When I was a teenager, I used to read voraciously about the supernatural. So many people were experiencing bizarre phenomena I was convinced a spiritual world had to exist.
It didn't occur to me that the world was full of liars. I didn't even piece it all together when I turned on the TV and saw an endless stream of anonymous actors insist that a giant sack of sand was the secret to weight loss, or that it was ridiculously simple to make salsa with the patented Razor Blade On A Stick.
After years of feeling betrayed, I've reached the point where I begrudgingly applaud these liars. Some industrious entrepreneur took the boring story of a drunk fat guy falling into a fire and invented spontaneous combustion. Some charlatan created a whole new publishing industry by inventing astral projection. "You can mentally travel anywhere in the world!" he crowed, pointing to his books for instruction. I blame my own stupidity for not guessing that this was crap, since the only proof he offered was a picture of him sitting cross-legged in his living room captioned, "Look! In my mind I'm floating over India. Wow -- the Taj Mahal is really big!"
And then there's lucid dreaming. That's where you learn to control your dreams so you can do whatever you want while you're asleep. You could fly. You could rule the world. You could find a $5 sandwich in New York. I was wasting my time chasing giant chickens in a motorized burrito.
Naturally I was hooked. I bought the book and devoured it. At its heart was a simple secret: you train yourself to recognize odd behavior, and then you say to yourself, "Gosh, this is all so weird it just has to be a dream!" Armed with this all-powerful awareness, now you can do anything you want.
News flash: nobody gets past the first part.
See, you can't really train yourself to say, "Gosh, this is all so weird it just has to be a dream." If something weird happens, you automatically say it. If you're walking down the street and you see a duck holding a machine gun, you'll realize something's up. You'll question reality when a ninja Grace Kelly pelts you with tangerines.
In dreams, though, you don't. And you can't force yourself to.
Last night I dreamt I saw a dog that was shaped like a stack of donuts. It was about twelve donuts long, and you could see all the way through it to the cement it was standing on. I went to pet it, but I couldn't decide which end was its face. I acted like this was nothing out of the ordinary, like it was yet another yappy Maltese.
In real life, red flags would have been raised. I wouldn't have thought, "That's a cute little dog!" but instead something like, "HOLY SHIT! IS THAT A YAPPY STACK OF DONUTS ON A LEASH?" After I finished freaking out, I probably would have thought, "That can't be a dog. Where the fuck are its internal organs? And where the fuck is its face?"
Then I'd have realized it's a dream, and that's when horny George Clooney would appear.
It's with some sadness that I let go of these so-called alternate realities with all their vast possibilities. I'll never see Tokyo from the comfort of my living room. I'll never go to a movie and see a fellow patron burst into flame. I'll never see a ghost, never get picked up by a UFO, never run into Bigfoot. But I'm smart enough to deal with cold, hard reality, and its smaller possibilities.
Fingers crossed this bag of sand will burn away my love handles and my next batch of salsa won't look like a zombie flattened by a bus.
