“What would you do if you were God? Or let me put it in a simpler way: supposing that every night you could dream any dream you wanted to dream. What would you do? Well first of all, I’m quite sure that most of us would dream all of the marvelous things that we wanted to happen. We would fulfill all our wishes. And we might go on that way for months. Besides, you could make it extraordinarily rich by wishing to dream 75 years in one night, full of glorious happenings. But after you’ve done that for a few months, you might begin to get a little tired of it, and you would say, “What about an adventure tonight, in which something terribly exciting and rather dangerous is going to happen, but I’ll know I’m dreaming so it won’t be too bad and I’ll wake up if it gets too serious.” So you do that for a while. You rescue princesses in distress from dragons, and all sorts of things. And then when you’ve done that for some time, you say let’s go out a bit further: let’s forget it’s a dream and have a real thrill…After you’ve done that for a while, you get more and more nerves until you sort of dare yourself as to how far out you can get. And you end up dreaming the sort of life you’re dreaming now.”

-from the Myth and Religion lecture by Alan Watts.