Sum. David Eagleman
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might have been an immune system response. Or she might have been scratching an itch, or sneezing, or getting a biopsy.
“So we discovered that we can communicate with her, but we cannot communicate meaningfully. We are of insufficient size. What can we say to her? What question could we ask? How could she communicate an answer back to us? Perhaps that was her attempt to answer. What could you ask her to do that would have relevance to your life? And if she told you what was of importance to her, could you understand her answer? Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed one of your Shakespearean plays to a bacterium? Of course not. Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless. And that is why we are now hunkered down silently on the surface of this noiseless planet, whispering through a slow orbit, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.”
When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels.
After some questioning, you discover that God’s favorite book is Shelley’s Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in His mighty hands, alternately reading the book and staring reflectively into the night sky.
Like Victor Frankenstein, God considers Himself a medical doctor, a biologist without parallel, and He has a deep, painful relationship with any story about the creation of life. He has much to say about bringing animation to the unanimated. Very few of His creatures had thought deeply about the challenges of creation, and it relieved Him a little of the loneliness of His position when Mary wrote her book.
The first time He read Frankenstein, He criticized it the whole way through for its oversimplification of the processes involved. But when He reached the end He was won over. For the first time, someone understood Him. That’s when He called for her and put her on a throne.
To understand His outpouring of feeling, you must understand the trajectory of God’s medical career. God discovered the principles of self-organization by experimenting with yeast and bacteria. He reveled in the beauty of His inventions. Once He mastered the general principles, His inventions became increasingly sophisticated. With artistic flair He sewed together the astounding platypus, the compact beetle, the weighty woolly mammoth, the glistening pods of dolphins. His skills became razor-sharp and keen, and His accurate fingers fashioned—with blinding ambitious accuracy—all the animals at the limits of His vast imagination.
But then, unwittingly, He crossed His Rubicon. He created Man: His most prized possession, His treasure, pride, showpiece, and obsession.
Unlike the other animals, who experienced each day like the one before, Man cared, sought, yearned, erred, coveted, and ached—just like God Himself.
He marveled as Man picked through the ground and formed tools. The invention of musical instruments reached God’s ears like a symphony. He watched with awe as men gathered up, erected cities, built walls. He felt His joy turn to trepidation as they began to scrap and brawl. It didn’t take long before they were invading. Wars waged as He tried to talk sense to those who might listen.
He quickly discovered He had less control than He thought. There were simply too many of them. He tried to make good things come to good people, and bad to bad, but He didn’t have the technology to implement it. The bloodshed mounted and was carried forward by the Assyrians and Babylonians; the Greco-Macedonians assailed their neighbors; the Romans began their onslaught until the sieges of Barbarians and Goths. Byzantium rose and fell in blood; the Chinese baited and pounced; Europeans flung themselves at each other. The bright colors of His ground were darkening with Man’s blood, and there was precious little He could do to stop it.
And all throughout, the voices of Man reached Him with pleas for help, entreaties for aid against one another. He plugged His ears and howled against the cries of pillaged villages, the prayers of exsanguinating soldiers, the supplications from Auschwitz.
This is why He now locks Himself in His room, and at night sneaks out onto the roof with Frankenstein, reading again and again how Dr. Victor Frankenstein is taunted by his merciless monster across the Arctic ice. And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
Something dawned on you when you heard the children’s song: Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. You began to suspect that you were, perhaps, a butterfly dreaming it was a human, or, worse yet, a brain in a jar experiencing sights and sounds and smells and tastes—all of them but dreamstuff. And so you waited for death in order to wake up, in order to find out whether you were strapped with spotted wings or surrounded by a glass jar.
But it turns out you missed the mark. It is not life that is a dream; it is death that is a dream.
Stranger still, it is not your dream; it is someone else’s.
You now recall that your dreams always had background characters: the crowds in the restaurant, the knots of people in the malls and schoolyards, the other drivers on the road and the jaywalking pedestrians.
Those actors don’t come from nowhere. We stand in the background, playing our parts, allowing the experience to feel real for the dreamer. Sometimes we listen and pay attention to the plot of the dream. More often we talk among ourselves and wait for our shift to end.
This is not a job choice but indenture: you owe the same number of hours of service as you spent dreaming during your lifetime. No one is very pleased about this work except for some former thespians among us. Mostly we give them the interactive roles every night; we’re happy to sit in the background. If we’re lucky enough that the dreamer casts us in a restaurant, we get a free meal out of it. On less fortunate nights, we’re cast as masqueraders at a terrifying party, or as sufferers in deep circles of Hell, or as co-workers who have to point and laugh when the star walks in without clothes.
For those in the interactive roles, lines of dialogue are flashed on a screen behind the dreamer, to be delivered as convincingly as possible. Most of us give poor performances; we’re not trained actors and have little incentive. Fortunately, the dreamers seem to believe whatever we deliver. Even if we don’t look like the characters in question, the dreamers are convinced that we are who they think we are, and are only mildly confused even when we cast different genders in the roles.
Once, a long time ago, the dream casts went on strike, and for three days everyone on Earth dreamt of wandering empty homes and threading through deserted streets. Interpreting this as a grim omen, several people jumped to their deaths. When they showed up as new inductees in the dream cast, their piteous stories brought forth tears of sympathy from the others, who abandoned the strike immediately.
Perhaps it doesn’t seem to you as if the afterlife is much of a punishment. But I haven’t told you the worst part.
In the mornings, when we’re done with our nighttime haunts in other people’s skulls, we fall into restless slumbers of our own. And who do you think populates our dreams? Those who have finished their time here and pass from this world. We forever live in the dreams of the next generation.
The man to your left hypothesizes that everything is cyclical and that we’ll eventually be back on Earth. This appears to be a time-sharing plan devised by some efficient deity; in this way we’re not all populating the Earth at the same time.
What’s the problem with this? There is a woman in my dreams whom I see every night, but I can never catch up with her, passing as we do into our next worlds.