It could be said that late night (or early morning, in this case) blog entries are inherently dangerous because you run the risk of being completely noncoherent. In my current state of wakefulness, I don’t seem to consider this a problem.

For some reason — perhaps because I was just now reading a portion of Orwell’s 1984, I began to think about fate. My belief in fate has always been hinged on a single premise: my own experience with recognizing events that couldn’t have occurred before. I call them “snapshots”. From time to time, I have an intuition that what I am seeing at that exact second is something I have seen before; not because it has happened, but because it has been presented to me. I know from past experience that I get images in my sleep from time to time that are predictive of an exact moment in the future. Back in 6th grade, I had at least one occasion where I knew I had seen a particular moment in a dream under a different context; it was a completely conscious recollection of the event. Since then, though, they have become more and more of a shock (or, perhaps more appropriately, a surprise).

It is from this that I believe that some parts of our lives are inherently predetermined. I don’t, however, believe that our path is rigidly defined; instead, I believe that specific points in time are rigidly defined, and that the space between those points is fluid and unpredictable. For me, these snapshots are always minor images, never major — holding a pencil a certain way while writing a specific word, for instance, or writing a particular e-mail regarding an issue that didn’t come up until minutes before I had the recollection. It’s always a little jarring and disorienting for just a second as the memory from my dream state snaps into place as a sort of overlay. For those proficient in graphics editing, it’s as if a hidden layer had just been rendered visible with unpredicted results. I have to wonder why these are always minor and never major events — a death, perhaps, or some life-defining instance. Perhaps it’s simply because life isn’t predominantly made up of life-defining moments in time; rather, it’s a jumble of events that are seemingly minor on the grand scale of things, composited into a life and making small adjustments in the flow of time.

I suppose that this would all depend on your outlook. Someone who is very literal minded (ironically, someone such as me) might think that you cannot see things before they happen, since each event is constructed out of the outcomes of thousands — millions, billions — of other events. Someone a little more creative might completely agree with me. It’s really more a subject for philosophers, but I like to philosophize on my own from time to time.