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,

and then starts running at me

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 always carry this.

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

really funny stuff in it.

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.

And where most consider their

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

the same thing about life?

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,

helping people become lucid

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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