The mysterious stranger
For those of you who haven't read it, it's one of Mark Twain's most captivating short stories; I'm sure you could find it with a quick search on amazon.com . Warning, this entry contains spoiler information, and I HIGHLY recommend reading the story first.
I finished reading it again recently, and was once again swept away with Mr. Twain's spellbinding all-encompassing style. Still, some part of it stuck in my head for some unknown reason, until tonight - and I have a feeling I will come back to it again somewhat soon. But at any rate, tonight...
Tonight, I downloaded a copy of the old Doom game, which I found very entertaining. Still, I couldn't help but notice a disquieting parallel to Mr. Twain's writing, until I could hear the narration in my head...
"Man created in God's image", "All the dream-marks that you didn't catch", "the pointless, meaningless suffering of Man at his own devices". Doom was created as a nightmare reflection of our real world, each character a shadow in our own image, twisted by the "nightmare-ish" dream world to which the game is set. Of course, the character that the player uses is "just a thought, the simplest notion, propelled through the dream world which is a mere fabrication of itself. Meaningless prattle to fill the void, and in the end the character realizes this - that he is utterly alone and always has been, as the mind has skipped on to other things".
It makes it kind of creepy, thinking of our world as a shadowy reflection of somewhere else, simply conjured up with dreamy lucidity and flawed logical connections... a movie playing for itself, yet completely the product of its lonely creator. And the creator is but the shallowest notion, a fleeting thought, an interlocking piece that has but the briefest instant of connection with "true" reality, and then goes floating off into oblivion.
I'm sure everyone's had those "what if the whole world and my entire life is just a dream" thoughts before; it's just interesting how much stranger that notion of entanglement can get depending on what you've been exposed to.
Speaking of entanglement, the ol' boys over at SlashDot just linked to a five-photon entanglement experiment that's supposed to completely eliminate quantum computing qbit errors. Interesting how significant the number 5 can be - it's the first prime separated from the others by a non-prime (when counting up from 0), it's the number of digits many vertebrates share, and much more. But why 5, though? Does that have any more lucidity than anything else in a dream-logic state?
Does entanglement make any more sense? What about Umklapp in Solid State Mechanics? Pi-Meson fields and the whole Virtual Particle Field theory? I don't even pretend to want to read about the new string theory crap. Something just doesn't ring true for me in it. How many more dream-logic theories are there out there?
"There was a time when the pieces fit
but I watched them fall away..."
Anyway, it's late, and it's time for me to go to bed. Maybe I'll dream something up that makes more sense.
Lastly, as a side note, I find it quite amusing how eerie I found the pentagrams and similar symbols scattered through Doom when I first played it back in High School - and now, after being more exposed to more non-christianized history, I find it simply fascinating how such a simple symbol can cause such a strong reaction in a properly conditioned person. Even more laughable, at the time, I considered myself pretty darned separated from all that church stuff. It's just funny.