This is a little window into the wild flights of fancy that is my imagination.
I was taking a bath. A nice soothing soak to melt the stress away. Then my mind starts to wander, and I start thinking of illusions. Not magic illusions, but illusions that occur everyday in reality. There’s the illusion of happiness, of rainbows, of faith, of sight — not knowing whether your senses are telling you the truth, not knowing whether to trust your own instincts, and so forth.
Then I started thinking maybe everything in life is an illusion. Maybe even this bath tub that I was sitting in right then was an illusion. That’s when the holodeck metaphor entered my head. I began to think of myself as not really being in the tub; that the bathroom was just a holodeck program — the tub wasn’t real, neither was the water, the sink, the bottles of shampoo, etc. It was all a program. The only thing that was indeed real was me, sitting in a bathtub simulation.
Then old Star Trek episodes started filtering through my brain, and I was replaying scenes of when Moriarty took over the Enterprise somehow because of a glitch in the holodeck program (not entirely sure, since I’m not a Trekkie and I can’t remember all the details). An example of an illusion that tricks the mind so well, that you believe it is indeed real, and it begins to slowly take over your life. Of course, once that thought entered my head, I started thinking of the Matrix and the variations thereof. By then I was getting kinda weirded out, quickly finished my bath, and got out.
Maybe I shouldn’t take baths at night any more.
In fact, you were correct but the illusion is not the solidity of the tub or the warmth of the water, rather it is the host of social and habitual constructs which have loead you to be taking that bath at that time with water provided by such and such a public corporation, the the illusory urgencies that hurried you out of the tub lest you start slowing down to question the validity of those predefined assertions. Why are fantasies like Quantum Leap, Sliders, and the ST holodeck so popular? Because they point to the inherently disassociative nature of living in a modern orderly society. But don’t worry, things will keep getting wierder. They always have!
most non-asians take showers/baths in the morning instead of at night. This way the hair doesn’t get oily during the day when you’re around others.
where did you get that from, steppen?