Not only the Hindus and the American Indians think that it all may be a dream—a possibility which our bumptious narrator refuses to take seriously. Consider this from an American humorist:
“Strange that you should not have suspected, years ago, centuries, ages, aeons ago! for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fictions! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths golden rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the reponsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor abused slave to worship him!…
“You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible, except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream marks are all present—you should have recognized them earlier …
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And you are but a Thought—a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
See what I mean by humorist? Laugh, I thought I’d die.
Presumably Mark Twain felt quite pleased with himself when he thus ended his last story “The Mysterious Stranger.” But even the narrator of this tale, who is no philosophical sophisticate as the reader doubtless perceives by now, would point out that you can’t have a dream without a dreamer, a thought without a thinker, a story without a storyteller. Nor can you tell a story without a purpose, even if as in the case of the elderly and bitter Twain, the purpose is to insist that there is no purpose.
Thus the one whom my narrator calls Shags is probably right: our lives are stories which God tells, thoughts which God thinks, dreams which God dreams.
The issue then is not whether there is a Dreamer. The issue rather—and the data are ambiguous—is whether dreams come true.