"Nothing unreal exists."

[mellowtigger]

It's probably a good thing that I rarely dream.

I remember only a handful of dreams each year, and this morning was one of those occasions. Waking slowly this morning, I spent about 3 minutes coming to the conclusion that a whole 2-year period of my life didn't actually exist. It was a period not even relevant to the dream itself, but somehow my histories got all wonky and confused. Dreams can be confusing because they are false inputs. Living without these brief unrealities seems to be a small blessing.

In the Star Trek movie "The Voyage Home", a computer quizzes Spock's memory on various subjects.

Q) What was Kiri-kin-tha's first law of metaphysics?
A) "Nothing unreal exists."

Apparently the quote comes originally from an old white lighter book called "A Course In Miracles". The full quote is, "Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God." I have my doubts on all three of these points.

Investigating my false-life issue this morning leads me to the revelation that there is more than one kind of logic in the universe. That's an important point that they didn't teach me in my college class on Logic.  Coincidentally, my 2-year non-life centers upon a college experience at a school that doesn't even exist.

So begins another day in the life of Terry.

Comments

[litch.livejournal.com]

What drives me a bit nuts is when you get persistent unreality, there is a house that has shown up in dreams over several years. I really had to work to determine I never lived there and that it doesn't actually exist.

But part of the value of dreams is thier synthetic existence, the let the lingerig fragments of daily consciousness recombine and abide our desires and fears.

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

Investigating my false-life issue this morning leads me to the revelation that there is more than one kind of logic in the universe.

Well, duh! Hell, there's an infinite number of them to be found in any chronosynclastic infundibulum.

What I find disturbing is when I'm partly awake and I can't figure out where I am. I mean, I know that I'm in my own bed, I know that I'm in my bedroom, I just can't remember which bedroom. Since starting at A&M, I've had... 18 different bedrooms? No, 19, because I switched bedrooms in my Austin condo. And that's just the real ones. I've had hundreds of unreal ones, as I dream of homes that don't actually exist on a pretty regular basis.

A month or so ago I found myself squinting around the room to figure out which wall the windows where on, to eliminate some of the options. Luckily, I've only had a window AC unit in my current bedroom, so that pretty much locked down where I was. And, having solved that mystery, I also knew that I was not, in fact, late for prison, and could therefore relax and go back to sleep.

[castleclear.livejournal.com]

I rarely remember my dreams, and most of those I do recall have been silly things.

I've not read A COURSE IN MIRACLES (though it was once recommended to me) and realize I should read it before entering into a discussion about ideas it contains, but on the surface meaning of the words "Nothing real can be threatened", how can that be true? (At the moment, I'm thinking of people in Afganistan.)

"Nothing unreal exists" looks to me to be a tautologic argument useful, for example, in refuting scary dreams. Perhaps a more accurate phrasing might be "nothing without material substance has material substance" since the utility of imaginary things, e.g. the square root of negative 1, has been demonstrated, and further "exists" in mathematics. (I suppose we might quibble over what is existence, LOL.)