Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.

Little kids are that way; they feel if their parents aren't watching what they do then what they do isn't real.

He sat watching the people go by, wondering how a thing of this sort could have come about, I must have let myself get mixed up in something horrible, he thought ... Probably she's the one who did it; I have no control of myself or anything that's happened. So now I'm waking up. I'm awake, he thought ... I've been destroyed and now that I'm awake all I can do is realize it ... The shock of getting up there and telling that account made me see. Mixture of lies and bits of truth. Woven together. Unable to see where each starts.

For each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy them.

He entered the elevator and together they moved closer to god

She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.

Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?