This Must be a Dream

This morning as I stood at the elevators on my way up to my office, I noticed two women wearing black pants and shirts in the exact same shade of aqua. I’m used to the phenomenon of several people dressing in the same color or combination of colors on the same day in the office, but this was the first time I had experienced it at the elevators before even getting to the office.

This made me think of a conversation my sister and I had last weekend. I told her that sometimes I think the world is just a figment of my imagination like in The Matrix. She replied, “If this is all in your head, can you make me thinner?”

What do people dressing alike have to do with The Matrix, you might ask. In my warped and slightly deranged mind, I wondered this morning if the people at the elevators and in my office who happen to dress in the same colors on the same day could possibly be the result of a lack of imagination on my part in my self-created and internally imagined world?

Exactly what is consciousness anyway? How many times have you been asleep and dreaming and thought, “I KNOW this isn’t a dream,” but it was a dream? How many times have you been awake and thought, “I must be dreaming,” but you weren't? If a person is hypnotized, they can be made to think they have pain when they don’t or that they have no pain when they do or that they’re a chicken. The hypnotic state can be so real to a hypnotized person that the experience can leave actual physical evidence on their bodies.

There are also those times when I feel I’m the center of my own little universe. Often, when I think, “It would be great if someone would invent…,” two nights later, I'll see the item being advertised on late night television. I wanted a place to go similar to New Orleans but closer to home and I’ll be damned if someone didn’t build Crockett Street. I constantly complained about talkative disk jockeys and the fact that they talk about everything except the music and, BAM, someone came up with satellite radio.

For all I know, I could be in a coma right now from some surgery I had when I was eight years old and this has all been one big coma-related, drug-induced hallucination. At least that would explain the Sixties...and Michael Jackson.