False dreams

There is at least a whole industry dedicated to disseminating false dreams. They’re disguised as thoughts, feelings, opinions. You will be tricked into accepting them as your own. You will consider them private, believing that no one else could know about them. Some of them will seem important, others will be invisible except by way of their effects.

Therefore, be very careful before dreaming a dream. It may be poisoned. The fact that you can’t choose your own dreams—well, that’s all the more reason to be careful!

“He won’t bother us for a while,” They tell each other. “I just put him on the Dark Dream.” They drink together, shoot very very synthetic drugs into skin or blood, run incredible electronic waveforms into Their skulls, directly into the brainstem, and backhand each other, playfully, with openmouth laugh. They speak of taking So-and-So and “putting him on the Dream.” They use the phrase for each other too, in sterile tenderness, when bad news is passed, at the annual Roasts, when the endless mind-gaming catches a colleague unprepared—“Boy, did we put him on the Dream.” You know, don’t you?1

Also, and this is not a contradiction to the above, dreams are exceptionally trustworthy. Out of all the phenomena that humans are able to perceive, the ones that come closest to reality are found while dreaming. We have a natural ability to discern what is true from what is fake. While awake, however, the best most of us can do is notice the vague sense of unreality that appears when one spends too much time around purely illusory things. During sleep—that is to say death, our nightly journey to the underworld, during which our soul is temporarily dissolved into the psychic ocean, before being reconstituted under the illumination of the Sun—during sleep, our preexisting ability to distinguish real from false intuitively, perceptively, “like when you look” and not resorting to logic, is sharpened. Therefore, dreams qua dreams experienced here and now are either obviously trustworthy or obviously illusory.

The difficulty is in remembering, while awake, whether something was real or fake. When we see something real, we may doubt ourselves. I sometimes think, “it seems real, but I don’t believe it because it doesn’t fit with my theory of how reality works.” Or other times, I think, “it seems real even though it doesn’t fit with my theory of how reality works—but what if I think so only because I have been tricked into accepting something counterintuitive in order to keep me away from what is real!?” Or, “it does not seem real, but maybe this is because I have been tricked into discarding something that actually is real, and in fact its apparent unreality is actually an esoteric symbol of its truth.” And so on forever.

  1. Thomas Pynchon (1973), Gravity’s Rainbow. Via Death is Just Around the Corner, episode 246, Columnated Ruins Domino (Side B) ↩