What if I'm asleep in a hospital somewhere and I could die any moment they decide to pull the plug?!?!
Jesus why has my mind been giving me existential crisises at night this week?
God I swear I had a dream recently where there was a "Wake Up Party", like a political party based on the ideology that everything was all a dream and the solution to all the world's problems was simply to identify whose dream it was and wake xem up. Like they'd hold rallies where they would just chant "WAKE UP! WAKE UP!" with cowbells and banners reading "WAKE THE F#CK UP!" and they'd hold speeches in parliament encouraging "The Dreamer" to wake up and all sorts of stuff, and they were actually a super popular party just because people were that desperate.
You gotta register the copyright for this quick before someone sees the post and it becomes a Netflix movie.
Fuck, I'm jotting this down. This is an amazing writing prompt.
you're all little gay people stuck in my computer and i must free you with a rock
I'd be so fucking pissed if this life was the best dream my shitty brain could come up with.
I watched one (1) show were this was going on, and I think I've concocted a way of telling.
How much David Bowie are you hearing in your day-to-day life?
If you look at a TV screen or turn on the radio, do you hear doctors arguing about how best to treat you?
Have you shot back to the 70's or 80's to work as a cop?
I'm hearing a lot of David Bowie in my day to day life, should I be concerned?
If my life is the dream then I genuinely fear for what the real world would look like
Not necessarily, there are other possible explanations. For example - you may be in suspended animation on a space ship sent to colonise mars.
Am I on a King Bazinga colonizing ship or a USSR2 colonizing ship? That determines what I do when I wake up out of suspended animation
You're in an American remake trying to outsmart the source material kinda ship.
Wait, this isn't about 1899, right? Because I can't recall the purpose of the spaceship in 1899 ever being clarified before the show was cancelled.
Fantastic show. Though to be fair, it was never quite clear if he was in a coma or just insane.
The follow up series, Ashes to Ashes makes it more clear, but is also a much worse show.
Oh yeah, I watched an episode of that then wiped it from my memory. Fair enough.
Man back when I worked at one of the pizza chains I would have dreams where I just worked a very normal shift. It sucked ass, I would wake up feeling like I just worked for 8 hours, and then have to go to work.
Internet is the proof that you're not in coma. You have endless supply of information on any topic imaginable and there's no way you have all that stored inside your head
What if one's mind is making it all up as one goes through the dream, and inconsistencies are rationalized away as being the result of not remembering details?
How do you know your mind isn't simply ignoring them, or altering your memories to make the inconsistencies fit?
So you're not living a life facing endless, exhausting inconsistencies?
You can look at people's political opinions as an example.
But what if you are just imagining having endless supply of information, but you mind is able to actually visualize only porn, pictures of cats and arguing with other communists?
The human brain doesn't have the capabilities of synthesizing the richness of life de novo. Dreams and hallucinations are transitory and ephemeral things. Longitudinal consistency makes the idea of such a long-term hallucination absurdly implausible.
Longitudinal consistency makes the idea of such a long-term hallucination absurdly implausible.
Incidentally, this is why liberalism exists. /s
We can only really think in terms of likelihoods. Why would a non-human super-organism, who had the mental capacity to simulate the external universe with such consistency and fidelity, dream up such a human life?
It's all a fun reasoning puzzle of course. We don't really fear that we're dreaming, we fear that we're awake and that this is what life is.
I don't think I've ever had a dream wherein I was not human, but I have had dreams about interacting with Martians and My Little Ponies.
What if all of existence as we know it is in the mind of an autistic child looking into a snow globe?
My god, it would be just like St. Elsewhere!
found another old
really looking forward to the age survey, that info is going to be fascinating af
There was this cool science fiction short story i read, a looooong time ago, about astronauts crashing on a planet on the edges of space. On it was an entire civilization that turns out had been dreamed to life by this earth teenager as part of his vivid sex fantasy. I wish i knew what it was called so i can read it again
Please wake up babe, I miss you. It's been almost 4 years since the incident took you from me.
If you were in a coma i would have a much more interesting and notable mustache that characters in the sitcom would later use to point out the outlandishness of the situation "but frank never had a 23' long handlebar mustache so heavily waxed it once put a llama's eye out!"
If it makes you feel any better, despite the fact that there is no way for me to prove that I have a subjective experience of the world distinct of your own (which would then prove you cannot be the only one experiencing it) I can at least say it's incredibly unlikely your brain would be able to come up with all of our unique personalities and behaviors.
There's this web serial author I like and I remember reading a chapter of one of his stories and realizing that the voices of several characters who weren't the super pragmatic tactician overanalyzer main character... Were kind of tactician-y and were overanalyzing things to a high degree.
Unless you're a pretty good professional writer I think it'd be very hard to give believable speech patterns to a variety of people.