kingtycoon | We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled.

He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman ‑ how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.

Have you ever felt like you were a great sage foretold by the ancient Taoists?

So I find myself, having wandered through thresholds, through the strange gate of the airport, through the sky above the clouds and I think - I woke from a dream, or I think, I'm asleep now and dreaming. Or I dreamed that I was dreaming in my dream. I fell asleep one day and started dreaming. I dreamed that I went into the sky, and I dreamed that I went to the plains, and then I dreamed that I came back, and woke up - but I was still dreaming.

I'm up against the unreal or the hyperreal. Nothing seems like it can be real because when the unreality sets in there at the fringes of your experience it calls into question your whole experience.

We wake or don't, and what seemed real becomes more and more distant, the dream becomes unrecoverable. What was it I dreamed, what was it that happened? It is unreal and the dark world that we wake to at dawn has no answer - only demands. You wake from the dream of sublime experience and emotion and love & find on the other side all the things you must think about, that you must do, that you must feel. And fall away from the dreamworld and leave it behind you, you convince yourself that the dream was only that, that it didn't mean what it meant because you must do what you must do. So Waking Life betrays the ideal life and you must say to yourself - 'it was only a dream' as if dreams were not as valid as the cold world you wake to.

So what's real? Now? I remembered that I used to dream - there was a girl with Kaleidoscope eyes I'd dream of and then I'd think that life- dreamlife - was the real and this the false, and then I met her, for real, it turns out. I dreamed her or she me and what's real but what we decide is real? So you see, you can be in this particular state - disoriented, and then reoriented and there is that nagging sense that this is really true - this wintery self of work and responsibility and not the good world, the realer seaming one you left on the plains.

You guess, a second or a third time - undoing yourself - was it real? Should I reconsider? Is she rethinking? Is she actual? Too many cluttered anxieties, too many hopeless phantasms to grasp at - this is the trouble with the unreal - it's too perfect to be believed.