What If

(As posted on Triond yesterday)

I was dreaming I’d returned to teaching after a long sickness break. Or had I returned to helping out in class? Whatever. I woke and went to the loo. I emptied my bowels and returned to bed. Glanced at my watch. Six fifteen in the morning. And got to thinking... About the nature of Life...

What if Life is but a Dream, as others have suggested. What if my sleeping dreams are created by my subconscious mind. By my “Id” if you will. But my waking dreams are created by some “SuperId”. An even deeper part of my “brain” which forges “Superdreams”: Waking Dreams!

What if those “others” exist only as part of my superdream? What if all people, even my relatives, are but creations of my SuperId? And the whole universe and all history is part of the Superdream.

Where is my SuperId? Where is my Id even? My brain. My mind. Where are they? Really? They are supposed to be in my head. But is my head part of the Superdream?

Is the stark Truth that I am all alone? Am I the only one? A loneliness far greater than any I have experienced, in The Superdream. Am I “The One” as in “The Matrix”? Not a “God” though because I have so little power in the Superdream. Perhaps there are no gods. Just little me. Alone. At the mercy of my SuperId. So what exactly is my SuperId? I don’t know.

Or maybe there is a group of us. Our SuperIds connected in some way. Perhaps we share one SuperId. Who knows.

When I die I expect to become nothing. An emptiness in which I cannot even acknowledge I’m not there. Rather like that gap in living that you get during an operation or having a tooth out under general anaesthetic. It saddens me that every living thing eventually dies in this way. Not a single one escapes this fate. So I am told. There are some water creatures that are biologically “immortal”, I read, but I hold out little hope there.

Yet rather than becoming nothing when I die, I hope to awaken from this “Superdream” and enter some “Super Reality”. Perhaps that Super Reality is but a “Super-Super Dream”, and that a “Super-Super-Super Dream”... ad infinitum. Now Infinity, that’s a scary thing.

How many times will I “Supersleep”? Just the once, or countless times? Is there reincarnation after all? Will I re-appear in other places, other times? Or does my consciousness continue, somehow, after my physical death? Will I join some Spiritual World?

Regular reader LewSethics reminded me recently of a possible scenario: that there is just one being reincarnating continuously so as to live the life of every one of us. Others have suggested such an individual might be God. There are countless possible scenarios. What concerns me, however, is my own personal destiny. The next major milestone for me is Death.

Whatever happens: from my perspective this world of ours will cease to exist once I am “gone”. It might just as well have never existed in the first instance. What a waste. I do Hope there is more than this.

Who cares whether there is a God, or race of Gods? What counts is whether there is Life. What matters is Existence. The Quality of that Existence too. I hope this Superdream is but an “Education”. That I am learning lessons for my “Afterlife”. I am a “Lifist” indeed. “Life” is Everything. If that has to be a “Spiritual” Life, eventually, then so be it. Better than nothing.

Let’s face it: on the cosmic scale of things the human race knows next to nothing. For me, nobody has really explained gravity, electricity or any of the major forces which make existence possible. Nobody has even told us where The Big Bang came from. The Universe seems to be some colossal Accident, which has spawned a multitude of mortals. Yet no-one can really explain it all.

Maybe there is indeed a universal “Force” behind all this. Could “Star Wars” be right after all? May the Force be with us indeed. May our Hopes be realised. May there be an “our”, a “we”! To the Spiritual. To Everlasting Life. To Immortality. To Eternity. Throughout Infinity. Let there be Life.

Paul Butters

See also: http://authspot.com/poetry/aire-valley/