I occasionally have really detailed dreams with plots and allegory and everything. Sometimes someone will tell a joke in my dream, and I don’t get the joke until I wake up and think about it. My subconscious is sometimes more clever than I am.
Anyway, the best dream I ever had was one of those really detailed ones with a complex plot. I don’t remember any of those details, but it was some kind of mystery story where two children are on the run from a detective. It was full of plot twists and complex lies. As the plot unfolded, it seemed like there were some contractions in the narrative. One character says it happened like this, but another character claims the opposite. Typical mystery story stuff.
But as the dream went on, these little inconsistencies built up and up until I concluded that a key event in the plot must have happened two different ways at the same time. Irreconcilably, both ways must have been true, but they absolutely contradicted each other. It’s not that somebody is lying, there must actually be something wrong in the timeline itself.
This is when the dream drops its biggest plot twist: why is it inconsistent? Because it’s not real; it’s all a dream. And then I woke up.
I know the “it’s all a dream” plot twist is usually cheap and stupid, but like, it WAS all a dream. I sat in bed for like 15 minutes just being impressed with how incredible the twist was, and how it was quite impossible for anybody else to experience the same story.
Wow! I had no idea.
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