My 20 min Lifetime

It's hard for me to fathom experiencing such a 20 min lifetime as character in a novel or movie does. I don't think I have ever in my life experienced such a thing, at least not in the way that one generally thinks of it. I remember reading a piece of literature at some point within my college career, and it was about this very thing. The entire story took place in the time it took for a man to fall to his death by hanging. In the piece, whose name I don't remember unfortunately, he basically created the life he would live if the rope from which he was supposed to hang would break. Years go by, and the reader is lead to believe that the rope did in fact snap, but at the end the reader is realizes that the whole thing was a figment of the man's imagination that occurred in less than a second's time. He did in fact die, and the lifetime of experiences were in fact fictitious.

Although I will be the first to admit that I often feel like much more time has passed than really has during tests or boring lectures, it by no means the same kind of thing. That could perhaps be called the 15 minute hour. I suppose the closest that I have ever come to experiencing a "20 min lifetime" like phenomenon would have to have been in a dream. In fact, in many respects I have most likely encountered many in the form of dreams. Unfortunately, I have not been blessed with the ability to remember many of my dreams....so recounting one is rather difficult. I do not pretend to know the exact statistics, but supposedly people have numerous dreams every night. If my theory holds true, this would imply that a person experiences a number of lifetimes within a single night. Imagine the amount of lives one would experience within a lifetime here on earth. Who is to say that the life we are living now is not part of such a dream, and we will wake up in an hour or two? Everybody has experienced a dream at least once in their life that seemed so based in reality that they could swear that it had really happened. Perhaps such "dreams" are the actual moments of reality that do occur between other dreams. It is an interesting thing to think about. What we think we know, may not in fact be based on truth at all. Experiences that we are sure we have had, may have simply occurred within out imagination. This can be tied in with another theme from class....life as myth and dream. How does one know what is real and what is not? How does one know with absolute certainty that the "life" we are living now is not only a figment of our imagination? I don't have the answer to that question yet...but does it really matter anyway? This is why I am not a philosophy major and am and English major...I need not concern myself with such travesties. I enjoy whatever "reality" I may be in at a given moment, and that is enough for me.