Life Is but a Dream

Fantasy and reality are not necessarily opposites, and whether something is real or not can be irrelevant, as Tracy Gleason once observed. What counts in the end for any of us is experience—factual, fictional, and otherwise. The sometimes thick, sometimes thin line, between actual and notional matters very little, if any, when compared with what we think we know, what we believe, and the experiences inextricably tied to our knowing and believing, quite apart from whether this knowing-believing-experiencing matrix is true, false, or even ultimately discernible as one or the other, and perhaps always a bit of both. Our experience of the world itself is a prime example of this blurring, and even synergy, between fantasy and reality, of something that seems to be distinctly there, and yet our awareness of it remains thoroughly illusory. The neurobiologist Roger Sperry said it well when he observed that prior to the advent of the brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma, and probably little sense and no emotion or feeling, and the universe was also free of pain. All we perceive through our senses, and process through our consciousness, is an ineluctable variation and deviation from the actual physics of our habitat. Life might be largely hologramic like a dream, and yet, we still find ourselves gently row, row, rowing our boat down the stream, needing to pay our taxes and make the bed and put food on the table each day, and we can do so much of this merrily at that. Experience that matters, however, is not inherently difficult or merry, real or make-believe, but edifying. Such experience matters to us (i.e., edifying experience meaningfully makes us) because it nurtures our becoming, or, said another way, such experience is meaningful to us because it contributes to our flourishing. How does such experiencing happen? One of the most electrifying and ubiquitous elements of edifying experience is nothing other than a good conversation. Not only conversation as between two people, mutually willing to be vulnerable, but conversation widely conceived, conversation as an ongoing, deepening dialogue with others but also internally with oneself, and externally with the natural world, especially when the conversation becomes intimately strange, when the conversation is an intercourse with otherness. Hearing the day. Feeling the sky. Meeting with moonlight. Consulting with color. Surprised by beauty. Lost in listening to the wind. Seduced by the scent of a sweet alyssum. The coital, conversational nature of nature and the discourses we have with our selves and others edify. If this all sounds a little exotic and unconventional, it should, as discourse that is edifying is supposed to be abnormal, as Richard Rorty remarked, to entice us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, and thus to aid us in becoming new beings. To become content with superficialities, platitudes, and niceties in our internal and external conversations is tantamount to living a sterile anesthetized existence. The critical issue is allowing ourselves the strange but wonderful conversation with the endless abundance of otherness within and without us, and that takes an enormous amount of courage, the benefit being experience rich with meaning, real or not.