Ernie’s away message at one point read, “Ever wonder if life is just a illusion and we are already in heaven or hell?” (to which I reply, if this is heaven why should this illusion be so crappy?) That made me wonder: what if we just made everything up in our heads and nothing around us is actually real? What if we’re all crazy and locked up, but living in an imaginary world? What if the people I think I’m interacting with are just a figment of my mind, behaving as I expect them to? Of course, one idea is that if I imagined everybody, they would be nice to me and my friends would act like friends – call me, spend time with me, not offer reasonable reasons not to spend time together (“homework” and “laundry” being most popular). Still, it is concievable that since I have such a low self esteem, I’m not likely to people a world with friendly, consistent beings. So how are we to know that what we see, smell, touch, and feel are actually real? In fact, that raises the question: what is real?

Say I eat a sandwitch. I have to walk to the kitchen, get out bread, mayonnaise, cheese, meat, and pickles. I can watch my hands do the proper motions, but how am I to know if the (real?) knife I’m holding is actually cutting real cheese? I raise the bread to my mouth; jaw muscles contract, teeth bite, then my hands pull the sandwitch away to tear it. I masticate, tasting the pleasant blend of flavors. But do I really taste them? Or am I just eating mush and thinking it’s a sandwitch? The sound playing in the background – waves of sound moving through the air, vibrating little hairs in my ears, and converted into electrical signals my mind interprets as “beautiful music.” Yet what is to say that music is real at all? Beethoven heard music in his head that was never played; but the question is, is any of the music we hear more than just in our own minds? Because they probably wouldn’t play “Fisherman’s Blues,” from the Waking Ned Devine soundtrack, in a padded room at my request.

Basically: what makes the world we’re living in, which is so innately believeable, actually the truth as opposed to a wonderful beautiful fantasy made up to cope with the horrors of the real real world? Of course I could get into religion, but I think I won’t this time because if I just imagined this…

– KF –