people train themselves their whole lives and see barely but a glimpse of the reality beyond what they call real. Some others have simply always known what was just out of reach and others still use drugs to take them to a place that may be found on either side immediately inside the dream or the reality. And the rest simply cannot see at all. 

For some, the reality that they see is not a reality at all, where dream or real. For these, the reality they claim to see is simply the reflections and not the subject of the reflection. The image hybrid that is formed when we combine the bias and imperfections of the two reflecting opposites with the secondary reflection projcted by the third mirror. These images are skewed and distorted, reflecting in all different directions, causing confusion because the reflections cannot be traced to their point of origin. We try to smash the mirror but end up simply putting a series of cracks in it, further distorting the image. We must not break the mirror, we must extend the mirror. We cannot reflect all of ourselves with a face mirror. We need an elaborate system whereby a series of mirrors reflect from a central object in infinite directions, capturing all biases, all imperfections and bouncing them back and forth so readily that they were already a part of the base image before the reflection began. Every bit of light and shadow is reflected and received somewhere, to the point where the initial object is not an objects, just a reflection of the reflections. The oject defines the reflection just as easily as the reflection describes the object. One set becomes another set and both contain each other.

Part Five

It is hard to believe you still sleep. It is hard to believe, from my point of view, that you have slept for so long and choose to keep sleeping. It is hard to believe that with all the noise and light bothering you in your sleep, you simply roll over and keep snoring. It is hard to believe that despite all the bad dreams, you still keep dreaming them. It is hard to believe that anyone who has had the chance to really wake up could elect to stay asleep, could decide not to stay awake and see where it takes you. 

It is hard to believe and yet I believe it simply because that is what I see. I have been given no evidence stating that you would rather open your eyes, rub out the sleep, drink a big a*s cup of coffee and start your day than laying there uncomfortable, rolling around in your blankets pretending you're still having some semblance of the dream you were just having.

It is so tempting to go right back where you came from after awakening. It is very tempting to pull the blankets up, pull the blinds down and convince yourself to revisit that dream world, that mirrored reality. It is so much like you know it is here, but so much different. Almost better. Phantasmic, mysterious, a new place each time you visit. But you know it is not real. You know it is just one skewed reflection of an object you have never truly seen, yourself.

The reality you wake up to is itself just a reflection. But at least this reflection is easier to identify now that you've gone down a mirror. But this mirror is still reflecting something that is not part of the original image. It is that secondary image. The image that is projected onto you by a media  who knows you better than you do. They know the reflection, of course, because they have helped create it. You know the reflection but that is because that is all you look for. The true image means nothing if you can have a facsimilie that reflects everything you want to see.

Remove the mirror. Careful, you don't want to break it. The problem is the mirror in the first place. The mirror should not be there, reflecting you back at yourself along with the flaws of the glass, the reflective surface, the lighting and any secondary afterimages from other mirrors. Put the mirrors in a corner under a sheet. They may reflect the sheet now, but they don't reflect you. You reflect yourself, you define the reflection, you are the reflection of whatever you portray yourself to be. If the reflection is biased, it is your bias, if there are imperfections, they are your imperfections. If there is less light, you aren't standing in enough of it. You are the mirror, the subject, the reflection and the observer all in one. You make the choice, not the reflection. You rule reality, not your dreams. You have dreams that you can make reality.

Part Six

If you can discover these things the way I have discovered them , you will discover that I did not discover them at all. The understanding was already there, the language written with no one to speak it. But what is the point of being the only one to speak a language? Why not show others how to speak it and then you can converse with them. The difference is, anyone can speak the language, but few really understand what it means. Learn to speak the language, but don't just speak it. Be the language. Know what it means and be the words you speak. Nothing will ever be easy, but knowing the language will make spreading it a lot less difficult. And not everyone wants to learn it. Some people know it but refuse to use it. Some people use it for the wrong reasons. Whatever your position on the spectrum, understand that there really is no spectrum. Just because you place yourself on that spectrum does not mean such a spectrum must exist. Some us are trying too hard. Some people are trying too hard not to try. Other people are trying to hard to do, some not to do. But the ones who don't have to try are the ones who can just be. We can all just be. We be as it is, but we be with definition, with limitation as it were. When we can simply be without desire to be anything else, then and only then can we see our true reflection in a mirror that has no dimples, no convex or concave shape, no cracks, no chips and no light pollution from other mirrors.

You asked me awhile ago how long this would take. I answered only by starting the narrative. It should be, by your perception, much later than when you started. I know, from my perspective, that I am much farther down the tunnel of time than when I started. Our frames of reference are different. You see, I told the story, from my point of view, I am done, you are just beginning. Try to put it all together this time. Like last time, you seem hesitant, but unlike last time, now you have all the information.

Reviews

[FateDictates]

I simply fell in love with these words that weaved and winded around me. They went right thru me and worked their way home to my heart..curtsy bow, thank you for sharing..beautifully, simply spell binding.. it has left me sighing. your new fan

[von Froszt]

Thank you so much for your comments! I appreciate your honesty. I am glad I was able to evoke such emotion in you.

[FateDictates]

pleasure was actually all mine..