Loose threads, false steps and slips of the tongue.

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if your experience is a dream, a memory or a lie.

Like when you wake up from a nightmare feeling convinced that the event really happened to you.

Or when you’ve fantasized about a person so many times, you actually have to stop and ask yourself, wait, did we really meet up in that hotel room, or was it just my imagination?

What about when you’re recounting your favorite childhood memory and it suddenly dawns on you that it was only a recurring dream and not a real story?

Then there’s my personal favorite, telling the same lie so many times, you literally forget what happened to you in the first place.

It’s quite the disorienting, paranoid feeling. You start to wonder if reality is just an elaborate illusion.

Yikes. An indistinguishable boundary between fact and fiction? That’s scary stuff.

Nolan’s movies expertly address this concern. Dicaprio’s character, at the end of perhaps the finest film on dreams ever made, realizes that he’s living in his own subjective reality. But once he’s reunited with his children, he doesn’t really care anymore if it’s a dream, a memory or a lie.

Because at that point, all levels of reality are valid. He accepts the world placed in front of him, rather than questioning or challenging it. He accepts his emotional catharsis at face value and doesn’t care whether it’s based on fact or fiction.

It sounds like a soothing place to be, but the journey to getting there cannot be an easy one. There are some mighty big questions to answer.

*What if fantasies expressed truths about ourselves that were impossible to arrive at in our real lives?

*What if sleep was just a memory consolidation process in which experiences from the day were reorganized into a more efficient form?

*What if the fiction we told ourselves overwrote our reality, resulting in the time continuum being disrupted, creating this new temporally valanced sequence, resulting in an alternative reality?

There is simply no way anybody can know for sure.

Hell, each one of us could be bringing alternate timelines into existence with every new memory we create, lie we tell, or dream we have.

Maybe the best we can hope for is to sit back and enjoy what’s on the screen.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What is one experience that feels like an alternate reality to you, but seems like the truth to everyone else?