I'm rocking a high fever, browsing personal blogs like this at what feels to be the wee hours of the morning even though it's 7:11pm, and progressively losing my grip on reality reading their contents. In the past 7 hours I've had 4 dreams of waking up, swearing it was reality, going for a drink and only realizing it was a dream when I didn't become less thirsty. Then, each time, I would sit down on a chair, completely aware of every smell and touch around me, feeling the chair against me, my arms against my legs, my dog on my lap, and I would try to wake up. Instead, I would fall asleep out of fatigue after what seemed like minutes (yes, in the dream I was very sleepy) and wake up again in my bed swearing that this time was real. Each time, once I found out it was a dream, I would become very frightened and aware of every dark corner of the room in case my night terrors returned. Luckily, I was able to keep the my wits about me and prevent that from happening.
So, it's been a special kind of day... I wonder if Descartes had an experience similar to this which prompted the formation of his theory of self existence and the existence of an objective reality, because this was very surreal and disorientating. In some of his writings, he attested that his dreams were absolutely indistinguishable from reality in every way, except that they were not reality. Long story real short, he had something of a crisis of self and used circuitous logic to try and prove a God, thereby disproving the chance that our world and every mind around him could be an illusion created by, in his words, "the Evil Genius". It was actually out of this crisis that his "I think, therefore I am" came from.
In the recent years, my dreams have become more and more fleshed out, cohesive, and close to reality, which makes me understand more and more Descartes' experience.
This was actually my first blog post; I hope this was read-worthy. Probably going to be the last, as well.
(Just to clarify, my "progressively losing my grip on reality" statement was a hyperbolic joke. I'm just fine. XP)
So, it's been a special kind of day... I wonder if Descartes had an experience similar to this which prompted the formation of his theory of self existence and the existence of an objective reality, because this was very surreal and disorientating. In some of his writings, he attested that his dreams were absolutely indistinguishable from reality in every way, except that they were not reality. Long story real short, he had something of a crisis of self and used circuitous logic to try and prove a God, thereby disproving the chance that our world and every mind around him could be an illusion created by, in his words, "the Evil Genius". It was actually out of this crisis that his "I think, therefore I am" came from.
In the recent years, my dreams have become more and more fleshed out, cohesive, and close to reality, which makes me understand more and more Descartes' experience.
This was actually my first blog post; I hope this was read-worthy. Probably going to be the last, as well.
(Just to clarify, my "progressively losing my grip on reality" statement was a hyperbolic joke. I'm just fine. XP)