This melting hour

We all wander the space-time continuum, plumbing the nature of being and the relationship between the two worlds we experience: one inner (the life of the mind) and one outer (the life observed through our senses). Mankind's ongoing, unmet metaphysical thirst simultaneously gives rise to art, religion, and science. While science does little to address metaphysical thirst, and religion does little to assuage it, art not only represents it, but often endeavors to respond, providing a means of slaking this thirst. Poetry, as indeed all art, is fashioned by the artist's conscious dressmaking from the fabric of the unconscious. A poem is the product of the interior life of the mind, brought to consciousness and expressed through the medium of language, in order to connect to a reader, a way of sharing thoughts. Working within the conceptual framework of Western philosophy and Derrida's metaphysics, this dialogue considers and utilizes several binary pairs: inside outside being not-being conscious unconscious Graphically organized this way, with the privileged term on the left, and the subordinate term on the right, reading down each column establishes a correspondence of inside/being/conscious and outside/not-being/unconscious. Bearing the vertical correspondence in mind, I propose the following metaphysical conceit: What if the external world observed by the senses, the outside/not-being/unconscious, is, in fact, as the correspondence suggests, an illusion, a dream? It would logically follow, then, that the internal world (the life of the mind) represented by the inside/being/conscious is, as the vertical alignment suggests, actually what comprises "reality.