I exited the exam hall early as I've finished my essay and got a good feeling about it (still do now). I wrote it in a simple, easily digestible manner with a heavy dose of wit, but also concise with my points and got deeper with every point. But I want to know what you guys, fellow TSA takers or not, think. I answered the philosophical question "Can you ever tell whether you're dreaming or not?"
Can't exactly remember what I wrote, but I remember I wrote the definition of the act of dreaming as "experiencing a supernatural world that is outside the realms of reality". I then moved on to say that in order to know whether I'm dreaming or not, I would have to do some physical and philosophical checks.
The first one would be the simple "psychological" physical checks. It is deemed that in a dream, words morph and jump around and the number of fingers on your hand are not always constant. With this argument forward, I closed it with "seeing that I can clearly see five fingers on my left hand pressing against this sheet, and still able to write this essay without words jumping around (yet) I can conclude that I'm not dreaming."
The next check is a check of self-awareness and existence of some form of decision-making. Because in dreams, you're seeing a five-sensical movie, of which your course of action is linear. I ended this one with "seeing that I'm thinking of what to write next on this sheet and which restaurant to dine at for dinner, I suppose conclusively that I'm not dreaming."
I provided a counter-argument for my third point. Basically I said there could be external influences acting upon our "real" selves that affects our decisions in this realm. For example, there could be a pen placed between my fingers that's making me write this essay here. "Hence", I ended, "There could be external factors making me write this essay and you reading it."
For the conclusion, I brought everything home. Mentioned that while I passed the checks, I could still very well be in a dreaming state where everything happening around me is influenced by the "outside" world. I ended this very cheekily (I think) with "However, I will know whether I'm dreaming or not when I get that Oxford offer."
So tell me what you guys think! Do you think I can be seriously considered with this essay? For reference, I'm applying for PPE at Balliol College, and predicted A*AA in Maths, economics and History.