In his thoughts, a man lives a thousand lives, but in actuality, he lives only one; the one an observer would see him live. But just this visible one is not the ordained life of ordinary men. They are destined to live a thousand unseen lives, all but one of them imaginary and without meaning, save for the insensible significance passively granted it by unawares, daytime dreamers.
At night, with eyes shut tight, asleep and dreaming, you and the brain know that the scenes you see yourself in are dreams. But in daylight, with eyes open wide, the brain commonly ignores that the scenes of you that it shows itself are dreams, and have no substance. Lacking the presence of some overriding physical stimulus, thought, in the daylight hours, customarily fails to make real time. Exact distinctions between things it remembers has occurred and it imagines could occur are the life you are actually living at the ever-present times of these ceaseless day time dreams.
The brain, being the tricky devil it is, (what with it being both the magician and the audience), is subject to yet an additional layer of self-deception, (or at least a routine pretending to be), in that if the above is noted to a normal man he will readily agree that such sometimes goes on in his mind. But lacking its pathological over indulgence, he shrugs away its significance with man’s common collective attitude: “Everybody day dreams – so what? It doesn’t mean anything as long as you don’t let them interfere with your real life.”
The overlooked legerdemain herein being that, from their private, internal perspective, an ordinary person’s “real life” IS in large part made up of day time dreams. Even this more extreme fact, (when pointed out), a few people recognize, but even they and their brain, (it being subject to more or less standard construction dictates), will instantly forget this a split second after having just acknowledged it.
That operation within the brain which produces what men call thought and day dreams is observably incapable of both day dreaming about you, and being simultaneously aware that it is doing so. If your brain is showing and watching imaginary scenes of you, and you suddenly make yourself aware of this – the scenes cease. This is an undeniable fact, readily apparent to anyone who wants to look.
J.