Last month I overdid it with a bottle of scotch, drank the whole thing in an evening. It was a regretful experience, and it caused me to pull back from drinking altogether. Since then, my dreams have been like visions, full of ideas and messages.

Recently I dreamt that this earthly experience is a simulation. Something showed me the programming and explained that it was once considered revolutionary programming because each byte of code contains the entirety of the code itself. This, the source explained, accounts for why we can never pin down anything essential in life. This is why all our intuitions buckle and crumble right when we’re on the cusp of backing them with what we think will become irrefutable concepts or laws. This is the program coming face to face with its own design.

When we search for purpose in our hearts, we are the numeral 1 staring into the infinite pool of the 0. When we gaze at the stars, telescope into some nebular dust, and believe we see suns and worlds growing, we’re in fact peering up our own assholes and into the backs of our retinas. We’re watching ourselves watch ourselves watch ourselves watch. Hence the kaleidoscoping stardust, the melting dawns, the breakdown between macro and micro, the elusiveness of absolutes. Cyclicality. Black holes. Umbilical cords. Inverted mountaintops on ocean floors.

I suppose that saying we’re in a simulation isn’t new or interesting. There was The Matrix. And Baudrillard.

When people say that God has put us on earth to experience mortality, they might as well say (and maybe they mean to say) that we’re in a simulation.

THIS IS A TEST. THIS IS ONLY A TEST.

Maybe my dream was one of semantics.

It isn’t new also to say that the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part. Sages have been saying this for millennia. “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

But the dreams have given me material—fodder to mold, cud to chew—and I don’t read too much into them. There wasn’t, to be more accurate, a “something” that showed me anything. Nothing was explained. Rather, all was understood, felt, went foggy when I woke up.