Crossword-Solution: BLACKOUTS 9 letters, 3 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 17

Maybe, life is a kind of waking dream. Maybe, it's a double-dream with a false awakening. Maybe, the dream only becomes lucid and truly luminous given the fuller perspective of life after one's own wake. Maybe, the pictures never stop. Doesn't the existence of dreams and higher consciousness during the years of blackouts of a lifetime, whether longer or shorter, give us a valid premise to hope that another highly spiritual state may await our passing?

Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can't sweat the fact that you've lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if incomplete, version of reality.

Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals. Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.