After watching David Lynch’s, “Lost Highway”, I thought of Descartes’s quote: “I Think, Therefore I Am.” He claimed the mind and body were two separate entities, because like everything else in this world, the body can only be sensed because there is a mind to sense it.

Our senses deceive us. The thoughts we have when awake can also be experienced when we sleep. I suppose that all the things that have entered into my mind when awake had no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.

But getting back to “Lost Highway”, the protagonist creates alternative realities in his mind to relieve himself of guilt and to help him cope. Each “reality” was real to him. They were cyclical and led him right back to the start.

All along the protagonist’s mind was doubting, perceiving, denying, and imagining. He knew he existed in the created realities because he “thought therefore he existed”. The mind may be confused at times or clear and distinct. We perceive things in our dreams just like when we are awake. It’s all in the mind.

In “Lost Highway”, the main character, when confronted with unsavory aspects of his life, decided to create self-consoling but self-deceptive “realities. He had to deceive himself to make his existence bearable. His “realities” were a lie to disguise unbearable truths.

This deception happens a lot in real life.

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The other night I had a dream that was so realistic that I felt I existed in it. Yet none of it was true. Sometimes we all feel that way about our own reality, how much of it is true?

When I wake up each morning, I’m hazy and disoriented, but then I focus on the bedroom and my self gets re-assembled in my mind, which is my first-person observer of reality inhabiting my body.

Then slowly my mind awakes and starts thinking and then my self is complete. I am again a witness of my world and the bearer of my consciousness and identity.

How wonderful the mind is. I truly believe:

“I Think, Therefore I Am.”

Also published on Medium.