Lokoloi

**10:43 AM**

There was this performance artist in my dream. He had lost a relative—either a daughter or a granddaughter—and through his grief, he decided to do a bunch of really weird things. For some reason, he always had blood on his mouth. I don’t know why.

Some of the things he did included fighting or racing tigers—I'm not sure which. He also had a rap battle with a shark in a tank. He wasn’t in the tank; he was outside of it, rapping at the shark for some reason. Yeah, it was really weird.

His points were about perception and perspective.

During an interview, he said that after losing, I believe, his daughter, he didn’t want to live anymore, but he also didn’t want to die. So, he found a way to live without truly living. I assume he meant that he tried to live as primally or instinctually as possible, without conscious thought. Most of what he did was just bizarre.

In the dream, I was the one giving the interview. Even while I was him, all I felt was grief—just overwhelming grief. And it was strange because I was literally him, something that isn’t possible in the waking world. It was a step beyond simply putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. But even though I experienced everything as him, I still didn’t understand what he was doing in retrospect.

Funnily enough, that tied into his second argument: that **perspective is an illusion.** Even if you try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it’s a false sense of security because you start to feel like you understand their emotions and experiences—but you don’t. You never truly can, because you are still you. Even if you perfectly put yourself in their position, your own memories and experiences still shape the way you interpret it. I’m not sure why that was part of his argument, but he was definitely an example of **not understanding.**

I don’t really know what to make of him. He was definitely a fascinating performance artist. The kind of guy I feel like my professor would be interested in—or at the very least, want to interview. Oh, you know what? I could get her to write down some questions for him. That’s actually a really good reason to sharpen my lucid dreaming skill—so she could interview him.

Anyway, what do I take away from him? I do think there was something valuable in his ideas—assuming this wasn’t just nonsense. His thoughts on perception being an illusion have some merit. It’s just true. Everything we experience is a controlled hallucination created by the mind. So perception, as an illusion, is just one of many tools our brain uses to interpret the world. On that, he was right.

But his thoughts on first-person versus second-person perspective—his argument that they weren’t real—weren’t really fleshed out. I don’t know if he was saying that because perception is an illusion, it’s useless, but he seemed to have some kind of disdain for it.

What really stood out to me was how, after losing his daughter, he found a way to **live without living.** To **live without thinking.** As if thinking itself is integral to truly living—to experiencing life and getting the most out of it. He didn’t want that. He just followed his first impulse. It’s like **reverse impulse control.** Whatever came to mind, he did—even if it didn’t make sense. Especially if it didn’t make sense. Because then his brain would give up trying to understand, which seemed like his goal. He wanted to live as absentmindedly as possible.

I remember him specifically saying in the interview that living for **just 38 minutes**—however long the interview lasted—was agonizing for him. Which makes sense. Every second he was conscious, he had to grapple with what he lost.

But I don’t want to live like that.

Still, the idea of thought being an integral part of **living** is really interesting to me.