“Two Worlds”

“So, a gigantic gulf separated Skylar’s view of life itself from those of everyone he had ever met. For he believed with all his soul that the superficial show of life was, at bottom, false. He had not yet understood why it was false, but he knew that it was. Childhood had shown him that Timelessness was real and could be lived, at least for short periods, in the normal waking state of consciousness. Something also told him that every event in life was preordained. In his way of looking at things, déjà vu was not something inexplicable or some trick of memory but a real clue to the fact that the script for humanity’s actors had, indeed, been written prior to the commencement of the performance. And, finally, the existence of a dream world, wherein people and objects struck the dreamer as thoroughly real, where a sense of time and its passage as well as a feeling of spatiality and its extent were understood, haunted him with its implications. While he could not, as yet, precisely formulate his worry, it had to do with the analogy of the theatrical performance: if people and things in the dream functioned with a logic acceptable to them and the dreamer, and it was only after waking that one dismissed the dream as foolish and unreal, might daily life resemble the dream or the play, in which one must shift out of one’s functioning consciousness, required for the dream- or stage-reality in which one finds oneself, to a superimpositional perspective in order to truly determine what is real and what is false?”