"All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream." -- Edgar Allen Poe
I had a cathartic experience on the drive home from work today. For whatever reason I thought of the ending to a book I just read,
Lighthouse, by William Monahan. It was a good book and the ending was particularly poignant and dream like. That got me thinking, here is this world that doesn't exist, yet I can picture it in my head all the same. That led me to think about the real world, the one we all share, and how it is largely projected from within us. I know that the concrete stairs that lead to my front door exist, and are real, but those stairs are different to me than they are to a fly or an ant, or a chipmunk (or even my neighbor). I also thought about how there are infinite mes. There is the me who walked up those stairs and into my apartment, (present) and there is also the me who turned around, got into the truck, and drove to Reno with nothing but the clothes on his back and the crumpled ten dollar bill in his wallet (elsewhere).
I know that all this can easily be dismissed as armchair philosophy, but consider this: mathematicians and physicists lend some credence that alternate universes exist and that for every action you take or decision you make, reality splits and there is an
alternate universe where the opposite happened.