Last night, before I fell asleep, I thought to myself, “I need to write a column tomorrow.”

I proceeded to dream about a strange quest in which I piloted a stolen dirigible, rode an avalanche down a Himalayan mountain, and steered a raft through deadly white-water. In the course of this grand adventure, I thought to myself – still in the dream – “I know! I’ll write a column about the interpretation of dreams!”

Of course, an idea that seems like genius in the context of a dream often shrinks considerably in the cold light of day. This one wasn’t too bad, though. Dreams fascinate me. Sleep does, too, especially because it’s so poorly understood. There are all sorts of theories about what sleep is, why we need it, and what, exactly, is happening to our brains as we do it.

But at this stage, they’re just theories, even if there are some very good ones.

If I were king of the world, I’d pour a lot of resources into understanding sleep. The average life expectancy in the United States these days is a bit more than 78 years. If I live that long, I will have spent about 26 years asleep.

I can’t think of anything else that I will have spent a full quarter of a century on, aside from maybe thinking about girls.

And probably not even that.

One of my good friends, an Englishman, recently wrote a Facebook entry about the movie Inception. I saw Inception. I’m a longtime fan of the work of the director, Christopher Nolan. I had high hopes for the movie, which is structured like a set of Russian nesting dolls: the action takes place in a dream, within a dream, within a dream, etc.

I found the movie visually impressive, but tiresome. Usually, an action movie has a few minutes of exposition, where the mission, or the heist, or the cause of the intergalactic war, or what have you, is laid out in terms a fifth-grader could understand, so there can then follow 86 minutes of colorful mayhem.

In the case of Inception, the exposition went on for the entire length of the film. No sooner did we understand that we were in a dream, than we were in a dream within that dream, which required a lengthy explanation. Oops, time to go down the rabbit hole to another dream level, for the following long and boring reason. Ha! You thought you were on the ground floor, but actually, there’s a basement level. And under that, the parking garage…

It felt like sophomore year in college, when you’re stuck at a bad party with first-year philosophy majors who are having a drunken and pretentious conversation about epistemology: i.e., the study of how we know what we know.

But back to Facebook. My English friend wrote a glowing little review of Inception (I met him when he was a professor at Oxford; epistemology is right up his alley). “You know,” he wrote, “it’s turtles all the way down!”

Huh?

I spent a year studying in England. During that year, I came across plenty of charming expressions, allegedly in my own language, that I’d never heard before. So I asked him what “turtles all the way down” meant.

Turns out I hadn’t hit a language barrier at all, merely a gap in my philosophical education. “Turtles all the way down” is an expression attributed to the British scientist and philosopher Bertrand Russell, and popularized in Stephen Hawkings’s 1988 blockbuster, A Brief History of Time.

The way Hawkings tells it, a woman attending an astronomy lecture by Russell stood up and challenged the idea of a universe made up of planets, suns, and galaxies. “Rubbish!” she’s supposed to have said. “The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

But what, Russell asked, was the tortoise standing on?

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” she said. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”

I like the idea of a universe supported by an infinitely tall stack of turtles. It’s a lot more fun to imagine than a universe created by a Big Bang, which, of course, begs the question of what was there before the Big Bang.

In other words, what came before the chicken. Could it have been…an egg?

The chicken and egg paradox is a classic example of “infinite regression.” Like the Wheaties box with the picture of the athlete holding the Wheaties box, on which there’s a picture of the athlete holding the Wheaties box…

Or, in my line of work, like the column about writing columns that begins, “Last night, before I fell asleep, I thought to myself, “I need to write a column tomorrow.”

Etc.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 23 September 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com