Little kids have ideas about the nature of reality that don�t always match grown-up perceptions and preconceptions, but that might contain wisdom inaccessible to adults. Most children forget this intuitive cosmology as they grow up and become preoccupied with other things, but I made a point of continuing to ask myself the big questions and take time to let my mind wander. As a result, I�ve kept in touch with the way my toddler-mind thought things worked. I still enjoy revisiting those old patterns of thinking, both because they�re fun and because sometimes they are accurate.
I know I started wondering whether life was a dream soon after I started remembering my dreams at age two or so. I eventually decided that there was no real way to tell if everything was real or a dream, so it was best to act as though it were real while enjoying it as if it were a dream. Of course, I wondered what a person in a dreamed life might see upon awakening; I figured it would have to be something completely beyond imagining, which just made me try harder to imagine what something unimaginable might look like! (Silly baby!)
Around age three, I noticed that everything in every moment was connected in such a way that the moment could never be repeated. There was this moment in winter when I sat watching Captain Kangaroo and the commercial for grape juice came on TV. The commercial featured a mother and daughter in a wooden porch swing in the middle of summer, and I felt a terrible sense of loss because summer was over for me. (I still didn�t quite understand that the snow would melt and spring would come. It wasn�t until I was eight or so that I really became confident that winter wouldn�t last forever.) I realized that moment wasn�t just about winter and the commercial; it also necessarily included the scratchy roughness of the carpet against my hand, the background sounds of my mother working in the kitchen, the presence of the noisy heater blowing air, and a thousand other things. No matter how often I saw that commercial during Captain Kangaroo, it would never exactly repeat the same moment. But�since at the moment I noticed it that moment was �now,� and the moment I am thinking about it is also �now,� there is really no difference between the two. I was �me� at that time and I am �me� now, so the past couldn�t have gone away at all; it was still back there, every moment preserved in time like the glass flowers in the millifiore paperweight. The future was also always there, preserved ahead of me. I realized that somewhere in the future I was already dead, and that was scary but interesting. At the time I didn�t care that this would mean there was no free will because I saw the individual will that created this succession of solidified moments as originating outside of time--if I am not really making decisions �now,� I must be deciding somewhere entirely above �now.�
Another of my favorite questions was, �What is �stuff� made of?� There had to be two kinds of �stuff�: perceived stuff and unperceived stuff, and I figured they were different things. I thought the perceived stuff was only a veneer hiding the unperceived matter. The catch was, there was no way to perceive the stuff under the veneer! I thought about these things most often on the bus on my way home from school, starting in first grade when the bus ride got boring. The back of the seat in front of me provided a good source of imagery. I could see that the outer stuff, the perceived part of it, was green leatherette, and I knew if I pulled back the green leatherette and looked inside all I�d see would be springs and padding. But if there were some way to peel back the entire layer of what I could see, and somehow look at what was under it without perceiving it (remember, as soon as it became perceived stuff it�d be foam and springs and leatherette again) I would find the elusive hidden stuff--Unperceived Matter. Of course, I didn�t use words like �unperceived matter� in my daydreaming. I imagined it visually: peeling away the ordinary exterior to reveal something formless that I imagined looking sort of like what you see between channels on the TV, a cloud of random pixels.
These were some key features of my intuitive cosmology. Years later, I discovered that there were people called physicists who thought about these things and had come to similar conclusions, though they had arrived there through math rather than intuition.
When you�re with a young child who gets a glazed expression and just stares blankly for a while, try asking what he or she is thinking about. You might be surprised by the answer you get.
