One morning, not long ago, I woke to my alarm, reached over and moved the switch to "Al. Off."  To my dismay, it wouldnt go off, so I switched it back on and then off again. Still, the incessant beeping continued. Suddenly, I heard my roommate, Jen, call my name as she kicked the side of my bed. I awoke to learn that I hadn't already woken up, rolled over and shut my alarm off. So I had, in my sleep, been trying to turn my alarm clock off while thinking I was actually awake. Thus began my fascination with reality.

While I dont normally listen to Metallica, I came across one of their songs randomly while listening to music on Yahoo! Before I hit the skip button, it intrigued me. I came to learn that the song was inspired by the 1971 anti-war movie, Johnny Got His Gun. I have yet to see it, but from what I've found so far, I can surmise that its about a young American soldier, wounded by a landmine in World War II. He loses his arms, legs and eyes as well as his ability to hear. His life is preserved by a group of doctors, who make some extra money on the side by turning him into a sideshow freak as "the armless, legless wonder of the 20^th century."  "He'll never know what has happened to him," the doctors say, "it is impossible for [him] to experience pain, pleasure, memory, dreams, or thought of any kind. This young man will be as unfeeling, as unthinking as the dead until the day he joins them."  They learn they are mistaken when the young man, remembering the Morse code he learned as a child, repeatedly signals SOS by moving his head. Through the entire movie, it seems the young soldier goes between dreaming, waking, and remembering. After a while, he loses the ability to discern between these states.

"I don't know if Im alive or dreaming or dead or remembering..." He muses in thought, "How can you tell what's a dream and what's real when you can't even tell when you're awake and when you're asleep?"

Reality is what makes the sighted man realize he's blind, the hearing man think he's deaf, and the outspoken man speechless. It makes the marathon runner think himself lame and the scientist consider his work equivalent to the scribblings of his 4-year-old, which cover the refrigerator.

Psalm 42 says, "Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me." God speaks to the deepest part of our souls. Again, in Ecclesiastes 3:11b we find, "He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."  The deepest parts of the human being cry out for someone/something larger than ourselves. The only true reality is that there is someone/something bigger out there. There is always a greater ability, a greater task, a greater equation, a greater accomplishment. This is mirrored in the thoughts of the young soldier:

Reality, for him, has been stripped to almost nothing, because he has become so low. It's not hard for him to know that there is something greater out there while he lies there in the silent darkness, a nightmare from which he cannot wake up. It is not very difficult for me to acknowledge that compared to Someone greater, I am blind, deaf, unfeeling, and unthinking. This is reality.