RING!! RING!!!

*Opens eyes and sighs

It’s time to wake up.

There’s a question that I’ve always had eversince… okay I don’t really remember when I started asking myself this but I believe that this was very very very many moons ago. This is a question that I would keep asking myself as soon as I got up. I never got a satisfying answer to this question so I keep asking myself this question each time I wake up but since getting an answer for this question is incredibly hard, I don’t bother trying to look for the answer anymore. The question is…

Where do we go when we sleep?

Trying to answer this question will lead you down a rabbit hole.

Why?

Because, once you attempt to answer this question, you face another question:

Why do we go to sleep?

I know, this sounds silly. But try and think about it. Why do we living creatures have to get some shut eye?

Trying to answer this question leads to another question:

Where were we before we got born?

You probably think I’m a bit high now. Well, I’m not. The very first time I got to think about this was when I started watching Mr Bean’s shows. At the beginning of the show, there is a giant focused beam of white light. A figure, Mr Bean falls from the sky. After that, the opera group starts to sing that classic, melancholic song. I actually found it quite depressing. Anyways, I asked myself one day “Where does Mr Bean come from?”

After a very long train of thought, the question evolved to “Where did I come from?”

The rabbit hole gets deeper! This question leads to another question:

Am I alive?

I thought about this question when I had a great deal of time on my hands. I had started going down the rabbit hole and wanted to see where it ends. I had been watching a lot of science fiction series and got a lot of crazy ideas.

Here is the list of ideas I got:

1. What if everything we see, hear, feel and touch isn’t real? What if everything around us is all made up and we only wake up from this “dream” called life when we die?
2. What if we are beings in some sort of a computer simulation and one day someone will pull the power plug and we’ll all disappear?
3. What if we are micro-beings – and earth is kinda like a sub-atomic particle (or something along those lines), and we are part of a larger organism?

These are all the crazy ideas that led me to the questions : Am I alive? If so, how can I tell that I’m alive?

As you know, we human beings are afraid of things that we do not understand. I felt very afraid for quite a while as I didn’t even know if I was alive or not (I know it sounds really silly now but hey, that’s what happened). I soon found out that there were other people who had a great deal of free time on their hands. These people called themselves philosophers.

They asked themselves the same question that comes at the end of the rabbit hole : Am I alive? If so, how can I tell?

The answer is the famous Latin phrase: Cogito ergo sum. This means “I think, therefore I am.”

The argument brought forward by the philosophers is that a key characteristic that separates you as a living person from people who are not in the world of the living is the fact that you can think.

Satisfied, I read the last sentence of the last page of the philosophy book that I was reading and went to sleep.

Then when I woke up, I realized that the question that had started all of this hadn’t been answered yet – Where do we go when we sleep?

Conclusion

Who knows where we go when we sleep? Well I don’t!

See you next week Wednesday!

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