The Importance of Being Idle

Object/Subject/Reject

Today on my limited travels I saw a Regimental Red 1967 Pontiac GTO. I know this, because I'm a '67 GTO geek, there's no other car that looks like it. If I ever have to money to buy such an extravagance, I shall have one in Fathom Blue. Anyhoo yeah I saw this gorgeous beast of a car, and I was so busy concentrating on it (cos I'd never seen one in real life before, and it was much bigger than I imagined) that I very nearly ran a red light. There's probably a lesson in there somehow (my guess would be Yoda's "Never his mind on where he is or what he is doing" but I'm terrible at extracting morals from stories, so it could be something completely different), but whats important isn't what I've learnt from this experience, its that the experience happened.
This objectively happening thing differentiates it nicely from the dream I had last night where I stole a car from a museum car park and drove far far away to this massive tree, for some reason that made sense in the dream. And I'm looking at this tree and I dropped my keys. So I bent down to pick 'em up, only to discover that they were near a VERY big spider. Except it wasn't a whole spider, it was just the front half of it, the back half was all squashed. The important thing to notice about this spider is that you couldn't kill it, no matter how much you squished it the intact bits kept wiggling, and also it wasn't made out of spider, its body, flesh, whatever you call it, was made out of the same nasty slimy rubberiness that slugs are made of. Anyhoo, being as terrified of spiders in this dream as I am in real life I was hesitant to pick my keys up, even though I needed them. So I started to cast around for a stick to rescue the keys from the icky spider-smush, only to see more and more of these spiders, most of them unsquished, and they were everywhere! They carpetted the floor with their repulsive bodies, and then I started to notice that they weren't just on the floor, they were in the tree too, and falling all around me. Luckily that was the point at which I woke up, before things really got out of control.
Now this event didn't occur in any objective fashion, it was purely subjective, but does that mean it has any less impact on my life than the objectively real experience of seeing a cool car and running a red light? I'd have to say "no", with a but. I don't really believe there is any massive difference between the two events, they are after all purely internal events (for all of consensus realities aparent solidity we can only ever experience it in the privacy of our minds, once it has been extrapolated from the mass of sensory data our brains collate). They are both the products of the part of our brain that likes to tell stories about things in a vain effort to make them make sense, except in one case it bases the story on received sensory input, and in the other case it just riffs off closed circuits. As far as the percipient is concerned both events have equal value. I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't really understand why people say "it's just a dream", attempting to dismiss things which disturb or unbalance them in some way. Shitty and disturbing dreams can mess up your day just as efficiently as a shitty and disturbing day can mess up your dreams. BUT (I told you there was a but, didn't I?) whilst I think that both the objectively real and the subjectively real are both equally real to the percipient I don't believe you should grant them the same weight of importance. Clearly the objectively real should be considered the more important (and by a pretty significant margin too), I just think we should be more mindful of our dreams is all.
I have no idea where that lot came from, all I was gonna say was that I saw a cool car.

posted by BadMonkey @ 4:02 PM