Solipsism

Solipsism is the philosophical position that only one's own mind is certain to exist. It holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind, including the external world and other minds, is uncertain and cannot be conclusively known.

One of the most fundamental debates in philosophy concerns the "true" nature of the world—whether it is some ethereal plane of ideas or a reality of atomic particles and energy.

I was maybe seven when I had a premonition in probably the form of a dream that I would marry a man with a particular first name and I forgot all about that until after I was married to a man with that first name. The premonition predicted I would be widowed at a young age.

So I married a guy who wanted one thing -- to be a soldier -- and he joins the military and I unexpectedly have a baby at our first duty station. And he would have had more manners if he had been raised by wolves. 

He came from this atrocious family with absolutely no social skills whatsoever and he just absolutely never called to tell me he would be home late. AND he's got worse eyesight than his atrocious manners, so he's in like EIGHT fender benders in a single year very early in our time together. 

So I spent our first few years waiting for him to come home for hours while he's running extremely late and hasn't called to tell me he'll be late. So I spent countless hours expecting any minute for the police to knock on the door and inform me he's dead in a ditch and I was widowed at a young age with an infant to raise alone and basically no work experience.

In addition to those early experiences, I spent the entire marriage occasionally having dreams that I felt predicted his demise and this was a factor in my decision to divorce him. I did not want my internal landscape to revolve around this narrative that I KNEW he would DIE and my only interest was in cashing the life insurance check or something like that.

To hell with what other people might think who had no way of knowing this stuff was inside me unless I told them. Whatever other people thought, this stuff was inside me and I needed to find a path forward where I felt I could live with myself.

I wasn't just trying to navigate my relationship to him. I was trying to navigate my relationship to reality and also to myself.

A complicating factor: I had substantial baggage from my mother who believed that if you dreamed it, it would happen. She spent years desperately trying to prove that she had dreams that predicted the future and came true and only succeeded in looking unhinged.

She was like the Trelawney character in Harry Potter who was absolutely terrible at divination but then would blurt things she was unaware were creepily accurate. I sincerely believe she was psychic but her attempts to prove it to other people were not constructive.

So step one was to try to find a means to better navigate my relationship to internal information, like dreams that seemed to predict the future. I think many people make absolutely no effort to try to sort out something like that and that is probably the crux of why a lot of people don't meaningfully change. 

Was my ex-husband ever really in danger of dying? Absolutely, yes, without any doubt. 

He was a soldier in the infantry and even if you never go to war, you can die in training. At one point, he told me that they nearly notified me of his death once very early in his career when a training accident produced a body so mangled they couldn't tell who it was and initially thought it was him.

Did my dreams constitute psychic phenomen "seeing" the future? Most likely, they did NOT.

Most premonitions in dreams are in symbolic form, not like seeing a movie of the events. Those dreams most likely predict the future the exact same way we predict the weather: 

By crunching data and drawing a conclusion.

And the best use of weather prediction is to make plans accounting for that information. It's not a good use of that information to stand out in the storm without an umbrella crying about how you KNEW this coming!

So over time, I began using seemingly predictive dreams to try to course correct. If I didn't like what I felt they said about my future, I wondered what I needed to do differently to find myself on a different path.

Starting in my mid twenties, I had an affair during my marriage with a man twelve years older than me. According to the law, I was unequivocally his victim and legally not responsible for the affair.

Let's call him Artie. 

Artie was my therapist and a married minister and an officer in the same military unit as my enlisted husband. He could have been defrocked, stripped of his license to practice therapy, divorced, arrested and busted down to E1 and jailed. 

He changed religious denominations to make it feasible to get divorced without being defrocked. Then never got divorced.

He left the army so he could stay in touch with me without ongoing risk of going to jail over it. Then never saw me again in person, though we exchanged letters and phone calls.

At some point, he told me he had an image of a daughter in his head and she told him goodbye or something. He told me some story about his internal landscape where he had spent years believing he would marry me and we would have a child together, a girl. 

He told me this after in his mind she parted company and assured him it's fine, but I'm not going to be born. That's the first I heard of this stuff in his mind.

So he spent years convinced we would get married and there would be a baby. While kind of half assing the real world stuff that NEEDED to happen to have any hope of marriage and a child.

I had many dreams that I would marry him. I never had ANY impression of having a child with him, much less some relationship in my mind to the spirit of my as yet not conceived daughter in specific.

And I absolutely hated those dreams that I felt predicted that I would marry him. It was those dreams that started me on the path of "If this is a prediction for my future, what do I need to do differently to find myself in a different future???"

I was having dreams that I felt predicted my husband's death and dreams that I felt predicted that I would marry this minister. I increasingly dug my heels in over imagining a future in which a man who supposedly loved me would make choices that would make me a whore in the headlines for marrying him.

I balked. That was a NO from me.

That's from a piece on this site called Self Respect. The years that I spent involved with this man were years in which I explored the possibility of marrying up to get a better life than what I currently had and decided:

1. I'm never ever ever under any circumstance moving somewhere over a man if we aren't already married.

2. I'm never ever ever under any circumstance shacking up with a man knowing that he will expect me to do the women's work and if you aren't married to him, you are investing in his career and getting ZERO rights to any proceeds from it.

3. I'm never ever ever under any circumstance going to make life choices like going to a second rate college that doesn't really further my career goals in order to live kind of near a man I'm not actually married to.

Because he left the military over his relationship to me and his desire to remain in touch without being arrested and then got a job in the middle of fuck NOWHERE. And I spent substantial time researching how to divorce my husband, move kind of near a married minister as a single mom with two kids and go to college knowing we might have sex occasionally but couldn't be seen together in public and he wasn't supporting me financially and etc.

There were three colleges kind of nearby him, all about an hour from him. None had a major I actually WANTED to get.

I've done the research. Men tend to go to whatever college best serves their career goals -- even if they have to pack up the little wifey and kids and move there -- and women tend to go to whatever college is convenient to them as married moms. 

And then we act SHOCKED and blame SEXISM when men have serious careers making serious money and women don't.

So his relationship to his internal landscape was apparently something like "I have a meaningful relationship to the spirit of my future daughter, ergo marrying the COMPLETELY unimportant bimbo for whom I have ZERO respect but I expect her to birth this baby is obviously a done deal and in the bag and guaranteed! It is FORETOLD!!! I can just WAIT for it to ARRIVE!!!"

And my relationship to my internal landscape was something like "Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Hurtling towards my DOOM!!!! How do I get off this path????????"

And we are both having visions of marrying each other. 

Guess what? We never got married.

So I think most people are caught in a solipsist vortex that they are not even trying to check against reality. People make assumptions about how things will go and some seem to impose their expectations on the world around them and somehow get away with it though their expectations are outlandish and outrageous.

Donald Trump. He's a BILLIONAIRE. He's President of the United States and isn't being removed from office in spite of admitting on camera he rigged the election. He seems to just expect to get his way and apparently because he's a billionaire, the entire PLANET agrees he should no matter how completely outrageous his behavior.

I'm pretty sure Donald Trump is exactly what people mean when they talk about a solipsist: a person who believes only they are actually real and everyone else is a playing piece on a gameboard called Life. And no one else really matters. 

And SOMEHOW all the playing pieces kiss his fat ass and scream "SEEMS LEGIT!!!!! GO YOU!!!! RUIN my country!!!! What do I care?!!"