On the Outside

Life on the outside ain't what it used to be
The world's gone crazy and it ain't safe on the street
It's a drag, and I know
There's only one place to go, I'm comin' home,
I'm comin' home
- "I'm Comin' Home", by Cheeseburger

This actually is the theme for the thoroughly bizarre cartoon Superjail. Yet, for some odd reason that song remains stuck in my head, and sums it up. The world sometimes does indeed appear to have gone crazy- but then again, normal and abnormal depend greatly on perspective- it could well be that we only understand abnormal from a commonly accepted and arbitrary definition of normality. Why, then, do we have imaginations and stories, and movies, all of which can create worlds full of strange things? And sometimes, don't we all like to retreat into daydreams? They're often so much more interesting than reality, which can sometimes be a drag. The definition of insanity is the inability to distinguish one's own thoughts from concrete reality. Here's the funny thing- the brain itself cannot or does not distinguish an internal (i.e. thought or daydream) from an external one (something really happening in the world around you). So how do you know what's real and what's not? The line is somewhat blurred. Say you're walking down the road, and someone runs up, points at your feet and yells "snake!" However, the snake turns out to be a piece of rope or a stick lying on the ground. Eventually, you would figure that out. In the meantime, if you're afraid of snakes, you would probably react to it as if it were a real snake. You reacted the same- the actual reality of the snake is secondary to the fact that if it were a real snake, you would have done the same thing. However, the way to figure this out is to come up with some kind of consensus as to what's going on anyway. You can observe the world, and if your observations jibe with other people, (let's not open the can of worms from the question, how do we know the other people are outside observers and not just figments of our imagination) we can generally accept that as reality. But again, there really isn't any hard and fast way to tell if the world around you is just an elaborate daydream or not. You can imagine yourself flying, but may not be able to do it in real life- perhaps your mind doesn't believe you can fly, so you cannot fly in your daydream. Or perhaps you are just subject to your own mind- generally when we think of dreams, we can control the content. However, there are dreams you cannot control the course of, and these you either wake up from or ride out. Not that all of them are bad, there could be some fun dreams where you don't have control, too. But at any rate, the point being- this could be a dream. I could be a part of your imagination, telling you this, perhaps because your mind wants to wake up from the dream, and so it invented me, or invented these words. Or it could be that I'm dreaming this, and that I just imagined writing this, imagined posting it, and in reality no one will ever see it, as I'm actually dreaming somewhere, perhaps tucked away in a cave and not aware of it. Okay, enough weirdness for one day. Go outside- look at the sun. I'm pretty sure we all live under the same sun, all of us on the same earth. So if that's the case, let's all assume things are hunky-dory, and we're all sane. Because the alternative is just too darn depressing.