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LIFE
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1993-10-31
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7KB
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░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░The Eleven Truths of Life░░░░░░░By William Luby
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I don't remember my first swimming race aside from a vague
recollection that it happened at camp and I did not win. Not
winning didn't concern me at the time, because I was only in second
grade and most of the other swimmers were older and more
experienced. I did win my next race though, and could not be beaten
thereafter, even though the competition got stronger. In spite of
my success, my swimming was far from perfect and I soon became
haunted by my inability to maintain a straight line while racing.
No matter how hard I concentrated, each time I raced I would swim in
an arc to the right. Because there were no lane markers at camp, I
was not disqualified, but I was forcing myself to swim a longer
distance than the others.
I became obsessed by this shortcoming and soon began to have
recurring dreams in which I was swimming in an important race and
could not maintain a straight line. One night, while I was making
one of these inevitable turns, I suddenly realized that I was
turning to the left and not to the right. The peculiar part was
that this revelation hit me while I was still in a dream state. I
felt a chill shoot down my spine as soon as I understood that I had
become both an active participant and a passive observer in the same
dream.
My dreams continued and so did my dual presence in these dreams.
Stranger yet, I began to understand that the swimmer had no
consciousness and the observer had no body in the context of my
dream. They did not appear to be two separate parts of one person,
but rather incomplete portions of two different people. With each
passing dream, the observer became increasingly comfortable in his
surroundings, to the point where he could leave mental notes that I
would be sure to recall when I woke up. Before long, the observer
made an amazing discovery: he was able to determine that the swimmer
was destined to turn in the direction I was facing while I was
asleep. How he did this I do not know. I didn't believe him at
first, but the evidence bore him out. If I slept on my left side
(facing to the right), which was usually the most comfortable, I
would inevitably turn to the right while swimming in my dream. If I
slept on my right side, I turned to the left. As an experiment, I
slept on my back one night and swam perfectly straight in the dream.
Somehow, I was able to have consciousness in the dream world and in
the waking world at the same time, identifying causes in one world
and effects in the other.
It didn't take long before the observer in my dream became more
confident of his abilities and graduated from an observer to a
director, where he could will the action in the dream. In fact, by
merely thinking something, he made it happen and the dreams became
projections of his thoughts. This was exciting at first, but
eventually took all the suspense out of my dreams. The director
embodied all my hopes and fears, so that if I did not want something
to happen in my dreams, it did not. Conversely, anything I wished
for came true. On top of this, I found that I was also blessed with
an ability to remember almost every dream I had, or at least enough
bits and pieces to reconstruct the main themes.
At some point in my youth, I lost interest in swimming and in
controlling my dreams and even got to the point where I stopped
remembering my dreams. With the onset of my teenage years, reality
became more important and I came to view dreams as merely reruns of
all my hopes and fears.
Nevertheless, when I had an opportunity to take a college seminar on
the interpretation of dreams I jumped at the chance, hoping to find
an explanation for this wonderful nocturnal world I had reigned over
in my youth. To my surprise, I learned that lucid dreams, in which
the dreamer assumes a first person and third person presence, with
the third person incarnation willing the action, are not that
uncommon.
The seminar leader encouraged all of us to keep a dream journal. I
needed little prodding, because I wanted to recapture the magic of
the lucid dreams I once had. The first few weeks yielded mixed
results, but then the lucid observer began to make occasional
appearances, with each dream becoming more fantastic than the
previous one.
Then came the fateful night. In a dream, I appeared as a
pretentious philosopher approaching the age of 50, secure in the
knowledge that I had recently written a "The Eleven Truths of Life,"
a book that had been acclaimed throughout the world for having
reduced the complexities of modern day life down to eleven essential
truths. I do not remember all eleven truths (I remembered them the
next morning, wrote them down and mailed them to a friend, who
eventually misplaced my letter), but I distinctly remember the first
two:
1. There is no God.
2. There is no afterlife.
(In fact, I remember reading these eleven truths from my book during
the course of my dream, yet dream "experts" maintain that people
cannot read text during a dream.)
In the dream, I am glancing over the eleven truths with a smug smile
on my face when another being materializes in front of me out of
thin air. I immediately know that this is God. I am speechless.
God has a gaunt face and gentle eyes. He is dressed in a simple
off-white robe, with dirty long blond hair and a beard, looking
remarkably close to the images I recall from the picture books of my
youth. I can think of nothing appropriate to say. After a long
pause, God says, "Well, my presence here indicates that you are not
as smart as you think you are."
I am taken aback. God has made a special visit just to belittle me?
I regain my composure and decide to go on the offensive. "Tell me
then, if indeed you are God, how many of my eleven truths are
correct?" I project, as confidently as I can.
God chuckles and shakes his head in wonder at the question. "All
things considered, you did fairly well," he concedes. "You got
seven right and four wrong."
"Which ones are wrong?" I press him.
God looks at me blankly, pauses for a moment, and disappears without
answering.
-end-
Copyright (c)1993 by William Luby