A while ago me and my brothers played this great old Super NES game called Breath of Fire II. I’m sorry, but this post is going to spoil one of the most interesting story elements in the game because that’s I want to talk about. Feel free to go beat the game and then come back later. It’s been a while since I played it so forgive me if some of the details are a little off.
Anyway, right at the beginning of the game, you’re playing as a boy, and you can walk around and talk to your dad and your sister, and other people in town. After you start exploring a little you come across a cave, and inside the cave is a horrible monster that somehow recognizes you as some “chosen one”. You don’t understand what he means, but he seems almost afraid of you. For all you know you’re just a normal boy.
He attacks you, but you are somehow protected and you manage to get out of the cave and back to your village. Then you go to talk to your father again, but somehow he doesn’t recognize you! In fact, all the people you know in town are acting like you are a homeless child that they’ve never seen before.
Your father offers to let you to stay in the church where there is another homeless boy staying the night. You take the offer, thinking this must be a strange dream, but there’s nothing you can do to wake up.
The next morning, having nothing else to do, you decide to leave town with the other boy, who is far more street-wise than you are, because apparently you don’t have a home here…
The game skips ahead years later where you are now best friends with the homeless boy you met years ago in the church. Looking back you are wondering: which of your experiences was the dream?
Did you ever actually have a childhood in that town? Are you still somehow still dreaming now? Either way, life goes on and wondering doesn’t get you anywhere.
Obviously it’s just a game, but I found this experience kind of incredible. For those moments when you are walking around town and nobody knows who you are, you are convinced you’re dreaming. That monster in the cave must have been a part of some strange nightmare and you haven’t woken up yet.
I can imagine being that boy, going for days and still wondering whether or not there’s any way to wake up from the nightmare. But as the days turn into months and years, you have to conclude that you aren’t dreaming. It must be your childhood that was the dream. What else is the explanation? Life goes on.
This highlighted for me how important our experiences are in defining what we think reality actually is. I’m a firm believer that there is only one reality that is true, but at the same time, we are stuck trying to determine what that reality is from our own experiences.
Whatever makes the most sense to us, given everything we experience in life, is what we will believe. If you were the child in Breath of Fire, after running into that monster, for the first little while you might be convinced that everything that’s happening now is just some freakish dream, but if you were 8 years old when that happened, and then you spend the next 10 years of your life living away from your old home because nobody knows who you are, it very much seems that those first 8 years are the ones that made no sense.
In fact we can tend to adapt our current beliefs far quicker than they may have taken to form. You might not last 2 weeks before you start to wonder if this is just your life now and everything before must have been wrong somehow.
Far later in the game, after accumulating more friends and fighting many different monsters to save the world, you run into a monster that says he knows you, even though you’ve never seen him before. He tells you that he was the one who erased you from the memory of everybody in your village years ago.
It turns out that you aren’t dreaming now, and you weren’t dreaming then, either. This monster had merely erased you from memory. You didn’t realize that could even happen, but now that you know, it all makes sense. That was your father. You do have a sister. But they had forgotten you.
I think that the way this revelation changed the perspective and beliefs you had about the boys past reflects something that can happen in our lives too. Everybody has different experiences and these experience often lead them to believe different things. But there are also times when something comes to light that can change your whole perception of the world. Something you hadn’t even realized could be true.
I think this can make it easier to understand people who have such different views sometimes and maybe make it a little easier to be more respectful of people with differing opinions.
We often believe the things that we do because of the experiences that we have had, and it’s impossible for us to just give these to other people so that they can understand, too. Our experiences are personal and there are many things that can’t be understood by explanation. Some things must be experienced.
I think that’s part of the reason I tend to appreciate it when people share their experiences along with their conclusions, as opposed to just talking about their opinions. I may not agree with your opinions, but I might still learn from your experiences. Sharing experiences gives us more common ground, even if, in the end, we don’t share the same conclusion.
There’s one more aspect I want touch on; something I noticed this morning.
I was tired, and dreaming, and realizing that I needed to wake up. But again, I was tired, and waking up is hard. It was quite tempting to just lay down and keep on dreaming instead of waking up to the day. Waking up was a choice I had to make, and it was harder to wake up than it was to stay asleep.
This is an aspect of choice that we all have in our lives. It’s often harder to “wake up” than it is to stay asleep, and this allegorical choice we make of whether to dream or to wake affects our experiences. Those experiences, in turn, go on to affect our beliefs about reality.
We can choose to deny ourselves experiences that will change our beliefs because we are afraid or because it is more difficult to wake up than it is to stay asleep. The beliefs that we come to while we choose to dream may be genuine, but they may not be based on reality. We have a responsibility to ourselves to “wake up” if we are dreaming, or we will face the untold consequences of not seeing the world for what it is.
The crazy thing about dreams is that no matter how insane they get, we often don’t even realize how senseless they were until we wake up and think back on them. As soon as we begin our day, the beliefs we may have had in the dream fade quickly because they aren’t matching the experiences of our waking life.
Take from this what you will. It’s merely some of my thoughts on my own experiences. The ideas had been running around in my head for the last week, so I figured I’d write them down while I still had them.