What happens in dreams? Things are weird. They don’t make sense. You run and run, and never get any farther from your pursuer. Is this real? We don’t think so when we wake up.
The so-called real world is also confusing. Our senses, it turns out, are unreliable. We see maybe ten per cent of what is out there, and our minds fill in the rest. It probably happens often that our minds do it wrong. Most of the time it doesn’t matter.
However, we would do well to be suspicious of our senses in the “real” world, the same as in a dream world. Things are not as they seem, especially, as Wallace Steven wrote in a poem, when played upon the blue guitar.
Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (excerpts)
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
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You see?