Complex Numbers

The Inner Fright

Waking up to find it was all just a dream is the cheapest ever way to end a story.

PROMPT September 14th

You just woke up to discover you had dozed off in your 3rd grade class... how would you react realizing your entire life since then was just a dream?

I mean, I guess it worked for Lewis Carroll. But it's not the kind of thing the rest of us can get away with.

I have trouble sleeping when I know I have an alarm set. I've been known to sleep right through alarms. I'm not on a regular work schedule, so I no longer wake up at the same time every weekday, and that compounds the issue. If I have, say, a doctor appointment at 9:30 then I have the alarm set for 8:00 or whatever, even if I go to bed at midnight (way too early for me), when it goes off, I get up and slog to the shower. Along the way, I notice something: the light is dim, or some of the clutter on my nightstand is missing. That's when I realize I'm dreaming. To prove to myself that it's a dream, I will myself to rise up through the ceiling. Once I do that, I wake up for real and check the time. Whew - only 6 am. Still plenty of time to catch some more Zs before I have to wake up. I wake up again, and it's 9:45. Oh shit, I've missed the appointment! Wait... no. It's dark. I'm still dreaming. Levitate. Yep, dreaming. Then the alarm goes off, and there's someone in the room with me who's not a cat. Sigh. Dreaming.

Finally I wake up and it's 7:55, and I haven't gotten any decent sleep and I can't levitate so I know I'm not dreaming. Five minutes isn't anywhere near enough, so I get up and take a shower -- during which the alarm goes off because like an idiot I forgot to turn the blasted thing off.

I say "alarm" but I just use my phone these days.

The point of all of this is to relate that the whole "butterfly dreaming I'm a man" conundrum never made sense to me. Even if my mind starts out thinking a dream is reality, eventually there's some discontinuity that makes me realize I'm dreaming. Rarely, I can use that to my advantage and have a lucid dream, like my own personal holodeck. Usually, I just wake up, or at least I think I do.

Reality is persistent. That's how we know it's reality.

So if I woke up one day from a nap in a classroom and I'm eight years old, my first reaction would probably be that this is just another nightmare, and pretty soon I'll wake up for real, safely NOT in Miss Martin's classroom.

Miss Martin was one of those bachelor teachers of the old mold, with the pointy glasses and seventeen cats at home. Think Dolores Umbridge, but in green instead of pink. Possibly she was gay, but more likely she spent her adult life teaching assholes like Kid Me and decided that having children was not for her. Her like will never be seen again in our time, and that's a shame, but I have no good memories of that school year.

This whole thing kind of reminds me of the great ST:TNG episode "The Inner Light." In it, Picard falls into a deep coma on the bridge, and wakes up to find he's living a life on a pastoral planet. He lives the rest of a very long life on that planet, with a wife and kids, and the show expertly compresses something like fifty Earth years into less than an hour of runtime. I mean, really, if you watch no other Trek, that one's worth it by itself. Point is, spoiler alert, he finally wakes up back on the Enterprise and he's in his whatever decade Picard was supposed to be on TNG. Forties, I'd guess. But he's retained all the memories of this other life, even though it was, for all intents and purposes, a dream. The exact mechanics of this involves hand-waving some alien technology, which is kind of a specialty of Trek, but the salient character point here is that to him, it was not a dream.

And so I would hope it would be for me in the purely hypothetical situation outlined in the prompt above: that I would have memories of this life, know what was coming. I mean, in the episode it turned out that everything he experienced in his mind were based on things that happened long ago, but the parallels remain. That is, assuming that this new reality turned out to be persistent and not, in fact, a nightmare.

Consequently, as soon as Apple became publicly traded, I'd dump every last meager dollar fourteen-year-old me had into it.

And then with my luck, it would go bankrupt in that timeline.