Monday, April 26, 2004
"kathy" I said, "I'm lost," though I knew she was sleeping
It's been a long time...
Note to self: falling asleep while watching "Waking Life" is a really, really bad idea. The whole idea of the movie is this guy, who is nameless througout the movie, who keeps waking up into another dream. It's a dream within a dream within a dream, and so on. Through most of this he knows he is sleeping, so he walks around having conversations with nameless, unexplained people about their philosophies about whatever. In one such conversation, he talks with a friend of his about lucid dreams, how sometimes you can't tell if you're dreaming or if you're awake, and a test is to flip a light switch. If the light is on and you expect it to stay on, and you flip the switch, if it stays on you're dreaming, if it turns off you're awake. The movie was filmed and then animated over the actors, so the whole thing is kind of wavy anyway.
I decide to watch this movie at 11 pm when I'm already tired, and promptly fall asleep about 45 minutes into it, right after the aforementioned scene. I'm out for maybe 15 minutes when I wake up, turn off the movie, and start talking to Josh. Needless to say I think I really freaked him out (or so he tells me). Everything still looked as wavy as it did on screen, although my life is nowhere near animated. I can't imagine how I'd look as a group of layered blocks of color. I don't know if it would represent me well, or if I'd recognize myself, let alone anyone else. Anyway, things were wavy, and I remember saying to Josh over and over again that I didn't know if I was awake or dreaming. He told me that I must be awake because he was awake and he was talking to me, but in my dream state, he could be as awake as me and I'd just be dreaming up our interaction. Then I remembered the test with the light switch. My lights were off at the time (a smart idea, I know), so I got up to turn them on. The circuitry in my room is kind of fucked up, so it took a second, but they turned on. Alas, I was awake. Josh promptly made me go to sleep.
Another thing they were talking about in that movie, one of the conversations, was this guy talking to his girlfriend about relative time, and how your waking life could just be the dream you have in the time your brain still functions after you've died, and you're just looking back on your life and not actually living it. I don't know how to react to this, but I guess it doesn't make anything less real. I've since found the script online, here's that scene..:
Man: I keep thinking about something you said.
Woman: Something I said?
Man: Yeah. About how you often feel like you're observing your life from the perspective of an old woman about to die. Remember that?
Woman: Yeah. I still feel that way sometimes. Like I'm looking back on my life, and my waking life is her memories.
Man: Exactly. I heard that Tim Leary said as he was dying that he was looking forward to the moment when his body was dead but his brain was still alive. You know they say that there's still six to twelve minutes of brain activity after everything else is shutdown. And one second of dream consciousness, well, that's infinitely longer than a waking second, you know what I'm saying?
Woman: Oh yeah, definitely. For example I wake up and it is 10:12, and then I go back to sleep and have those long, intricate, beautiful dreams that seem to last for hours, and then I wake up and it's 10:13.
Man: Yeah, exactly. So in 6-12 minutes of brain activity, that could be your whole life. I mean, you are that woman looking back over everything.
Woman: Okay. So what if I am. Then what would you be in all that?
Man: Whatever I am right now. I mean, maybe I only exist in your mind, but I'm still just as real as anything else.
When I watched it all the way through last night, it didn't give me any fewer panick attacks, even the parts I'd already seen. I highly recommend it.
9:40 PM
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