Everyone remembers waking up. It’s something that we always think about. We remember struggling up through the layers of water, or just holding our breath and floating up to the sunlight until we wake up in the same bed we went to sleep in.

No one ever remembers going to sleep. You remember drifting, things get a little confusing, sure, but what about the actual point where you can honestly say you are awake here, and you are asleep here? There’s a line, of course, and it seperates reality with dreams. Actually, no, there is no line. You can’t remember any line. Do you know why you can’t remember that line? Do you know why you can’t remember going to sleep? Because you’ve always been asleep.

It’s not so much that you never go to sleep, it’s that you never wake up. You never wake up because you started off asleep. You don’t think you’re asleep because you’re too concerned with the dream you’re having.

So why is the dream you “wake up” to the same as the one you were just having? It’s always like that. For a minute, let’s forget everything I just said about you never waking up. Let’s say that you go to sleep and you wake up, just the same as you’ve always thought you did. You go to sleep, you’re unconscious, so on and so forth, and you have a dream. You have a dream and it’s so much like the real world you just left that you can’t tell the difference. Then you wake up. But you don’t really wake up, you just dream you wake up. But you’re still dreaming. You’re still dreaming, and the dream that you just had is the exact same thing that you’re dreaming now. It’s the same world. It’s the same life. You don’t repeat what you just dreamed, you just think of it as a dream. It seems familiar because all dreams seem familiar. Dreams are familiar because they’re based off reality, right? So you shrug it off and you keep dreaming. Then you wake up for real, roll over, the person you’re in bed with wakes up too, and you say, “Wow, that was a really crazy dream. It was one of those dreams where you dream you wake up, but you’re still dreaming?”

It’s exactly like that. I’m dreaming now, you’re dreaming now, everyone right now everywhere in the world is dreaming all of this right now.

That doesn’t explain all the detail in the world, though. You know that you personally can’t dream up that much detail, so this has to be real, right? Wrong. Everyone’s dream is colliding with everyone else’s dream. That’s where the detail comes from in the things you know nothing about. Everything is being filled in by someone else.

So we’ve established that no one ever wakes up, we just keep waking up in the same dream that’s based off itself. However, that doesn’t explain all the complicated detail of memory. In dreams we don’t posses memory. Things are as they are, and that’s really all you need for dreams. You don’t need a history.

But you and I, right now, we have a history. We have memories. We have memories so numerous and complicated all the way back to our childhood. What explains that is the dreams of other people. There were always other people around when we were born, so we were effectively born into their collective dream. Not only that, but they were also born into the collective dream as well, which was sustained by people who were also born into the collective dream. So we’re all dreaming and supporting each other’s dreams with our own dreams.

Now. The question you’re going to ask next is, what happens when you wake up? Of course, by “wake up”, you mean for real, and not just into another dream.

This, of course, has caused me years of existential angst. What if there is nothing when you wake up to the real reality? Who’s to say that waking up to the real reality will be any different than waking up to the dream reality? Where are we now, exactly? Where is all this, because it needs to be somewhere? If all this is a collective dream, who is doing the dreaming? Do our real selves exist outside the dream or are we part of the dream? If we’re born into this collective dream, who’s to say that there is anything else? If this is all a dream, is everything actually meaningless? What if it isn’t meaningless? If the true measure of who we are nonphysical, then why are we so hung up on the idea that things can only exist if they have physical form? What makes us us? What if there is no way to wake up to the real reality? What would be the point? How can we leave a system that we were born into and have existed in our entire lives, which forms the basis of our existence?

I’ve been through it all. I’ve worked it all out, too. All the questions, all the answers to the questions, all the questions that those answers spawned, everything. It’s all taken care of.

Because…

I found it. I found the way to wake up to the real reality. I don’t know how I found it, but it’s there. It’s actually just one word. I can’t tell you what it is, because once you know it, it takes form inside your head, and once it takes form, that’s as good as saying it, and saying it is what wakes you up for real. I know it, but the only reason I’m still here is that I’m not thinking about it. I’m not thinking about the way it looks or the way it sounds or how to pronounce it, because the second I think about that, I’m out of here. It’s actually quite difficult because anyone knows it’s the most difficult thing in the world to not think about something you know.

The problem is, I don’t want to be the only one to go. So I’m going to take a chance. I’m going to tell you what the word is, and once I do – and I’m just guessing here – is that we’ll both go, because we’ll both know the word at the exact same moment, and that should be enough to wake us both up.

He loosened his tie and reached into the bag of sunflower seeds, then popped a dozen or so into his mouth and started working them around. He looked down at the still-growing crowd twelve stories below, then up at the empty blue sky.

“Tell me.”

He picked up the bag of sunflower seeds and held it up to me without turning to look. “Are you sure?”

I nodded, cracking a single seed between my teeth, prying open the shell, and picking out the kernel inside.

He laughed, then took off his watch and let it drop. “The word is