So in reality.....

          “Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.” Tupac Shakur

Unless you've been under the proverbial social media rock lately, you've probably been inundated with images of a certain white/gold (or is black/blue?) dress.

For those who have missed the viral sensation, let me explain. Recently a photo of a blue and black dress was circulated on the Internet. The only problem was that to ¾ of the viewing population, the dress actually appeared gold and white, that is the blue parts appeared white and the black parts appeared gold.

Like actually

I thought the Kevman was going a tad soft in the melon when he held up a picture of an obviously white and gold dress, telling me in all honesty that it was blue and black. He had his little earnest face on...he wasn’t shitting me.

In short, we were seeing two completely different versions of the same picture.

But the story gets better. Later that day, after a lovely dinner and a cocktail or two we had another squizz at the bi-polar dress. I now saw it as blue and black while the Kevman now saw white and gold.

Words were spoken...some not for little ears (“What the f**k??” was popular).

So how could this be? How could we see the same picture so completely differently?

The science behind it is baffling and I can’t be arsed examining it now (that’s what Google is for my friends, go for it).

What I would like to examine is the backlash to the popularity of the picture.

It is not uncommon for various phenomena to go viral on the Internet. A recent episode that springs to mind is that of a certain socialite’s shiny posterior supposedly ‘breaking the Internet’. And quite rightly the backlash was profound. Why were we being inundated with this shit when much more important things where going on in the world? How had we become this shallow?

I agreed.

But this time, I don’t.

Yes there are indeed much more pressing issues in the world to be acknowledged, but this dress picture has proven a far more valuable point than naked pictures of Kim Kardashian’s ass ever will. While the Kimster’s pic serves only to reinforce the women as sexual meat paradigm, the dress picture emphasises something altogether different:

That two different people can perceive the exact same ‘reality’.... differently.

 Rather profound I thought.

Still not impressed? Well let’s extrapolate (and here I break my ‘no controversial issues’ rule to a certin extent)

Let’s take the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

There's a ‘reality’ here that changes with every person you talk to. Some see ‘evil Muslims’, some see ‘evil Jews’, some see ‘cunning Zionist oppressors’, some see ‘violent Hamas extremists’ while others see atrocities committed on both sides and write them all off as ‘religious idiots’.

So who is right?

Well we could ask the media, but do you really think they are able to give you a comprehensive story in a three minute newsbite? Doubtful. And in their desire to bring you the ‘two sides’ of what is actually a multi faceted issue they have a tendency to paint one side as good and the other as evil. This doesn't actually help us understand the actual situation a whole heap. These people would effectively try and tell you what colour the dress is when half of them are seeing it completely incorrectly.

When it comes to the picture it is merely a variance in perception, colour vision, and a little mental trickery. But when it comes to Israel and Palestine, variances in knowledge are the main culprits: Knowledge of the history of the occupation of Palestine by Israel, knowledge of the current situation, and knowledge of the full spectrum of religious thought within both the Jewish and Islamic religions.

If you asked an ISIS member, a Mossad employee, a moderate Imam, a Palestinian child, an Israeli university student, an American soldier, a frontline foreign doctor, a Gazan soccer player, an Al Jazeera reporter and French photographer their thoughts on the conflict, chances are you would get a different version from each of them.

A different personal and subjective version of ‘reality’ based on their own knowledge and life experience.

They would all see a slightly different coloured dress within the spectrum of vision of the ongoing conflict. And to each person those colours would be as real as the bullet casings at their feet.

So was this dress going viral such a bad thing? Really? When it so clearly illustrated how very different people’s perceptions of a ‘reality’ can be?

Some stated they would have preferred other pictures to have gone viral, such as that of a young girl being handed a folded American flag at the funeral of what one would assume is her military parent.

So what reality is to be seen in that picture? Do you see the bravery of American soldiers? The sadness of children deprived of a parent?...or does your mind extrapolate to the warmongering of political bodies and the senseless deaths of thousands of innocent people because some world leaders can't get their shit together and treat all their countrymen and women fairly and equally.

Does the picture of the little girl really teach us anything more than the picture of the dress? Probably not. 

What the dress picture effectively did was remove the context to show the simple truth. It took out the politics, the religion, the weapons, the opinions and the media slant and showed us what we needed to see.....that a complete stranger as much as someone we love and care about more than anything in the world can see something completely different to the way we do.

With the dress you don’t have a lot of hope of changing what you see.

But with everything else, there are steps of knowledge toward common ground.

So when you approach every disagreement from now on......just be thankful it’s not about that damn dress and get to steppin'

I'll leave you here with a quote from the legendary Bruce Lee. This is for all those fighting around the world for the most basic of human rights. More people stand with you than you know.

“Defeat is a state of mind; no one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality.”

Take that whichever way you see it.