The good news is, if you read my last post, I found a book that can hold my interest. Maybe even awes me a little. Forbidden by Ted Dekker is my latest binge, and I’m almost through it in two days of on and off reading. The bad news is, he stole a concept that I had played with about three years ago, just waiting until I had time to write again before it became anything more concrete and serious. Figures.

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“Pain is in the mind.” Says Inception… a movie about dreams. Hmm.
Snagged the photo from greenteamovie.blogspot.com

Anyway, now that the reading update is out of the way, I want to discuss another topic with you. After dinner this evening, my family launched into a discourse on weird things that humans do on a regular basis. We ended up on dreams, when my brother mentioned that he has felt pain before in his dreams. I have as well, and my dad, while my mom sat by and looked skeptical. She had never had anything like that happen before, and then we debated for a long time whether one had to experience a sort of physical stimulus in order for the brain to misinterpret it as pain, or if it could conjure the idea of pain in the mind, being felt in the dream, disappearing upon awaking. Needless to say, we came to no conclusion.

But that had me thinking: do you think we experience anything during our waking hours that is conjured by the mind? It may not be real at all. Maybe we’re dreaming already, waiting to wake up. Do you think we could experience things differently? Is what we feel, see, think, hear in dreams really so far removed from reality?

I’m not going to go into weird psychological stumblings about whether what we see or not is real. How do we really know what we think we really know, and such. But what if our brain did conjure some things? Oh look, I tied it back to Ted Dekker again. Maybe you all should just read Forbidden. Maybe this would make a little more sense. 

Do you think you’re really awake? Are our dreams as ethereal as we make them out to be? 

How about this: are you ever inspired to write because of dreams, no matter how dumb or uninteresting the initial dream might have been?