anamnesis

Had a dream last night about something that has careened around my unconscious since childhood. I call it 'the loop'. Robert Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land, describes an alien race that sees humans as long caterpillars; they see time in longer durations than the simple snapshots we perceive. A human being, from birth to death, with all the human's movements in space-time is seen simultaneously and appears strung out like a long worm. Nietzsche believed that consciousness, or awareness, travels down this line and, at death, starts back at the beginning, like on a DVD. Nothing changes, it is merely replayed in our experience. Read Only , after the first recording. Awareness looping forever down the same track. My loop dream is something like this. It tells me I wouldn't know if I had re-entered my life at an earlier, or a later time, and am playing a segment over and over. Each time going back to the situation I was in before as if it were now. The dream alludes

What do you want your last words to be?

The more taboos and prohibitions there are in the world, The poorer the people will be. The more sharp weapons the people have, The more troubled the state will be. The more cunning and skill man possesses, The more vicious things will appear. The more law and orders are made prominent, The more thieves and robbers there will be.

I had my flying dream again that night, soaring over an endless landscape of circuit boards, their vast expanse cut with rivers of cruel electricity. Reading Spirits in the Wires by Charlie. A fun romp into the possibility of entities living in cyberspace. While I "know" all the reasons why this could not be the case, I also realize the sum of what we don't know in our chiaroscuro world puts any given assumption at risk. Because of this gulf (which science assures us is a puddle rather than the Aegean Sea) I have heard, and I believe, our fiction paints reality clearer than our "facts." It's not the words you use; it's what they make you see. -SASKIA MADDING