Running With Scissors

Deux Ex Fried Redux

For as long as humans have possessed conscious brains—which, in the grand scheme of things, has only been during what basically amounts to a spec of a turd in the every-flushing toilet bowl that is space-time continuum—they have been enthralled by the concept of dreams.

They have been mythicized, fantasized, philosophized, and occasionally overused in literary fiction as a cliché way to start a chapter.

Most humans at some point have had a dream so weird and bizarre that they can't help but think if it has a deeper meaning to them, when in reality it is actually nothing more than a way a human brain processes memory during sleep. Why does the brain choose to process said information by picturing you naked during a speech while your teeth fall out is something we may never know. Maybe brains just like being a dick.

Still, one thing that most humans can tell for certain is that dreams are different from reality, since one involves cold, rational truth, while the other involves a series of increasingly ridiculous and outstanding situations with little to no connection. Or can they?

Reality, as we have tried to teach you throughout this tale, is often more ludicrous than dreams or fiction. It is actually the brain that, through eons of existence, has naturalized the absurdity that surrounds it as a type of shared lunacy we like to call "civilization."

The world is infinitely more ridiculous than we are aware off, almost as ridiculous, if not more, than the world in our dreams. We only have to shed away any civilized preconceptions and look at things as they really are. Let's look at lunch, for example.

You sit under—and at the same time, over—the desecrated husk of a tree, and shove the previously-carved corpse of an animal into a hole in your face, possibly accompanied by chemically-enhanced plants, while chewing with bones in your ever-moist mouth, because if you don't, you will literally die. And for that basic existential need, you need to pay. You pay to stay alive.

Madness, but a normalized madness, thanks to the human brain.

If humans are constantly surrounded by absurdity, just like in dreams, then how can they tell when they are dreaming and when they are awake? After all, it is not until a person is awake when they realize that there was something odd going on there for a second.

Since science's answer to this has been a collective shrug, we are forced to seek wisdom in philosophy, a wisdom that one René Descartes was more than happy to provide.

In his treaty, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes asked himself that same question, arguing that, since our brains are not to be trusted either sleeping or awake, we shouldn't trust it very much at all, period. A bold statement by a man who once said "I think, therefore, I am." A dumbass, he was.

He instead states that we should trust God to show us what is real and what is not. But since God has not been that into humanity since that whole incident with his son and the cross and the whatnot, humans have to rely on other means to differentiate between the two. Enter Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes refuted Descartes, stating that the lack of absurdity during their waking moments should be enough to differentiate the both. Anyone who has spent at least five minutes watching CNN can testify that there's enough absurdity in the world to render that theory useless. What we are left then, is the power of observation. We have to trust our eyes and instincts to determine what is real.

It comes as no surprise that Peter thought he might've been in a dream by using some simple observation of his surroundings.

It wasn't the fact that he was suddenly and inexplicably sitting on the softest park bench his butt had ever felt, or that he was apparently been spirited away to a beautiful and endless park to begin with. It wasn't that he found weird that the whole place smelled like Kentucky Fried Chicken, or that his suit had been turned into a magnificent robe made of little, angelic pubes. It all seemed perfectly normal to Peter.