I’d like to be the first to make reference to the Xfinity Comcast package commercial aired in the Philadelphia area (and probably nationally as well). I could give two doos about Comcast and I’ve actually never had cable. I’m more interested in the specific “moment” that this commercial addressed.

Image by Brooklyn Museum via Flickr

Two guys sitting on a couch – one guy looks like he’s having a female orgasm and the other yanks his attention with some dumb BS about the Xfinity package. “I just took your moment, didn’t I” he declares. “Moment returned…” and with an open, extended palmed gesture from the moment stealer, the fruity one returns to his goofy, glassy-eyed smile while staring up at the ceiling and leaning back on the couch.

Who hasn’t been in that “moment”? Who can honestly say that they’re so focused that they’ve never dreamed or dazed off into the distance thinking of things bigger than their current situation? We’re human. We have to dream. It’s a byproduct of sleep; sleep being another thing we quite obviously need. What FAR too few people realize (at least about 10 percent in California that didn’t vote pot in as a legal recreational drug) is that we have the capacity to dream while awake.

We know that lucid dreams are dreams that we have control over while we’re asleep. What we may not have realized collectively is that life is entirely a lucid dream whether you care to acknowledge it or not. Atheists may contest that life is our final and first experience and that dreams are just remnants of information stored in your head before you go to bed. Christians may say that through Christ, we will attain the blissful state of transcendence and enter the kingdom of Heaven which may be “dream-like”. Muslims throughly believe that there are virgins awaiting their arrival to the afterlife and that milk and honey will flow like rivers – surprisingly, sometime around the 1950’s we had a similar vision about homemakers that always have dinner on the table and a different colored pair of underpants on our birthdays where the streets were paved in gold…

I want to address the “moment”. This moment is clearly a blissful haziness and detachment. We all enjoy good dreams. I want to contest that our dream in the US has evolved. Sure, 2.5 kids, a dog, a car and a suburban house was a dream for the mid 20th century. That dream has been accomplished and it resulted in an innovation renaissance yielding airplanes, computers and the eventuality of the need for a new dream. Now that we’ve put ourselves and our kids in debt by demanding unreasonably that they ALL go to college, we’ve had to clean up the dog’s messes only about a billion times more often than we’ve had to bury them prematurely (and ultimately kill our kids’ dreams that a best friend is ‘forever’ and after polluting the air with carbon dioxide by using a car or two per household and a household or two being foreclosed on by our eldest kids for every new house being built, we’ve learned one thing… We f*#@ed up. Our dream wasn’t wrong. Our dream wasn’t evil and nor should it be subject to the oppression of terror. Our dream was evolving through the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and now 90’s and 00’s. Here it is the turn of a new decade in the 21st century and we’re still stuck with fogies who are clutching onto their decrepit and cancer/AIDS infested dream until we cut off their “cold, dead hands” and bury it before they wind up like Golem falling into death’s grip while clutching the pointless momento that controlled the course of their lives and dictated their socially accepted success. Well, if the “moment” is what we’re really after, why do so many people trade it for a dying dream? The answer is acceptance.