Dental Awakening

I once wrote a devastating thirty words, which I felt obliged to preface with a trigger warning:

The following comes with a trigger warning. It may spur disorientation because you'll realize, with gnawing discomfort, that it's true; this is something you've known and forgotten tens of thousands of times. So it's a surprise that packs a powerful punch of deja vu:

Every morning, when you open your eyes, you leave behind loved ones.

Do you mourn? Do you try to get back?

No. You trudge blithely into the bathroom and pee.

The analogy is easy to dismiss because a dream is "just" a dream. But lucid dreamers will affirm that, though they impose different physical laws, dreams feel absolutely real.

A few weeks ago, I was riding in a taxi with dear old friends when the taxi began to fly. I realized, with a start, that it had to be a dream. But I had the presence of mind to look around and study the environment, and, my god, it was utterly convincing. As real as reality itself. My friends, who I'd known for decades, began to melt. And the taxi began to melt. And the world melted as I awoke. I was completely lucid through it all, and the experience rattled me so deeply I still haven't quite recovered. If the room around me right now were to melt, it would feel no more shocking.

We recall dreams as thin, insubstantial things comparing poorly to the rich lushness of the here-and-now. But that's only in the remembering. Dreams feel lush while you're in them. It's the recollection that's thin.

Still, my thirty devastating words are easy to wave off, because they reference a dreamscape—while this, I’m told, isn’t one.

But then you go to the dentist.

The transparent pretense of every attachment we have in this world is never more apparent than when a dentist holds a drill in your mouth and haplessly gives it a go to see whether the anesthetic was sufficient...and it isn’t.

The love of your life could be squeezing your hand, and she'd be just some broad.

You might look to God, but unless he can materialize you onto a Caribbean beach miles from the nearest dentist, that guy can totally go fuck himself, too.

You don't need to lucid dream, or extrapolate dreamy doings into earthly reality, to lift the veil. Just visit your friendly local dentist.