“I think, therefore I am.”

This is the sort of statement that Gonga discovered one day as he was paging through one of “The Textbook Game” books which he had been commissioned to advertise.

It made his scratch his head slightly. He didn’t have to think. He just knew he was. The whole idea of thinking hurt his head, so he pictured a big ripe banana and a tall glass of milk with Nilla Wafers instead. He smiled. That was better.

A few pages later, he realized the author was asking whether it was possible to be sure you were not dreaming even if you didn’t know if you were dreaming.

Dreaming? Was he dreaming right now? Maybe that’s why the book was so confusing. Gonga decided to put it down. He wanted Nilla Wafers really bad. Was that just a dream also? Maybe he was asleep and all he would have to do to get those Nilla Wafers was to wake up, and they would be sitting right in front of him.

I switched out of my Gonga mindset. He was a useful projection of my imagination, but he would never fully grasp philosophy. After all, he couldn’t even figure out that he didn’t really exist!

I, on the other hand, was fully aware of how the world operated. I put on the Gonga persona when it suited me, but always, in the background, my own mind was still thinking, still working.

Long ago, I had slogged through Rene Descartes’ philosophy as he questioned the existence of everything. He had concluded that he knew he existed, because he knew he was thinking. I thought that was funny. He spent reams of paper trying to argue logically whether or not he was really awake, or in a dream, and how he could know whether or not he was dreaming. I pondered it for about two minutes and then concluded that he must have been dreaming when he wrote all that stuff; which is why Philosophy class still seems so much like a dream to students today.

Gonga roused himself and closed the textbook. With a grin stretching from ear to ear behind his plasticized face, he went into the kitchen and pulled the Nilla Wafer box off the top shelf. Now he knew the answer. “I eat, therefore I am.”