It’s All Just a Dream
FreiFem2011Would you too like to experience the mind-bending thrills of the movie ‘Inception’? Delve into reality’s multiple incarnations and get lost in dreams that may be real and reality that may only be a dream! All you need is a functioning uterus and some handy male genitalia. Combine, stir, wait. A lucky few will then find themselves enacting their own ‘Inception’ storylines!
Seriously, pregnancy dreams are wacky beyond belief. The most incredible experiences happen between six am, when I am woken by my husband leaving our bed, and eight thirty am, my new, mandatory “wake time” (without which I could spend days in there….days…) Between my dissolving memory and the dreams within dreams that mirror real life situations I encounter during my day, I am constantly asking myself – wait, did I just dream that? Did the architect and I agree on a 27” fridge, or was that conversation entirely a product of my sleeping brain? This morning I was at my parents house, sad because my father was dead, when I woke up. My father came in the door singing. Stupid me! His death was just a dream! Five minutes later I woke up “again”, my father alive, not talking to me. Perhaps I’ll wake up again soon, and find this all dissolves, and my father in reality, is a functioning communicative father.
To paraphrase Descartes, maybe this all is just a dream….
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Classic “Matrix” question – if you lived your whole life in a dream, would you know you were in one? And how could you wake up?
And then – even if we figured it out – would we choose reality over the dream, if the dream is really far better than reality, just for the sake of “truth”? You remember Cypher’s choice in the Matrix? Maybe choosing to eat that steak, even if you know it’s not “really” real – is the right choice to make?
I have actually been asking myself a similar question – I actually do enjoy living the “Frum” life and have never felt it was too cumbersome or morally pungent, it was always a happy, meaningful, fulfilling Yiddishkeit – of course we never dwelt too deeply on the apparent racial and moral problematic issues in the Tanach or Gemara (anyway those times are long gone). So what do you do when you wake up one day after many, many years living the beautiful Frum family life and realize that in all likelihood it appears to be a big lie? Do you live by the “truth” and give up all that joy and happiness? Or just stay in the dream anyway?
well put, Chay Nobody… The dream “mashol” acquires new dimensions as you describe it.