In bed at night asleep, if a dream your brain is producing becomes intolerable, it will remind itself that it is just a dream, and will cause itself to awaken for a moment to stop its running. But no such thing occurs in the upright, daylight hours. If the daydream the brain creates in a man’s mind become unbearable – he goes crazy, (as his peers pronounce it). If the brain of an ordinary man starts to show daydreams so disturbing to him that they begin to detrimentally interfere with his actual living of his life, it will not remind itself that they are just imaginary,
and awaken itself and thus the man from the nightmarish situation.
This of course is an anomalous occurrence. Most people are not, (by their community’s judgment), crazy, but their life, from their private, internal perspective of themselves, consists just as much of dreams as does that of one judged insane. The only difference being the degree to which their individual dreams contrast with physical reality.
Here appears another slippery juncture in the neural magician/audience’s conspiratorial slight of hand. If you tell a man that, to a substantial extent he lives in a world of dreams, he and his brain will immediately reject the idea, reaching out perhaps to touch a nearby object or himself, or even you, while verbally noting the he is not at that moment in some dream world, but is clearly aware-of and awake-to the reality around him, completely aware of the object he touched, and totally awake to the existence of both you and himself.
So it is inaccurate to say that men live in a dream realm. Men do not live physically in a dream world, detached from reality, or they could not survive. They live amidst dreams only mentally, and the mere fact that this does not normally interfere with their survival, tells an air conditioned person the actual value of the dreams – zero. The only importance of these, off-the-meter-brain-produced-dreams, is whatever that same, I’ve-got-nothing-better-to-do-brain says they have.
The magician finishes the trick – looks smugly to the audience, and as
“How’d I do,” with, need it be noted, a predictable response.
J.