Sociosomnia: “The Sandman” Ego-Aware “Fight” Scene 😶‍🌫️ (~4 min scene, watch here on youtube)

This scene in “The Sandman” is beautiful. Dream (the dude) challenges Lucifer (Brienne of Tarth) in “The Oldest Game” — one of imagination and creativity, where the images one creates through claiming an identity have a direct bearing on the physical world.

This speaks to an ego-aware (turquoise+) battle, in which the contestants know they’re creating their realities through identity declarations, “I Am…”. Although these identities are created from emptiness, their consequences are not—in the moment and long-term.

I see this as reflecting a deep structure of “the oldest game” of co-enacting our experience, and doing it together. We get to create, so does everyone else. Just like in the battle scene, our ego-reality-choices aren’t isolated, they interact and inspire the choices of others. Nor are they infinite—like Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms, they have to transclude the previous iteration to have any real effect on the world (eg: If the countermove wasn’t able to defeat the previous one, the opponent would win).

With love, Jordan