Against Somnambulism

People have dreams. Sometimes other people confuse dreams and somnambulism. That makes others confused about the dreams they have. Friends tell each other about their dreams. They discuss them and such discussions make them wonder. Some of the dreams discussed include those that are thematically related to the everyday. Thus, the topics of discussions tend to consider the questions of eating, walking, and sleeping. When these are talked about, at times, they acquire additional meanings. As the flow of the conversation is caring the interlocutors’ thoughts, they marvel at the possibilities for modifying mutable notions.

People sometimes dream of being philosophers. Sometimes they dream of being writers. They talk about such dreams. In conversations about the dreams of philosophers and writers, they indulge in an adventure  of imagining notions being nothing but. As such, they seem to gain resilience that enables oscillations of unprecedented proportions. Within such exercises in flexibility of the boundaries of meaning, notions stretch to the point of somnambulist ludicrosity.

An instance of such sheer confusion of meanings is taking brains for shit. The other is meditating upon a possibility of poetry being transformed into something else. Also, the word “notion” tends to be imagined as a concept infinitely welcoming just about any content. A dream about it features an unrivaled thinker who cheated on a philosophy exam for want of de-notionalizing the notion of notion. In order to achieve his goal, he devised a theory in the form of a poem. The poem is of the approximately following content:

I take the notion as a de-notion /

It makes me gesprach volare et sonore /

de-NOT-ion is and is not a notion /

because ich sprache alszo /

If anti-de-notion proves the opposite to be right /

To fuck with everything else /

By virtue of it being a potent candidate /

Pour being relatable to a plethora of myriad multiply valent concepts /

Each of them forming zillions of bonds with similarly modifiable notional potentialities of a cow.

The writer, supervising  the exam, called the thinker’s attention by saying:”Mr. so & so, will you, please, kindly come to your senses!” The cheater froze in astonishment. He was kindly called upon to empty his pockets just to make sure no materials or aids were going to be used. When asked why a piece of paper in a person’s pocket on a sunny day during an idle walk is not the same as the same thing in the pocket of the examiner, the supervisor answered: “Because in the former case the paper can be put either in the front, back, inner, outer, lower, or upper pocket. In the latter, it can, too.” The thinker insisted that it meant applying a double standard to the same situations. The writer kindly answered that there was substantial insufficiency of differentiation in the notional apparatus of the thinker. In support of that, he added: “Before you told me what you thought, you didn’t think about your thought as a thought, so you could then utter it as a question proper.”

The thinker thought and thought: ”But I’m not hiding anything. I almost said it could meant I could hide anything, but then I realized that it would make NO sense. “  “Precisely,” replied the writer, “It could be because I cannot find the aids you are going to use. Alternatively, it means that you need no such aids. In either case, you will succeed and become a famous rhetorician of a concept. Or not. Depends how you look at it. Depending on how it is looked at, however, you will either be remembered as a revolutionary or you will not.

A sense of humor is not an issue. Neither is literary literacy. Likewise, undoubtful are limitless possibilities of interpretative realities. Here and now, exclusive of superficial instantaneity, constitutes the focus of the debate. Its core is assuming the role that renders the discussion truly futile.