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Am I Alice or a Butterfly?


Posts: 2266

During my brush with death I fell into a coma and was forcibly kept there. I experienced dreams that were so vivid and real that I honestly have a hard time believing I had them at all. I had no doubt of what I was experiencing to be real. That reality, my place in it, and my experience of it was indistinguishable in character from the one I sit in now as I type this. I am reminded by Zhuangzi’s butterfly of which I pondered while younger but never truly appreciated until now – while he slept he dreamt himself to be a butterfly and he truly thought himself to be a butterfly, he fluttered around flowers and saw only as a butterfly could see, it was only upon waking that he realized that he was not a butterfly but a man- the natural question arises whether he is a butterfly dreaming of being a man or a man dreaming of being a butterfly. My experience differs though, it was so real that when I awoke, I still believed myself to be in a dream because for myself there was never a dream to begin with, all was a waking experience. The appearances, conceptions, and understandings, I forged in the dream were still so much apart of my waking perception that they continued to act as my lens and determined all. For three days I hallucinated a separate reality and thought it to be surely real as those who perceive it properly watched, studied, and continually explained to me where I was and what had happened. Or so they tell me, in all actuality they were hardly a part of my appearances and only bleeding in when my mind deemed it time to dream them up.  Only on the fourth day upon waking did this hallucinating stop and everything was as it used to be.  

I have struggled with the question posed, what is real and what constitutes reality, ever since. In some sense it seems nothing is real except for what you believe as my dream was so unquestionable that the validity of its reality could not be questioned. I really have no idea and sometimes cannot decide whether I am Alice or a butterfly.

Posts: 1433
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your alice

professional retard :)
Posts: 2266
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your alice

 Sometimes I fear that this is true and others it saddens me that it is not. 

Posts: 5
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yeah you're just alice

Posts: 1319
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idk what u are but i know ur amazing alice chan <3

Posts: 1131
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During my brush with death I fell into a coma and was forcibly kept there. I experienced dreams that were so vivid and real that I honestly have a hard time believing I had them at all. I had no doubt of what I was experiencing to be real. That reality, my place in it, and my experience of it was indistinguishable in character from the one I sit in now as I type this. I am reminded by Zhuangzi’s butterfly of which I pondered while younger but never truly appreciated until now – while he slept he dreamt himself to be a butterfly and he truly thought himself to be a butterfly, he fluttered around flowers and saw only as a butterfly could see, it was only upon waking that he realized that he was not a butterfly but a man- the natural question arises whether he is a butterfly dreaming of being a man or a man dreaming of being a butterfly. My experience differs though, it was so real that when I awoke, I still believed myself to be in a dream because for myself there was never a dream to begin with, all was a waking experience. The appearances, conceptions, and understandings, I forged in the dream were still so much apart of my waking perception that they continued to act as my lens and determined all. For three days I hallucinated a separate reality and thought it to be surely real as those who perceive it properly watched, studied, and continually explained to me where I was and what had happened. Or so they tell me, in all actuality they were hardly a part of my appearances and only bleeding in when my mind deemed it time to dream them up.  Only on the fourth day upon waking did this hallucinating stop and everything was as it used to be.  

I have struggled with the question posed, what is real and what constitutes reality, ever since. In some sense it seems nothing is real except for what you believe as my dream was so unquestionable that the validity of its reality could not be questioned. I really have no idea and sometimes cannot decide whether I am Alice or a butterfly.

 Does it matter?

Posts: 32762
0 votes RE: Am I Alice or a Butterfly?

your alice

She's as much "Alice" as Jim Carrey is "Jim Carrey", and all we can report back to her is what we've seen of her. The butterfly story isn't too different from Jim's experiences 'possessed' by Andy Kaufman, and it began to affect him when people would play along (especially Andy's family and the cast of Taxi). 



Ę̵̚x̸͎̾i̴͚̽s̵̻͐t̷͐ͅe̷̯͠n̴̤̚t̵̻̅i̵͉̿a̴̮͊l̵͍̂ ̴̹̕D̵̤̀e̸͓͂t̵̢͂e̴͕̓c̸̗̄t̴̗̿ï̶̪v̷̲̍é̵͔
last edit on 11/25/2020 9:05:26 PM
Posts: 2266
0 votes RE: Am I Alice or a Butterfly?

Does it matter?

It’s not clear that what constitutes the mind is matter thus I’m not sure it does matter.

Posts: 32762
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Butterfly said:
For three days I hallucinated a separate reality and thought it to be surely real as those who perceive it properly watched, studied, and continually explained to me where I was and what had happened.

I had a long dream that felt similarly, but as I saw later when I'd seen more movies it conformed similarly to principles from the movie The Butterfly Effect. 

I'd gone to sleep and awakened in a different setting, still as myself but in another timeline. It was as if I'd never moved away from San Francisco, as if my folks pushed themselves that much harder to not have to move elsewhere, and by then it'd been years since moving away. Unlike former dreams my senses felt intact, real, rather than the pillow fisted numbness that's normally present in dreaming. When something hurt me in the dream, it wasn't a trivial forgettable thing like most dream injuries but rather a "real" twinge of pain, one that rather than jar me from the dream instead further immersed me into it. 

At the start of the dream was a flood of memories, of every experience I'd had that led me to this point rather than the one I was on before the dream. Every memory was there, recallable like the ones I have access to now, as real as the experiences I take for granted while typing this entry. As far as I knew in this setting, that was me, and even after waking I was disoriented over having access to both sets of experiences, over having seen parts of the city I'd never even been to... later again in real life when revisiting there (there's all sorts of rational explanations for this, especially within the self-doubting range of heuristics, but the feeling remains). 

I'd only dreamed like that once, never before it and never again since, and the only reason I don't give it more merit is over Occam's Razor. 

Ę̵̚x̸͎̾i̴͚̽s̵̻͐t̷͐ͅe̷̯͠n̴̤̚t̵̻̅i̵͉̿a̴̮͊l̵͍̂ ̴̹̕D̵̤̀e̸͓͂t̵̢͂e̴͕̓c̸̗̄t̴̗̿ï̶̪v̷̲̍é̵͔
Posts: 32762
0 votes RE: Am I Alice or a Butterfly?

Check into Philip K. Dick for a more artistic bent on reality philosophy: 

Throughout his life, he suffered from severe hallucinations and a distorted view of reality. His novels reflect this, and his writing made him one of the most beloved and most critically acclaimed writers in the sci-fi genre.

Dick has said his writings revolve around two questions:
1) What is reality?
2) What does it mean to be human?

Dick's characters typically spend much of his work wondering who they are, and whether their memories are real or fake.

Similarly a common theme in his works is a comparison between an objective "Real" reality and a subjective "Perceived" reality, debating the dividing line between the two and whether it is even worth contemplating the difference; a theme that reflected his own mental state. 

He wrote serious existential and theological treatises within the context of futuristic science-fiction stories, when science-fiction novels were still in their infancy and considered as childish and peripheral by the majority of the literary world. He was one of the first authors to use fantasy and science-fiction to discuss taboo and socially risqué subjects, contemplating ideas that wouldn't be discussed in mainstream academia for decades. He mixed, deconstructed, and reconstructed philosophical and psychological ideology from everything from Carl Jung and his theories on collective consciousness through to Jean-Paul Sartre and his theories on individualism, constantly searching to define and challenge reality and the human mind. Some of his stories have been cited by big-name philosophers like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek.

His largest work is to date unpublished save a few excerpts - over 7000 pages of notes speculating on Greek philosophy, early Christianity, theology, mental illness, and the implicate structure of the universe itself. This work, titled the "Exegesis," spans thousands of years of metaphysics and occult literature. Written during the final few years of his life, it is either his greatest triumph of skeptical empiricism or a deep descent into incomprehensible insanity.

His works are what inspired Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (which I also highly recommend), and Blade Runner was also inspired from his literary works (in this case Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which has been converted into a graphic novel that carries every line from the book). He at some point in his life claimed to have seen someone in a dream (while under drugs at the dentist's office) that he then met later in real life, prompting his mental state to deteriorate further. 

Around 1974, Dick began to have odd revelations/hallucinations, culminating with direct contact with the entity formerly known as God. Many think he suffered from schizophrenia, a possibility Dick himself acknowledged and wrestled with. He became increasingly paranoid, at one point alleging that the KGB or the FBI stole documents from his house (he did, in fact, come home one night to find one of his filing cabinets forced open); later, he suggested that he might have broken into his own house and then forgotten about it. Many suspect his later novels are so confusing because he was trying to work out these problems in his writing.

His works are a form of genius, but they stem from a man who believes he didn't even come up with his own stories, but that rather he was covering them journalistically from his means of seeing into other worlds. Fans of his work seem to think that reading his stories in order serves as a timeline of his mental state, and I've been meaning to push myself into diving into his works but keep not doing it

He was so ahead of his time that people are still looking into him now. 

Ę̵̚x̸͎̾i̴͚̽s̵̻͐t̷͐ͅe̷̯͠n̴̤̚t̵̻̅i̵͉̿a̴̮͊l̵͍̂ ̴̹̕D̵̤̀e̸͓͂t̵̢͂e̴͕̓c̸̗̄t̴̗̿ï̶̪v̷̲̍é̵͔
last edit on 11/25/2020 9:35:02 PM
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