Shutter Island

*Spoiler alert: don't read this if you haven't seen the movie. It might ruin it*

I also saw Alice in Wonderland on Sunday, but a bunch of people already said what I had to say about it, so there you go. I thought I'd write about Shutter Island, because it was an amazing movie and really ties into the theme of "life as illusion and dream."
I won't ruin the ending, but you come away from the movie wondering which side of the story was real and which side was illusion. It just made me wonder about our life as an illusion.

It also made me think about the nature of insanity. Schizophrenia has always fascinated me, though I've never known why. It makes me wonder whether the schizophrenic are the ones who "escaped from the cave," that, perhaps, their delusions and hallucinations are real, and the rest of us are just not "awake" enough to see them.

Also, there was something that Dr. Sexson mentioned today about only using 10% of our brains. That's something I have thought a lot about, especially in relation to Allegory of the Cave. I often wonder how we can have things like space travel when we know so little about our own brains!

I've thought a lot about this in relation to the mentally handicapped. My dad used to work with Special Ed kids, and he told me a lot of really interesting stories in which some of the kids often seemed to "read" his thoughts. I've often wondered if the mentally handicapped are using a different 10% of their brains than we do. Could they be hyper-empathetic? Telepathic? Even clairvoyant? Who knows?

And, with that, I will end my ramblings. Hope I've given you something to think about...