At dinner this evening a friend and I were discussing the way reality seems to stop and then start again when you go to sleep and then wake up the next morning. And it occurred to us that there is no way to know, for sure, that the reality you wake up to is exactly the same one that existed when you went to bed.
After all, memory is notoriously slippery. We have all had the experience of being quite sure we remember something a certain way, only to be proven wrong by the facts. So it stands to reason that if reality shifts while we sleep, our memories of reality would shift right along with it.
Have you ever gotten the sense that something is slightly off? Perhaps that a person at work doesn’t seem quite right? Well, maybe that person didn’t even exist in your reality the night before. Maybe you are just experiencing an incomplete shift between worlds, a trace of the slightly different world you had left behind the moment your head hit the pillow.
If this is true, then there might not be much we can do about it. This text you are reading might not even exist when you wake up tomorrow morning. Or if you are reading it the next day, perhaps it didn’t exist the day before. How would you know?
Truth, reality, dreams and illusion. There are mysteries here, between the world of what was, and the world of what is about to be.
Something to sleep on, anyway.
There’s a great (and short) song by They Might Be Giants that’s along these lines: http://tmbw.net/wiki/Lyrics:Sleep
Cool! That reminds me of one of my favorite Stephen Wright jokes:
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The present is so much more interesting.