 
 The Eleven Truths of LifeBy William Luby
 

    I don't remember my first swimming race aside from a vague
    recollection that it happened at camp and I did not win.  Not
    winning didn't concern me at the time, because I was only in second
    grade and most of the other swimmers were older and more
    experienced.  I did win my next race though, and could not be beaten
    thereafter, even though the competition got stronger.  In spite of
    my success, my swimming was far from perfect and I soon became
    haunted by my inability to maintain a straight line while racing.
    No matter how hard I concentrated, each time I raced I would swim in
    an arc to the right.  Because there were no lane markers at camp, I
    was not disqualified, but I was forcing myself to swim a longer
    distance than the others.
    
    I became obsessed by this shortcoming and soon began to have
    recurring dreams in which I was swimming in an important race and
    could not maintain a straight line.  One night, while I was making
    one of these inevitable turns, I suddenly realized that I was
    turning to the left and not to the right.  The peculiar part was
    that this revelation hit me while I was still in a dream state.  I
    felt a chill shoot down my spine as soon as I understood that I had
    become both an active participant and a passive observer in the same
    dream.
    
    My dreams continued and so did my dual presence in these dreams.
    Stranger yet, I began to understand that the swimmer had no
    consciousness and the observer had no body in the context of my
    dream.  They did not appear to be two separate parts of one person,
    but rather incomplete portions of two different people.  With each
    passing dream, the observer became increasingly comfortable in his
    surroundings, to the point where he could leave mental notes that I
    would be sure to recall when I woke up.  Before long, the observer
    made an amazing discovery: he was able to determine that the swimmer
    was destined to turn in the direction I was facing while I was
    asleep.  How he did this I do not know.  I didn't believe him at
    first, but the evidence bore him out.  If I slept on my left side
    (facing to the right), which was usually the most comfortable, I
    would inevitably turn to the right while swimming in my dream.  If I
    slept on my right side, I turned to the left.  As an experiment, I
    slept on my back one night and swam perfectly straight in the dream.
    Somehow, I was able to have consciousness in the dream world and in
    the waking world at the same time, identifying causes in one world
    and effects in the other.
    
    It didn't take long before the observer in my dream became more
    confident of his abilities and graduated from an observer to a
    director, where he could will the action in the dream.  In fact, by
    merely thinking something, he made it happen and the dreams became
    projections of his thoughts.  This was exciting at first, but
    eventually took all the suspense out of my dreams.  The director
    embodied all my hopes and fears, so that if I did not want something
    to happen in my dreams, it did not.  Conversely, anything I wished
    for came true.  On top of this, I found that I was also blessed with
    an ability to remember almost every dream I had, or at least enough
    bits and pieces to reconstruct the main themes.
    
    At some point in my youth, I lost interest in swimming and in
    controlling my dreams and even got to the point where I stopped
    remembering my dreams.  With the onset of my teenage years, reality
    became more important and I came to view dreams as merely reruns of
    all my hopes and fears.
    
    Nevertheless, when I had an opportunity to take a college seminar on
    the interpretation of dreams I jumped at the chance, hoping to find
    an explanation for this wonderful nocturnal world I had reigned over
    in my youth.  To my surprise, I learned that lucid dreams, in which
    the dreamer assumes a first person and third person presence, with
    the third person incarnation willing the action, are not that
    uncommon.
    
    The seminar leader encouraged all of us to keep a dream journal.  I
    needed little prodding, because I wanted to recapture the magic of
    the lucid dreams I once had.  The first few weeks yielded mixed
    results, but then the lucid observer began to make occasional
    appearances, with each dream becoming more fantastic than the
    previous one.
    
    Then came the fateful night.  In a dream, I appeared as a
    pretentious philosopher approaching the age of 50, secure in the
    knowledge that I had recently written a "The Eleven Truths of Life,"
    a book that had been acclaimed throughout the world for having
    reduced the complexities of modern day life down to eleven essential
    truths.  I do not remember all eleven truths (I remembered them the
    next morning, wrote them down and mailed them to a friend, who
    eventually misplaced my letter), but I distinctly remember the first
    two:
    
    1.  There is no God.
    2.  There is no afterlife.
    
    (In fact, I remember reading these eleven truths from my book during
    the course of my dream, yet dream "experts" maintain that people
    cannot read text during a dream.)
    
    In the dream, I am glancing over the eleven truths with a smug smile
    on my face when another being materializes in front of me out of
    thin air.  I immediately know that this is God.  I am speechless.
    
    God has a gaunt face and gentle eyes.  He is dressed in a simple
    off-white robe, with dirty long blond hair and a beard, looking
    remarkably close to the images I recall from the picture books of my
    youth.  I can think of nothing appropriate to say.  After a long
    pause, God says, "Well, my presence here indicates that you are not
    as smart as you think you are."
    
    I am taken aback.  God has made a special visit just to belittle me?
    I regain my composure and decide to go on the offensive.  "Tell me
    then, if indeed you are God, how many of my eleven truths are
    correct?" I project, as confidently as I can.
    
    God chuckles and shakes his head in wonder at the question.  "All
    things considered, you did fairly well," he concedes.  "You got
    seven right and four wrong."
    
    "Which ones are wrong?" I press him.
    
    God looks at me blankly, pauses for a moment, and disappears without
    answering.
    
                                    -end-
                       Copyright (c)1993 by William Luby

