I was thinking of using a writing prompt for today.  I just couldn’t figure out what to write about.  I did not have a great day.  This is annoying because it seems like just another in a long line of not great days.  Do you ever have the feeling that you are forgetting something, but you just can’t figure out what it is, and you have this anxious feeling in your chest that is screaming at you to remember, but remember what? 

It’s a bit like being in a dream where things do make a sort of sense but everything is a bit fuzzy around the edges.

Do you ever wonder if you are in a dream?  I know that is some high school grade ‘deep thought’.  But even so, it occurs to me all the time.  I used to live near someone who would let their alarm clock ring constantly.  Every time I walked by their house I got this strange feeling that I was the one who needed to wake up, like any second I would snap awake and realize that the alarm was my own. 

I get that feeling any time I hear one of those standard beeping alarm clocks. 

I suppose this is not unlike those people who believe we are living in a simulation.  It’s one of those ideas that is pretty pointless, because I feel like it just reinforces for certain people the desire to ignore the real suffering of other people.

But it is also not a new idea.  The idea that there is something obfuscated or unreal about our existence is a pretty old idea.  Plato’s allegory of the cave comes to mind.  Our understanding of our existence is mere shadow puppetry.  We sit bound in the dark as shadows dance on the wall and we call that reality.

I doubt other animals worry that their existence is an illusion.  I wonder what the evolutionary drive behind this feeling is.  This feeling that I could reach out and pull back the curtain that is obscuring my sight, but its just out reach.