When I was six years old, I watched an old Twilight Zone while I was home sick with the flu. In this particular episode, the main character was convinced that he was a figment of another person's dream. So, whenever the person who was dreaming woke up, he was afraid that he would cease to exist. Everyone thought he was crazy, and his wife eventually got him to see a therapist. Eventually, he figured that he was just being crazy, and he went on with his life. The episode ended with his wife waking up as young child. She had dreamed she was grown up, married, and had kids. The main character of the episode was just a figment of her dream.
This really freaked me out. It made me wonder whether I was actually real or not. The worst part of it was I felt that I could really never know whether or not I existed. This was a thought that disturbed for most of my childhood. As I got older, I found that I wasn't the first person who had this thought.
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher and mathematician from 1600s who struggled with this as well. He wrote "Meditations" on the subject, and this work soothed my adolescent anxiety of the state of my existence.
So, to quote the great Descartes, "I think, therefore I am."
I think I have seen that episode
ReplyDeletePhilosophy has so many ways to spin a person's head. One of my favorite's the I learned about was how the entire world was all just inside one's own mind and nothing existed outside of it. -Alan Donoho
ReplyDeleteThis is pretty freaky! I would definitely be scared if I worried about this a lot. When I was a kid I would pretend not to be real, I would close my eyes and imagine what it would be like if I was just my voice. It doesn't really make sense to me now, but I did it a lot lol.
ReplyDelete- Bailey West
I enjoyed reading this, the series Black Mirror on Netflix is a show that makes me wonder the same things, you should watch it if you haven't already.
ReplyDelete-Carter Messner
Now that's a plot twist
ReplyDeleteAgreed about that plot twist! I feared this in middle school and I wonder if that is when our brains are first developed enough to start thinking this.
ReplyDelete