The thing about dreams is they have no beginning. There’s a cutoff right before they’re born, and then they sort of pick up wherever they feel like they left off and make the rest up as they go along. You never remember the last thing you think about before you fall asleep but then all of a sudden, boom! You’re in the middle of it, and huh…it seems like you’ve been here for a while now too. It’s like getting abducted to and from a place you both can and cannot recognize. A place that’s both foreign and familiar. Which is exactly what dreams feel like…they’re somewhere you can’t get to until you’re already there. Which makes dreaming on a plane of its own existence…
So anyway, I’m grabbing the box of cereal and that’s when I realize I’m dreaming again. This morning or yesterday or however long ago it was, I was eating a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. In perfect recollection. The Cheerios I’m pouring are the dream, and just as I’m finding out I’m eating dream cereal, the box disappears in my hands. Pop! Just like that. Then everything starts getting shaky and off centered. Reality is losing any authority it might at once had held any claim over, and my morning verbatim is starting to go awry. I open the fridge for fat free milk, find whole, and the refrigerator melts into the floor. I pour myself a glass of orange juice and take my eggs Sunnyside up, and the sink starts spewing out blood. A side of white toast instead of wheat, and the floor is made of fire. None of it is real of course because none of it has to be…but you need the fake like this sometimes so the real can continue telling the difference between the two. It’s management adjustment. And it all seems normal. Right, even. Like it’s exactly how it was only ever supposed to be. And by that I mean nothing seems off. Okay, the refrigerator is halfway in my neighbor’s ceiling which is also starting to splinter and cave in. But my cereal is just as bland as it would be. And as for the rest of the meal, everything tastes exactly like it always would. The milk is pasteurized. The juice is freshly squeezed. The eggs are cooked. The sink is starting to pool a deep red. But the bread is buttered. Dream food is real food by way the realm of reality chooses to depict it: as its depiction. Following, if these dream things were ever real, tangible things, this is how they always would be. Dream eggs would taste like eggs, and real eggs would taste like dreams. Dream toast would taste real, and toast would still taste like toast. Because toast would taste like dreams eggs, and dreams would taste like toast. In fact, if these are things, there’d be no way for me to know otherwise. I could be drinking dream orange juice in real life and eating real cereal in my dreams. And there’d be no way for me to find out. I’d be none the wiser. This is obviously not the case. Dream food doesn’t possess the same qualities as real food. The exception here being that I know it doesn’t…and, least you go insane, the things you know go as unshakable law when you’re in a locked room. I eat scrambled eggs and drink water. I don’t use butter and there’s no ketchup. I know my routine like it’s my identity. After all, isn’t it? This is all dream food with no more an effect on my taste buds than tofu. Dream food is zero calorie phantom nutrition. I can’t eat a thought. The eggs smell like the smell of a smell. The juice tastes like it isn’t me, and eating the cereal is like trying to bite ectoplasm. Yuck! And yet, out of all this deceit and mimic, I can gather one thing: my dream wants me to believe I’m not sleeping. It wants me to buy that I’m still awake. But I know that about it now. It’s been known. There are less surprises at each turn. So I get up and start pacing. I sort of just wander around my dream house and think of nothing in particular until I’m done sleeping…which isn’t all too different, it seems, from being awake. I notice that the walls are a dream green and I’m wearing khakis. Yes, everything is right if you let it be, but how could you? So I begin to realize these aren’t my clothes. That this isn’t my real house. I look down at a pair of shoes that aren’t mine, and that’s when the dream starts flip-flopping into a nightmare…
Submitted March 26, 2016 at 08:32AM by Starkiller60 http://ift.tt/1XTQoCU StonerPhilosophy
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