What makes us sure that our waking life is the real life, and not our dreams, when some people's dreams are as vivid as waking life? Well, in our dreams we are somewhere different each night, and often are a different person in a completely different type of situation. Whereas in waking, each day continues where the latter left off. Thus consistency defines reality. This is the first example that came to mind, but there are others. I used to have a lot of friends, that I felt really close with, in 8th grade...and recently I saw a few of them again at a sleepover, and they don't feel close at all anymore...they seem like regular annoying teenage girls, not the special, unique people I once saw them as. I am now wondering if my 8th grade experience really could have been so magical when now every trace of it is gone. It was transitory, thus was it, by necessity, never there at all? It's like when people say that love isn't true love if it doesn't last forever. If a hypothetical event happens, and afterwards no one remembers it, and it left no evidence of it's occurrence, did it really happen? There is a philosophy (called infinite return) that says that, if something happens only once, it did not really happen (and thus everything is actually happening over and over again).
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