I Dreamed Myself?

I'm sitting here, groggy, on a dreary Saturday morning. One of the medicines I take gives me a head-slap of a sleep hangover. So, my mind is wandering. You're welcome to wander with me.

I was listening to some YouTube videos by a guy named Alan Watts. I don't know his pedigree, so I can't comment on why he makes the videos. They are on a number of philosophical and metaphysical topics. He has a beautiful speaking voice. One of the videos is on the topic of controlling one's dreams. There are two versions of the same talk posted on YouTube, and some overzealous poster named one, "What If God Got Bored?" I'm not sure where that came from. Certainly not from the content of the video. I've seen that line of thinking before. "What if God got bored?," followed by ,"He would create humanity." It then goes on to make some observation about humanity, usually taunting or derogatory, always cynical. Philosophy and metaphysics don't always deal with what is obviously true or even relevant. However, this line of thought is particularly irrelevant, true or not. It sounds very profound, but there is no reason to suggest that God ever gets bored, boredom being a uniquely human construct. There is also no reason to believe that he would create humanity for his amusement. Some cynical (pop) philosophers have tried to sell God's boredom as an explanation of the existence of evil. It is solely a tool for his psychopathic amusement. It's one attempted explanation for the plight of Job, but it doesn't wash. It's too contrived. It would be easier to slide into atheism, chalking it up to superstition.

Quite a digression. I told you my mind is wandering.

Anyway, on controlling dreams. Mr. Watts' meandering on the possibilities is certainly more interesting than pondering God's boredom, even if it is not really any more relevant. He narrates the possibilities enticingly. We would move ourselves limitless through time and space. We would follow each of the infinite possibilities created by the choices we would make. We could rocket ourselves through distant stars and galaxies to endless Earths and not-so-Earths. We could dive to the depths of the sea to visit places and species no man has ever seen before. We could create an unending set of situations for an infinity of characters. We could travel through unremembered pasts and futures that might never come to pass. It's a comfortable and comforting idea that our dreams might have more meaning than random synapses firing while our cognitive mind rests. Mr. Watts draws us back from our infinite wandering to dreaming the existence which we now live. Is he proposing that our reality is the dream of some metaphysical us? Is that how the poster mentioned above made his or her leap to the idea that human existence is a manifestation of God's bored dreaming? Are each of our metaphysical selves particles of the godhead? Did we create reality out of our of bored dreaming?

I can't follow Mr. Watts there because the conclusion of our self-creation is only momentarily interesting. Or, put differently, I can't stay with him there. It's not a conclusion. It's just an abrupt end to the mental gymnastics of infinite imagination. It begs the question of ultimate creation. If our über selves created our subjective reality, then what created those selves? Are our ethereal selves the product of the ultimate hen? It further puts aside an answer to why all of our metaphysical selves would dream the same reality simultaneously. Maybe the infinity of possibilities includes that situation. It's a conclusion that isn't a conclusion at all, but just another theory on the nature of reality that lacks proving.

Well, I'm awake now, so it's getting harder to mentally wander around because I feel like I should be doing something. Anyway, thanks for coming along for the ride.