Start the timer. Go go go. 

This is getting harder. Why? What's changing? External, internal? Some kind of mid-ternal that I'm not aware of? Slowly realizing something. It is bad when one thing becomes two. I used to have a list of quotes from the film "Ghost Dog" posted up by my work desk. It's not posted up anymore, but it's still around.

I remember watching anime and being annoyed by how often characters ask themselves "Is this a dream?" I wonder know if it's a translation thing; the American TV show equivalent of "I can't believe (blank) just happened!" which is uttered at the beginning of half the scenes to create a connection to the previous one. Man, I hate that phrase. So much so that I refuse to utter it myself now. No one will ever accuse me of using hackneyed shorthand to spur an audience's recall of a previous scene. 

I am nobody's plot device, dammit. 

Are there people who constantly wonder if they are dreaming or awake? If so, what spurs this? Is it a kind of denial at events that they feel are happening to them that they have not directly caused? As in, they don't see the causal links to the situation? It feels like a failure of imagination. Do these people dream and just stand around marveling at all the crazy happenings, never engaging? Generally, when I dream, there are stakes. There are things I want, goals I want to accomplish, things I don't want to happen, and I experience them as such. I can't say I'm "consciously" engaging, of course, because in a dream I seem to just know things. And there's the idea that a dream is a sort of memory of a jumble of abstract thoughts and our waking brain is interpreting them when we wake, basically telling ourselves a story.

Either way, I consider myself mentally prepared to deal with any situations that might be a dream or might be real. Which means I could very well end up as a plot device. Dang it.