The receptionist at the insurance company on the floor below your office debunks social Darwinism, orbital mechanics and guilt. Your inbox contains 7,204 copies of a haiku cycle asserting that competitiveness is jealousy traveling through time in reverse, and three emails pointing out how much more money you'd be making if you accepted credit cards. And even though you're dreaming, you realize that this point is redundant, that the people in the dream don't need to tell you that they're telling you things, because by telling you things they're already showing you that they're telling you things. And then you wake up, and expect your alarm clock to be able to integrate, and the rims of lunch-change quarters to have inscribed koans. Sadly, the awake world's version of the creator's monologue has more of a millionth-monkey quality, tantalizing shreds of cogency trailing off into gibberish just when they start to look interesting.
Dreams facilitate the expedient detachment of effect from cause.
But if you're bad at dreaming, there's always music. The more records I buy, the more of the explanation I find, which is why people who buy fewer records than they can afford mystify me. In their version of the dream, somebody tells them the first half of the first sentence of the nature of being, and they shrug and spend the rest of the night dreaming of being asleep again. Charlie eats one ticketless Wonka bar and then gives up and becomes a stevedore's apprentice. A drab life is a willful pathology.