So What If the Sky's on Fire?

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 270 words.  The Widow cites evidence that the naughty rural guerillas have inadvertently taken bolt-cutters to the Great Chain of Being.  Kate's inner five-year-old - who has ever slept more lightly than most people's - is guiltily apprehensive that she might be right.  But the old wolf of sixty winters can only press on, and abide by these new hazards whichever way they fall.

For Katherine the Golden in her last trial, it could never be any other way than this.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Getting Real

Following on from an access-locked post about a silly dream which affected me most unreasonably for its matter, yet wised me up very reasonably indeed via that very same irrational effect, this attempt to distil my general conclusions into the clearest shot possible:

Experiences are real.

They are no less real, nor in any sense worthless, when they occur in a mode other than the default practical one in which we reckon with the objective world.  Memories, dreams, myths, movies, stories, music, ecstatic states and downright bonkers hallucinations are all equally real - though not reliably equally useful or benign.  What mainly determines the value of a class of experiences will be the following:

1)  Correctly identifying the mode of experience.  A dream or a myth - or, for that matter, a multimedia news-story - understood for what it is, is valuable data.  Mistaking one of them for another, or especially any of them for baseline sensory reality, is an error whose effects may be anything from the delusory to the deadly.

2) Competently mapping that mode to the objective world.  Making the above distinction is of small use, if it does not make a corresponding functional difference.  The consequences of error are therefore similar.  Anybody not very severely dysfunctional is deeply and extensively proficient in mapping their baseline sensory perceptions to the world about them: we are evolutionarily optimized for it to begin with, and we are getting practice and feedback at it for at least sixteen hours out of the twenty-four.

But the more specialized or artefactual another mode is, the worse our regular instincts serve us, and the harder and more carefully we have to work at acquiring good, objectively effective responses to it.

Get it right, and we are True Thomas.  Get it wrong, and we're only poor Tom o'Bedlam, cast abroad on stony roads to beg our bacon.

All experience is real.

We need to be good at telling one mode of experience from another.

We need to be good at responding to each mode of experience sensibly.

Trivial? Trite?  Maybe.  But I've seen ruinous errors enough under each heading - many of them from apparently very well-grounded and highly intelligent people - to leave me extremely leery of complacency in this area.