The Day You Wake Up

You are sitting in a coffee shop; staring out the window wondering about what the fate of yourself and humanity will be.

The foregoing is an excerpt from my December 2022 letter.

You are sitting in a coffee shop; staring out the window wondering about what the fate of yourself and humanity will be.

You suddenly are struck with a chilling thought.

You really consider, if only for a moment, that life is in fact a dream;

And like any dream it is of your own creation.

But you are trapped in it: you cannot escape and you cannot forcefully wakeup.

This terrifies you.

But you look around and think if this is a dream,
All the figures you see are just projections of your inner world,
And the internal dynamics of your psychology.

That is, every 'other' person is an image,
Which symbolically captures something in you,
But fundamentally is you.

As if it weren't strange enough,
Uniquely, and to your amusement you see:
Every “other” person has their own autonomous personality,
Their own preoccupation with problems of living,
Their own hue of temperament,
And their own closely held “inner world” too.

However, at base,
As a dream you would have on any other evening,
They are all projections of you.

But they don't see it.
They don't know it yet.
They may never know it.

One hundred thousand shades of "you".