Dreams and delusions are kindred. I think one can begin with a dream and later get derailed by deluding oneself that the make-belief is as real as it gets.
On the other hand, is it also possible that one begins with a delusion and later get immersed with dream after dream that is supported with false hopes?
If Martin Luther King’s, “I have a dream” was more than mere rhetoric, sadly, we know how it ended his activist life prematurely. Had good old Martin declared, “I can’t dream no more”, he’d probably still be alive today. But dream is not what I intended to write about.
Point in question is how long can a person be self-deluded?
I guess it will be for as long as it takes. Delusion works at its best when it inexplicably provides the person with that “comfort zone” during life. One can profoundly tell the deluded mind that the world is round and yet he’d rebuff it with a, “how do you know its round?”
It does not stop there. With an uncanny deftness of a geological scientist, he’d will explain to you that the world is not perfectly round. By the end of his dissertation, he has succeeded to digress, take you on the trail of a curve ball in flight and leave you back where you began.
Quite understandably, at the end of it all, you start to get deluded by the whole process in what you zealously first believed in doing; to straighten a mental misrepresentation of the other person.
So you see, that’s how contagious delusion is.
And sadly, I am right now a victim of having told someone that the world is round but this “geological scientist” is about to reinvent more delusions. And so like the deluded person, here I am as his kindred, dreaming on!
