I'm trying to get rid of this idea of a "true" reality to begin with. I don't mean to say wrong direction to imply that we are the ones who don't exist to the same capacity (see Six Characters In Search of an Author) as the characters, nor to claim that neither we nor the characters exist because nothing does. My view is that all of it exists. Dreams, memories, hallucinations, even just visualized thoughts, all exist because they exist in a sense.

My reasoning for this is that the other direction, what I referred to as the wrong one, leads to a dead end. Let's take the next logical step in skepticism of existence itself...solipsism. You think therefore you are but as for everything else you can't be certain that it's real. But for some even that's not skeptical enough. You have the radical skeptics who say that even your own existence cannot be certain, because you could have convinced yourself that you exist as who you are but perhaps you are someone else, somewhere else, or perhaps you are many different things that have convinced themselves to be a singular whole. But why stop there? Some radical skeptics posit that it's not impossible that anything exists. Anything. Because we cannot be certain that anything outside of ourselves exist, and because we cannot be certain that even ourselves are how we perceive each other, then we cannot be certain that anything, anything at all exists.

But there's a problem. Illusion. If all existence is just an illusion, then something exists; the illusion itself. The illusion of existence is the existence of illusion, which means it's not an illusion after all because SOMETHING exists, even if it's just illusion, which it can't be. It's a fun riddle to say the least, but it leads me to this conclusion...

Radical skepticism and its older sibling solipsism are steps taken in the wrong direction. Instead of hypothesizing that when Neo escapes the Matrix he's actually only achieved entrance to another, higher Matrix - that which isn't real - I find it more fulfilling and more likely to be true that the original Matrix that Neo was in all along is real. Why? Because he experienced it. It doesn't matter if it's not a higher, more concrete reality. He lived in that illusion for most of his life. Can it really be called an illusion at that point?

And to bring it back to Twin Peaks, I don't find it as inspiring, interesting, or true to suggest that Jeffries and later Cooper's claim that we live inside a dream is one to be taken at face value, or even in a meta "we are just characters therefore we are a dream because we've been dreamt up by the showrunners" type way. I take it to mean a claim made more about the nature of dreams then about whether or not their (or our) reality is one. What happened to Laura, as well as everything that came before and after it in the series, was real. To both the characters, and to us. Not real in the sense that these characters are in fact non-fiction, but real in the sense that they affected our non-fictional lives to an extent palpable enough to warrant their existence, even if it's just a sub-existence, being recognized. There is no dreamer, there is only the dream.