The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Requiem for a dream

One day while sitting on the couch I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but… just‥ wrong. (It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade). I was transfixed, I couldn't look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp.

I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn't eating or drinking. I stared at the fucking lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me, by this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother's house just before I had my epiphany…. the lamp is not real…. the house is not real, my wife, my kids… none of that is real… the last 10 years of my life are not fucking real!

Via Jason Kottke, temptotosssoon comments on Have you ever felt a deep personal connection to a person you met in a dream only to wake up feeling terrible because you realize they never existed?

There's a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “The Inner Light,” where Picard is knocked unconscience by an alien probe for about half an hour, but Picard spends a subjective thirty years living life on an alient planet. It's considered one of the best Star Trek episodes and won a ton of awards.

The article presented above appears to be a real-life occurrence of subjectively living years of your life in a dream-like state. Only without the alien probes. And the flute.

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