Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

1. It represents the ignorant lives that people in most institutions live.
2. Symbolism is used often in the form of extended metaphor. He refers to the institution of education as a cave with shackles and an instructor telling you what to believe. The sun being true enlightenment.
3. If you want true enlightenment, you have to ask your own questions. You must personally take charge in figuring the world out yourself.
4. They weren't there by their own will. Somebody else forced them in there and don't want them to leave.
5. School in that in order to succeed, a student has to mindlessly follow whatever the teacher tells them, rather than a person being in charge of their own personalized education.
6. The freed prisoner is excited and curious while the trapped prisoners are subtly content with where they are, even though, it's not the true world.
7. Leaving the cave at first, when you become "blinded by the sun," and when you go back into the cave, when "your eyes need to adjust to the darkness."
8. The prisoners simply need to be curious enough to break their shackles by asking questions, and observing what is really happening.
9. I don't think there is too large of a distinction, the distinction comes when trying to recreate a reality in the form of words for somebody else, or when you try to remember what reality used to be.
10. The world is better understood through the physical makeup of things. Thoughts cannot influence reality.

Big Question

My big question has been one I've been thinking of for a while. It's more of a theory than a question, but it follows the formula that Dr. Preston laid out for us about these questions, so here it is:

On the topic of dimensional theory, I can think in a way that nobody else can. Everybody's thoughts are unique, and cannot be measured directly. According to my theory, this is because thoughts are a fourth dimensional object that humans cannot directly perceive because we are third dimensional beings. If thoughts are fourth dimensional, then it is very possible that all thinking forms of life are controlled by the same fourth dimensional being.

The basis of my theory is speculation on the fourth dimension, through comparison of the third and second dimension. Since we exist in the third dimension, we can perceive the first three dimensions. Imagine the second dimension as a piece of paper. You can touch the paper at separate points with one hand, and wiggle your fingers around the paper separately. In the same way, we could be controlled by a fourth dimensional being by being the "fingertips" of a being touching a third dimensional "paper."

In order for this to be efficient, this means that each our world would need to be equidistant to this fourth dimensional being, as to waste less energy (if that even exists in the fourth dimension). This means that our space is fourth dimensionally round. What does that mean? Well, imagine a circle. That's a two dimensional figure. The circumference of that circle is a first dimensional line, coiled in a way so that every point on that line is equidistant to a point in the center of the circle. In the same way the points on the surface of a sphere are equidistant to the point in the center of a sphere. So our "space" is fourth dimensionally wrapped around a center fourth dimensional point.

Comment with any questions or loopholes you find in my theory and I'll look into it.