Eternal Recurrence

The movie Waking Life proposes this really interesting thought. In your dreams, you often have no concept of time. You can fall asleep, have a dream that seems to last hours, days even, then wake up and find that you've only been asleep for a couple minutes.

They say your brain lives on approximately 12 minutes after your body dies. During these last few minutes, dopamine and serotonin are released, and your mind falls into a trippy, dream-like state. In dream world, twelve minutes could seem like forever. You could, in a sense, relive much of your past, even live an entire life again.

To go even further, maybe too far, during your last minutes, you might relive your entire life, your death, and your 12 minutes of brain function after your death. This creates an infinite loop of living.

Of course, this is a very solipsistic view. In these relivings, everything and everyone is a figment of your own mind. Nothing is real. This brings a lot of things into question, including whether or not the life you're living now is simply a repeat in a dying mind. This seems pretty crazy, but if you think about it, it's very rare to be aware of the fact that you're dreaming during the dream.

Nietzsche popularized the idea of Eternal Recurrence. He spread the notion that you should live your life as if you were going to be forced to relive it infinitely. The idea of that horrifies some people, but it's a good motivator for you to savor every moment and enjoy the beauty of life, instead of always looking to the future, focusing on making money, or performing mundane, time-wasting tasks like watching TV.