Chris cLArkE

When does a person's life change? Socrates: When he knows that he does not know Senka: When he knows the limits of his ability Dostoevsky: When he suffers alone Nietzsche: When he transcends himself Sartre: When he believes in his freedom Frankl Victor: When he finds meaning in his life Schopenhauer: When he exceeds his will Cioran: When he dies Spinoza: We change according to the requirements of necessity and not in response to our freedom Milan Kundera: We change when we realize that this world is beyond repair Simon de Beauvoir: When a person vomits his heart Carl Jung: When we understand ourselves and see the dark side of it and the seeds of evil.

Alan Watts poses a question that stops you in your tracks: "Suppose you are God, suppose you have all time, all eternity, and all power at your disposal. You were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night, what would you do?" He walks through what would happen, step by step. At first, you'd fulfil every wish imaginable. "You would have all the pleasures you could imagine: the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys. You could listen to music such as no mortal has heard and see landscapes beyond our wildest dreams." You'd spend night after night in paradise. Maybe a whole month of nights. But then something would shift. Perfection would get boring. "You'd begin to think, 'Well, I've seen quite a bit. Let's spice it up. Let's have a little adventure.'" So you'd introduce danger. You'd rescue princesses from dragons, engage in battles, become a hero. And as time went on, you'd push further and further. Then comes the real turning point. Watts explains: "At some point in the game, you would say, 'Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don't know that I'm dreaming,' so that you would take the experience of the dream for complete reality." You'd forget you were God entirely. You'd dream yourself into poverty, disease, agony not out of cruelty, but for the contrast. For the moment you wake up and realise none of it was real. "And you would say, 'Wow man, that was a gas.'" Then Watts delivers the punchline: "How do you know that that's not what you're doing already? You sitting there with all your problems, with all your whole complicated life situation it may just be the very dream you decided to get into." And his final line reframes everything: "If you like it, crazy; if you don't like it, what fun it'll be when you wake up." It's a perspective that doesn't dismiss suffering. It recontextualises it. What if the struggles, the uncertainty, the messiness of life aren't things happening to you, but experiences you chose for yourself? What would change about how you approach today if you believed you'd chosen this exact life on purpose?

A Meg Ryan & Nora Ephron double bill in 35mm! WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... (1989) & SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (1993) screen December 30th & 31st.