by David Faden
June 6, 2002.
The three hikers leave only two sets of footprints in the mud. The third walks round the drying puddle. Ahead of the other two he turns on the trail to face them. They stop.
"Sometimes I'm afraid I'm all that exists," he says.
"I'd be afraid too, Tim, if you were all that existed," Sara says.
"No, you wouldn't, Sara," Tim says, "because you wouldn't exist."
"Well, maybe as a nonentity I wouldn't feel scared but as a figment of your imagination I'd probably still appear scared to you."
"I'm hungry," Rob says. He sits down on a log and pulls a bag of sandwiches from his pack.
"Yeah, but that's just what I'm worried about," Tim says. "Appearance in place of actuality."
"OK," Sara says, "maybe each imagined person is a thread of your consciousness and so has its own emotions?"
Rob takes another bite from a sandwich.
"I don't know," Tim says. "I guess even if you're not a figment of my imagination, I still don't really know what you're thinking or feeling or even if you are thinking or feeling."
"Yeah, but you think you know," Rob says. "You think she is there or you wouldn't be talking to her."
"Yeah, but I'm not sure she's there. I see her and hear her talking to me, but that's just what my senses are telling me."
"OK," Sara says. "Are we talking about two different ideas here? One, that everything apparently outside of Tim is just part of his imagination and, two, that Tim's senses are lying to him?"
"Well," Rob says, "I think Tim's looking for a way to be absolutely sure that how he perceives the world is how it is."
"Yeah," Tim says.
"I don't think it's possible to be absolutely sure," Sara says. "I mean, you've assumed that it's possible that we're all part of your dream or that we're just hallucinations. Once you assume that you can be perfectly fooled, how can you be perfectly sure you're not being fooled?"
"Maybe we could try to prove that it's impossible to be perfectly fooled?" Tim says.
"Well," Rob says, "I don't think you're going to be able to 'prove' that. Don't your dreams seem real to you when you're experiencing them?"
"Yeah. At least, that's how I remember them. But they probably seem real only because when I'm dreaming I'm not able to critically examine my experiences."
"And how could you 'prove' that?" Sara says. "You just believe that because of past experience or your memories of past experience or what you believe to be memories of past experience."
"Holy crap!" Rob says. "There's a bear there!"
"Where?" Tim says.
"Behind you," Sara says.
"Is there?" Tim says.
There was. And it ate them all up.
The end.