IN SUPPORT OF COMTE-SPONVILLE

Abstract

When I was a small boy, about two years old, on occasion, I had some nightmares. One morning I mentioned that to my Mother, and she replied, in a most natural matter of course manner, as if it had been about a simple and trivial issue, that next time, when I would again have such a nightmare, I should simply remember that I was dreaming, that all it would only be in a dream, and then I should just wake up … Since my Mother’s reply came so instantly, smoothly, and without the least emotion, let alone dramatization, I simply took it as such …
And next time, when a nightmare came upon me during my dream, I simply did, and yes, I managed rather naturally to do, what my Mother had told me to do …
And never ever I would again have nightmares for more than a mere moment, before I would manage to wake up from them …
Later, nightmares would, so to say, even avoid me completely…
On occasion, and sometime even more often, we feel during our waking hours as if we were in the middle of a nightmare …
Yes, as the saying has it : life is not a picnic ! And it really can get so much worse …
Well then, is there some way recalling, even if rather vaguely so, the story with my early childhood nightmares ? Could we possibly wake up – during our waking hours – to the realization that the respective horror does not, and in fact, simply cannot happen to who we really are ? But then, who really are we ?