Our daily lives, our surroundings - furniture, pavements, shops, our day-to-day concerns consume so much of our attention that often it's hard to put human existence into a Universal context - our place on a planet in a solar system that's one of billions in a galaxy that's one of billions.
And yet when we do so, it can strangely comforting; the thought that there's so much out there, the scale and mystery of it all - and the fact that here we are to behold it.
Consider the massive input of resources that governments make into researching the Universe; from the Large Hadron Collider to the huge radio telescopes dotted around the world. "Money," say some, "that could be better spent addressing humanity's more pressing needs."
But as a species we could not countenance a situation in which we are not doing everything possible to gain a fuller understand of our Universe - from the inner workings of the atom to the farthest galaxies.
Science is about hard fact. Unlike politics or economics, which have so much direct effect on our lives, the theoretical positings of scientists searching for a provable consensus to the conundrums of cosmology seem immensely vague and distant. It's so much easier to have heated arguments about migration, Brexit or in-vitro fertilisation than it is to discuss why there should be less gravity about in the universe given the amount of mass in it. What's causing that extra gravity? Is it dark energy or dark matter? Quintessence or dark fluid?
For all of Mankind's expenditure on science, we really know little about the Universe in which we live; however, we do know much more than our forefathers. We know that the Universe is expanding - (Red Shift); we can work out how fast it's expanding, and what it's expanding from (the Big Bang).
But we don't know whether that expansion will result in a steady state, or whether matter will start to slow down, then start to close in upon itself, drawing back to the original singularity. Does the Universe, then, expand and contract in endless cycles?
And is this Universe, the one that we can see, the only universe there is? Are there several? Or are there an infinite number of universes, including one that's identical in every respect to this one, except there you had gooseberry yogurt for breakfast last Thursday?
So - we have (so the scientists, armed with results from telescopes provided by us taxpayers, tell us) all this dark matter, dark energy, dark fluid, quintessence - which no one can yet pin down. There are many equations arguing the existence of these theoretical types of matter and energy, but there's no empirical proof - no one yet has ever seen dark matter.
In which case, here's my theory (sorry - no equations, I'm afraid). As valid as everyone else's, until proved wrong...
Yesterday morning I was still in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness in that part-asleep, part-awake state that one achieves when there's no rush to get up. Downstairs, son Eddie was frying bacon. The smell wafted up into my room and entered my dream.
It then suddenly struck me.
While we're asleep, our resting consciousness picks up dark energy. You may think you are lying still in a bed standing on a floor of a house standing on a patch of land. But that house, that bed is actually on a planet that's spinning (at Warsaw's latitude) at 642 mph (1,033 km/h) while hurtling around the sun at a speed of 66,619 mph (107,230 km/h), and rushing through our galaxy at 515,000 mph (828,000 km/h). And as you travel in your bed at these improbable speeds, sweeping through oceans of invisible dark energy, your consciousness picks it up - much like your nostrils pick up smells - and it relays it to you in the form of dreams.
Once again; your consciousness ploughs through fields of that dark energy while you're awake, and while you're asleep.
The dreams are local to us, just like the smell from your kitchen is unique to your kitchen and different to your neighbour's kitchen. So it's unlikely you'll get a dream featuring stuff that's going on in a faraway galaxy, but far more likely that you'll pick up threads of something that's happened nearby in the not too distant past.
So there we are - consciousness as a part of the universe, along with matter and energy.
Until science proves otherwise - that's my theory and I'm sticking to it!
[AND THEN THIS EVENING... THIS APPEARS: MATERIALISM ALONE CANNOT EXPLAIN CONSCIOUSNESS
The heart of this article, by Prof Adam Frank, is this: "Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. "
This time two years ago:
Work starts on Warsaw-Radom rail modernisation
This time three years ago:
Won't be long 'til summertime is through
This time five years ago:
It was a good year for the apples
This time seven years ago:
Early-September moan about the commuting
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