sheep dreaming of electric children

What do children see? 

This question makes me consider the possibility that I live in a simulation. 

When the question is asked, it's supposed to conjure images of being so steeped in cynicism and a lifetime of shit that you can't possibly remember what it was like to be a child. 

But trust me I bathed in that cynicism I've lived in it. I breathed it in and pissed it out and breathing in again like an infant in the embryonic sack. 

But when I look at a child's face my inherent empathy fades much of that away. I can instantly be transported into a world of Wonders. 

I can instantly wipe away the layers of meanings and functions that I see on every object, and instead just enjoy the object for what it is …or what it could be.

Sure I'm unable to generate surprise when I know the functions that exist. But I can understand that surprise and I can recognize it in a child's eyes.

What I have a hard time imagining is someone whose own past is so blocked to them that they can neither remember nor imagine how they themselves saw the world as a child. 

That so many people seem to echo the notion that they can't see the world as a child, blows my mind. Sure I understand that extreme trama can block your mind from remembering parts of it. And to those people I feel truly sorry. But the sheer number of adults who claim to have no comprehension of a child's mind? 

These same adults who will look at me with horror when I describe some of the things I've experienced. Are all of them barely survivors of some great trauma? 

The other option of course is that I do live in a simulation. That the machine or whatever it is that has created my reality has programmed these adults as adults, has not given them the programming that they would have received growing to adulthood. 

I try not to be callous but instinctually I do tend to treat these people as NPCs. Treat the vast majority of them as background characters, as noise, as set dressing. 

In a way it makes me hope that the absurdity is the truth. Else I am dismissive of the true trauma that swarms around me everyday. 

Because what I cannot comprehend, the question I ask is: “what do the people who ask ‘what do children see’ see?”