Dream Away

Not to detract from the disease of Alzheimers, but I've wondered if there isn't a different type of thing that can be going on when an elderly person grows "confused", apart from that disease.

Think of it... you spend your whole life with your mind wrapped with the reality that our culture has created for itself and our world. You live it. You compromise to it. You spend your days-into-years thinking, worrying about things, making decisions, all in conformity to, or occasionally in defiance of, the reality of the world we've decided to share -- that we've decided to share in order to maintain some unity for ourselves and so that we can agree enough in order to have some sense of satisfaction in communicating amongst ourselves.

Maybe at some point in old age, it's possible to just stop. To let other people worry about the world-as-it-is, and to just let yourself go into whatever world you want to create for yourself. No worries about what other people will think. No need to maintain some facade for the sake of the larger society. Just the freedom to think and be however and whatever you want.

Maybe a person in that stage of life seems confused to us only because we're still stuck in our world-as-it-is.