Lately, throughout the early morning hours, I've been experiencing fairly lucid dreams of the kind one would wish to recall during conversations in the daylight hours. Unfortunately, its nigh impossible to remember dreams after they've been drowned out by a few moments of thick reality. And besides, nobody cares much to hear others' dreams. They're just dreams: make-up-as you-go scenerios pieced together from the things that you've recently felt and seen, as well as those primitive, deep-set fears and insecurities that haunt the back of your mind. They're random nonsense in other words. Might as well walk up to a friend and say "bigadeebigadeeboo!"
Ok then. Get ready for some jigadeewigadeewoo.

I dreampt that I witnessed a man attempt suicide by jumping off a small bouldery damn, into a shallow body of water. After the jump, I was confident he had fatally injured himself. To my surprise, and to the relief of his family and friends, he not only survived, but walked to the top of the damn completely unscathed, looking healthier than ever. I remember this was an emotional moment.

Feeling elated, I turned to the man and told him how precious life is. I said that we are the fiery ends, the sparks, of a vast, timeless, random universe. I asked him to imagine a large room full of millions of tiny bouncy balls exploding outward from the center of the room. I described the way the balls richocheted off the walls and off each other, producing areas of high and low concentration. I then said that the areas of high concentration would interact so violently that nearly every possible combination of balls would at one time exist; and that out of these most volatile places in the room, humans came to be. Humans were by far the greatest thing the room (or universe) ever produced, for the onset of our existence marked the first time the room was aware of itself.

I guessed that I felt a little like a guy on an acid trip when I woke up, which was moments after the scene I just described. It wasn't that the dream produced any new facts or theories on what it means to be human (our immergence from a purposeless/will-less vast universe is something science seems to imply). I was rather stunned because the experience made the scenerio seem very real and very possible. In short, its like I could grasp the idea, even though it involved numbers so high, and probabilities so low, they might as well represent infiniti.

For the next several minutes I layed in bed and thought about how comprehensible or incomprehensible the universe is. I tried to comprehend the age of the universe. It took a lot of concentration, but I was able to figure how many heart beats one would fire off in a 100 year life. Then, I figured how many 100 year lives one would have to live to live 1 million years (10,000). Next, I tried to compute how many lives one would need to live to live the 16 billion years the universe is thought to have existed. The numbers became too huge to hold in my head. When it came to time, and if broken down into heartbeats or seconds, the universe represented a number that was nearly incomprehensible. Yet when it came to space and matter (the atom and empty space), the universe could only be defined by numbers so high, they might as well be infiniti.

The fact that the universe is so vast that it can never be fully comprehended by us is a pretty obvious statement to me. The idea that the something so vast could produce us and everything we know seems plain to me as well. I make this point simply because I've read so many books, and have heard so many people state that its impossible to imagine life emergining out of "nothing". I dissagree. However, I'd use the word "everything". And I don't think that makes us any less special.