Brain in the Vat

If you’re reading this, you are still asleep.
Really, you’re in a filthy, poorly lit lab which was originally a cabin built in the 1970s. The lab is dusty due to lack of maid service; no one ever comes down here and it’s evident because of the 23-year-old computers which are displaying fuzzy, block-lick letters slowly moving up grime covered monitors colored in two different shades of green. The computers are connected to the wall jack with rat-eaten wires so short that they only just barely touch the ground between the computer desks and the wall. The ground is covered with a thick veneer of dirt.

It’s easy to see that the room has had some movement recently: there are footprints on the floor where a heavyset man with muddy working shoes carried scientific equipment too heavy for the scrawny scientist who owns the lab to carry. On the computer screens are finger smudges where someone - most likely the scientist - wiped the sludge away for better vision of the seemingly random parading digits.

The doctor is currently out. He is in town taking care of some business and running errands. Outside, in the decomposing brown leaves of late fall, sits a dented gasoline generator that is elevated by a two foot tall base that separates it from the ground and underneath a tiny roof. Clouds are nowhere to be seen in the sky so the warm light of the sun shines over the unnamed section of forest where the lab is. Light shines though the naked tree branches making shadows that dance over the ground as the day goes by.

And there you sit, part of your skull missing and your brain completely exposed with sterilized metal prongs sticking out of your occipital lobe attached to brand new wires that run from your brain to a port that connects to all the computers, transmitting data from your brain. A tube is taped into your forearm supplying a steady stream of nutrition and a drug cocktail to keep you comatose into your veins while one of the desktops monitors every one of your heartbeats, every one of your breaths, and every little seismic twitch your vacant body makes.

Sitting at a 30 degree angle, you often have minor spasms ranging from a finger movement to a full on kick into the air. This sends the computers into frenetic fits of beeping. The doctor has learnt to ignore them. Your eyes are open, but make no mistake, you are sleeping. Not just sleeping, but dreaming. You’re dreaming of a world that the doctor had created to be exactly like the real living world. Everything in your unconscious world is just like ours. There are almost no differences: there are people with faces and pets and families and even their own personalities; there are thousands of plants that each look different from another and there are animals and cities and towns and states and provinces and countries and continents and paved roads and dirt roads and highways and suburbs and street names and politicians and friends and enemies and dirt and gravel and pebbles and dust and stones and boulders and mountains and seas and lakes and streams and rivers and oceans and boats and yachts and cruise liners and televisions and celebrities and movies and movie stars and movie theaters and up above you in the night sky are stars and constellations and planets and nebulas and galaxies and galaxy clusters and even other worlds with intelligent, civilized life on them.

The only difference is that there is no fear, because you cannot die, because you are merely sleeping.

So why do you just stay locked up in your home, watching TV and working on the computer all day? What happened? All you do anymore is go to work and come home and sleep. You know this is not the way to live in your Dream World because of how empty you feel every night as you're sitting upright in bed trying to read the novel you bought because of the good review you read online.
The doctor spent so much time hunched over a keyboard sculpting the world in which you reside. The least you could do is actually live in it; meet some of those people, plant some of those plants, drive on some of those roads and highways, sail some of those oceans, and climb some of those mountains.

The worst that could happen is you could wake up.