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Waking Life Page #5
from reaching anywhere
near their real potential?
The answer to that can be found in
another question, and that's this:
Which is the most universal
human characteristic...
fear or laziness?
What are you writing?
A novel.
What's the story?
There's no story.
It's just...
people, gestures,
moments,
bits of rapture,
fleeting emotions.
In short,
the greatest stories
ever told.
Are you in the story?
I don't think so.
But then I'm kind of reading it
and then writing it.
It was in the middle of
the desert, in the middle of nowhere,
but on the way to Vegas,
so, you know,
every once in a while
a car would pull in, get gas.
It was the last gas stop
before Vegas.
Office had the chair,
had a cash register,
and that was all the room
there was in that office.
I was asleep,
and I heard a noise.
You know,
just like in my mind.
So I got up, and I walked out,
and I stood on the curb of
where the gas station ends,
you know, the driveway there.
I'm rubbing the sand out of my eyes,
trying to see what's going on,
and way down at the very end
of the gas station...
they had tire racks.
Chains around them, you know.
And I see there's
an Econoline van down there.
And there's a guy
with his T-shirt off,
and he's packing
his Econoline van...
with all of these tires.
He's got the last two tires
in his hands,
pushes them into the thing,
and then I, of course,
I go, "Hey, you!"
This guy turns around,
he's got no shirt on,
he's sweating, he's built
like a brick shithouse,
pulls out a knife,
it's 12 inches long,
as fast as he can, going,
I'm still...
"This is wrong. "
I walked in,
stuck my hand behind the cash register
where the owner kept a. 41 revolver,
pull it out,
cocked the trigger,
and just as I turned around,
he was comin' through the door.
And I could see his eyes.
I'll never forget this guy's eyes.
And he just had bad thoughts
about me in his eyes.
And I fired a round, and it hit him.
Boom. Right in the chest.
Bang. He went... as fast as he was
coming in the door, he went out the door.
Went right up between the two pumps,
ethyl and regular.
And he must've been on drugs,
on speed or something, you know,
because he stood up...
and he still had the knife, and
the blood was just all over his chest,
and he stood up and he went like that,
just moved a little like that.
And I was pretty much in shock,
so I just held the trigger back
and fanned the hammer.
It's one of those old-time...
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!
And I blew him
out of the gas station.
And ever since then,
I hear that.
A well-armed populace
is the best defense against tyranny.
I'll drink to that.
And you know,
I haven't fired this in such a long
time, I don't even know if it'll work.
Why don't you pull the trigger
and find out?
I'm not here. Leave a message.
Hey, man. I guess you already
took off or something.
But, uh, remind me to tell you
about this dream I had last night...
'cause there's some
All right, man. Uh, I guess
I'll catch you later. Okay.
Bareback riding. Copenhagen William...
and his horse Same Deal.
...for a hat band.
Sew it into the inside of the...
I do not await the future,
anticipating salvation,
absolution,
not even enlightenment
through process.
I subscribe to the premise that this flawed
perfection is sufficient and complete...
in every single,
ineffable moment.
The Blonde Bee,
the Firefly, Praying Mantis...
...lunatic macaroni munchkin
with my googat...
...venerable tradition of sorcerers,
shamans and other visionaries...
who have developed and perfected
the art of dream travel,
the so-called
lucid dream state...
where, by consciously
controlling your dreams,
you're able
to discover things...
beyond your capacity to apprehend
in your awake state.
- Winning back-to-back...
- Tell us what Felix is doing...
A single ego is an absurdly narrow vantage
from which to view this... this experience.
individual relationship to the universe,
I contemplate
relationships...
of my various selves
to one another.
While most people
with mobility problems...
are having trouble
just getting around,
at age 92,Joy Cullison's
out seeing the world.
#Now I'm free to see the world ##
Hey, how's it going?
They say that dreams are real
only as long as they last.
Can't you say
A lot of us out there are mapping
that mind/body relationship of dreams.
We're called the oneironauts.
We're explorers of the dreamworld.
Really, it's just about the two
opposing states of consciousness...
which don't really
oppose at all.
See, in the waking world,
the neuro-system inhibits the activation
of the vividness of memories.
This makes evolutionary sense.
It'd be maladapted for the perceptual
image of a predator...
to be mistaken for the memory
of one and vice-versa.
If the memory of a predator
conjured up a perceptual image,
we'd be running off to the bathroom
every time we had a scary thought.
So you have
these serotonic neurons...
that inhibit hallucinations...
that they themselves
are inhibited during REM sleep.
This allows dreams
to appear real...
while preventing competition
from other perceptual processes.
This is why dreams
are mistaken for reality.
To the functional system of neural
activity that creates our world,
there is no difference between dreaming
a perception and an action...
and actually the waking
perception and action.
I had a friend once
who told me...
that the worst mistake
that you could make...
is to think
that you are alive...
when really you're asleep
in life's waiting room.
The trick is to combine...
your waking
rational abilities...
with the infinite
possibilities of your dreams.
'Cause if you can do that,
you can do anything.
Did you ever have a job that
you hated and worked real hard at?
A long, hard day of work. Finally you get
to go home, get in bed, close your eyes.
And immediately
you wake up and realize...
that the whole day at work
had been a dream.
It's bad enough that you sell your
waking life for... for minimum wage,
but now they get
your dreams for free.
Hey, man,
what are you doing here?
I fancy myself the social lubricator
of the dreamworld,
a little easier.
Cut out all that fear and anxiety
stuff and just rock and roll.
By becoming lucid, you mean just knowing
that you're dreaming, right?
Yeah. And then
you can control it.
They're more realistic and less
bizarre than non-lucid dreams.
You know,
I just woke from a dream.
It wasn't like a typical dream. It seemed more
like I'd walked into an alternate universe.
Yeah, it's real.
I mean, technically,
it's a phenomenon of sleep,
but you can have
so much damn fun in your dreams.
And, of course,
everyone knows fun rules.
- Yeah.
- So what was going on in your dream?
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"Waking Life" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 15 Aug. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/waking_life_22998>.
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