perchance to dream

"I now recognized them as familiar aspects of a dream life: that one moment you are here, and another you are there.

Very familiar. I could estimate I had spent perhaps a third of my life asleep, and a large proportion of that time must have been spent dreaming.

So: I knew dream life. In fact, in a way, I was actually comfortable with it. Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world--just no more confusing than any other.

(...)

Waking was the most reliable part of a dream, as built into dreams as death is to life.

You dream, you wake: you live, you die.

Somehow, it occured to me that if you die, you wake.

(...)

Waking is rising: You wake up, not down."



- Alex Garland, The Coma