Imagine 2.0

The ability of human's to imagine and dream is one of the many, many reasons that our species stands apart from the rest here on Earth (and for that matter, all those non-living bastards on the moon, Venus and Mars too). These capabilities are amoral, and I'm not going to write about that, since we all know from our history books that dreams and imagination gave us the Sistine Chapel along with Concentration Camps.

My topic is a little more user friendly. Sometimes, imagination and dreams can interfere with everyday reality.

Case Study

Today, I was talking with a co-worker about the intricacies of Monte Carlo Simulation; or we were talking about the price of Happy Hour Beer at John Collins, I can't remember. Regardless, at some point during this conversation, my mouth, which is normally a willing and eager participant in the process of drinking coffee, gets a little lazy. Now, because of this stumbling, semi-hot, but mostly lukewarm coffee ends up dribbling down my face and onto my hand.

"Captain Dipshit, your ship has arrived, sir!"

So, I cordially excuse myself, and somewhere during the 16.5 second walk to the kitchen sink, I start thinking about how I am going to run through the meeting I'm about to have in an hour. Naturally, I'm dreaming about how I will coordinate the greatest meeting in history, which would leave the participants stammering and thumping their chests as if Winston Churchill had walked in and told his War Cabinet about his latest plans to whoop some Nazi ass. I think I even managed to fit a guitar solo in this imagined meeting as well.

When you have left reality and entered your mind, your body clicks into autopilot. It remembers the last thing that you consciously told it to do and starts filing through the many, many iterations of various scenarios it has been put into in the past, offers a conclusion as to what your conscious intentions ought to be, and if you haven't regained full consciousness yet, executes this conclusion. Normally, this is very helpful. We wouldn't be able to drive a car down the block without the ability to function while disctracted.

However, this isn't always the case.

As I was dreaming about ripping a shredding guitar solo that would not only get me promoted to Director of Badass, but also get me the phone number of the little hottie who insists on wearing jeans that look more like body paint, my subconsious had remembered that I was going to sink to wash my hands, but the results of the simulation determined something a little different.

Within .005 seconds, I realized that I wasn't a) lifting the cold water handle on faucet and cleaning my hands, or b) lifting the hot water handle on the water purifier to fill my Korean Ginseng Tea for the first of typically three trips during the day. At this point, the sensation from my hand, which felt like a thousand piranhas mistaking my flesh for, well, someone else's more tasty flesh, was the sensation of BURNING! HOT! SCALDING! WATER SOAKING INTO MY SKIN!

There will be no guitar solos today, only 1st degree burns and the knowlegde that the modeling software in my head really needs to upgrade to 2.0. Either that, or I could just snap out of my head and pay attention.