Of ice storms and solipsism

This is by way of immense mental catharsis, spilling out some very weird questions that have been on my mind for a long time.

*

We had an ice storm one night, while I was asleep. I barely even noticed it until I slipped on a patch of transparent ice and almost broke my neck, hurrying to get to Bio class. Even then, I put it down to slush, and hopped onto the grass to get traction, barely noticing the little blades breaking off under my feet. Skidded into Anspach, ran breathlessly into the Bio hall, took my usual seat right in front (not to be a teacher's pet, since that doesn't happen in college unless they pay you for it--just because I have trouble concentrating on the lecture unless I'm staring the prof in the face and counting his nose hairs). It took five minutes before I realized that the prof wasn't in class. It took ten more before I gave up and left. I was peering at the noticeboard outside the classroom, looking for a yellow "Sorry! Class cancelled! See you next week!" sign, when a scruffy dude in a red goatee tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey! You in Bio 151?"
"Uh, yeah," I said. "Why, you know what happened? Did the prof decide not to come in because of the ice storm? What a wuss."
"Nah," he said. "Campus is closed. All the classes are cancelled."
"Oh." I stood there for a moment, chewing my chapped lip. If you go to CMU, or any Michigan school, you will realize just how unusual snow days are. Last year, there was a goddamn blizzard, and kids had to slog to class in snowshoes. I had been really looking forward to my classes that day, too; we'd been scheduled to delve into the mysteries of molecular bonds and amino acids in Bio, really getting down into what makes life work. I simply did not know what to do with myself and my notebooks. I turned to ask the dude if he had anything planned for the day, but he'd slipped away back into the scruffy-goatee aether.
I wandered outside, not knowing how to fill up my time. An ice storm. How had I missed that? There was no sun to illuminate the trees, no warm yellow light to sparkle off the diamond-encrusted branches, just dull grey clouds and treacherous ice that I couldn't see. Every little thing I saw, every blade of grass and crumpled-up cigarette, every rotten cherry hanging from every branch, was covered in a thin sheet of clear, pure, dead water.
I walked around touching things, trying to feel their texture under the ice. Everything was smooth, slippery, cold. A twig slipped out of my hands before I could run my fingers across its rough bark. A cherry disintegrated to red-brown mush in my fingers as I tried to break the ice off its delicate skin.

I probably could turn this pointless little story into some kind of anecdote about the need to slow down and look at the beauty around you, or maybe a parable about the fragility of apparently solid routines. "Serious" authors do this shit all the time. Which is a mistake, I think. drworm and I were talking about this, the silliness of trying to find symbolic meaning in everyday events. Real life doesn't work that way; that's why we have fiction, to satisfy our need for patterns and closure and poetic justice in a world that doesn't really pay attention to these things.
In any case, the metaphor wouldn't hold. The ice didn't fill me with awe for the beauty of nature or the power of weather, it fucking scared me. Why couldn't I see it until I almost broke my neck? Why were these normal things I saw every day on the way to class suddenly shut off from me in a layer of unbreakable cold? Why couldn't I keep anything in my hands?
I'm sure that I was the only one on campus thinking this. I am absolutely, 100% certain that the other conscientious/brave/didn't-check-the-e-mail souls hurrying back to their dorms with me had their minds on more concrete matters, like how not to slip on the ice or whether their car would start in the cold weather or how many times they would have to bang on the landlord's door before he agreed to call a plumber to fix the water pipes that almost certainly burst and froze in the cold.
It's not that they didn't see the questions inherent in the ice, it's that the ice asked no questions to begin with. The ice just sat there and froze, as ice will do. I was the one who placed meaning upon the ice, turned concrete things into metaphors for my own abstract philosophical queries, as humans will do.

The last thing we'd discussed in Bio was Intelligent Design and scientific proof. One girl stood up and lectured that there was proof for the existence of her God, and that she'd pray for us. The teacher explained that there wasn't any proof either way, and that there never could be, and that the girl was committing a massive tactical mistake in insisting upon proof, for then she could be easily disproven. I sat back and absorbed the fray.
I am an atheist. I don't believe in God, not of any type. Never felt a holy presence or a higher power, never needed to, don't need it to explain my world. Things like Julian Jayne's theory of the bicameral mind, or the VMAT2 gene, or even simple evolutionary psychology only gave me a leg to stand on, a way to show my militant Zionist Hebrew school teachers and smug baptized classmates that I wasn't crazy or stupid for not believing in something they all could feel, that I wasn't missing out on the best part of life, that there wasn't a hole in my soul or my heart because I hadn't given myself over to something I never experienced in the first place.

And hey, as long as I'm discussing what I believe, I'm also a solipsist. Which is really just about the last word in sane illusion (after that, you get to schizophrenia). I've been one since I was a kid, and I'm just realizing what it means now. This might not be ice. This might not be reality, and you can't prove that it is, and how the hell do I know you exist anyway? You're just a figment of my imagination. Actually, everything that exists might be a figment of my imagination, even if it is real.
You can see the logical flaw, of course. At least, anivad did: "Are you sure you exist?" The true solipsist can't be sure. If everything else is an illusion, why not consciousness, too? Why not Self? I've already accepted that I'm a social robot with faulty wiring, a zombie Bride sewn together from the hearts of a thousand unrequited lovers, a tabula rasa who doesn't like the colors she's been scribbled on with. Am I less yet, a figment of the imagination of a God who doesn't even exist in the first place? Or is everyone else real, and I'm not? Was I created out of whole cloth by the subconscious thoughts of those around me? Which one of you clever bastards thought me up?

And I know I'm never going to be able to stop asking these questions, no matter how many answers I get. I'm never going to be able to ignore them or get them out of my mind. Never.
I have a thousand variations on the same story to illustrate why this is, stories I've made up, read, heard, totally forgotten; the only difference between them is the flavor of each changing reality. I'm going to use (with permisson) the latest one I've heard, one of the simplest and most direct, no Mugwumps or mysterious fortune cookies to add to the plot, a story he_dreams_awake told on his radio station last night. (In doing so, I'm sure I'm changing the point of the original story entirely, and not telling the part I've taken nearly as well; if you want the original, ask him.)
You've all seen "The Matrix," right? Put aside your natural revulsion towards self-inserts and imagine that you've just gone through the first half of the movie, taken the red pill, been ejected out of a slimy pod, and shown around Zion. "That was all pretend," your new friends say, "an illusion, a computer program. You can't trust that. This is your home now. This is what's real."
Given this scenario, what do you do? I'm curious.

[Poll #655428]

Where does a reasonable person stop asking? Does the invalidity of the first reality automatically mean the validity of the one that replaced it? What if there's a third one; is that one more real, or less? A fourth? Are they all layers upon layers, extensions of the same infinite nightmare?

Where do belief and disbelief circle around and melt into each other? Am I so skeptical that I can't even believe what my eyes and ears are telling me, or am I so gullible that I'll seize upon what amounts to little more than a freak of logic and assume it means anything?
It must be belief of some sort, because I don't have any proof; if I had proof, I'd know, instead of just believing, and I'd be a lot more certain about all of this. As it is, it's all speculation that I can't get rid of, since I've never seen reality crack or fade, never been in a different world that I couldn't wake up from, never personally experienced anything I couldn't explain.
PKD sez: Reality is what stays when you stop believing in it. I'm still sitting on the couch; the world hasn't gone away. Does this disprove my entire entry, or does it just mean that a paranoid schizophrenic science fiction author just isn't the best person to go to when you want a solid answer about reality? How do I know if I've stopped believing in something I can still see?

Have you ever believed in something completely illogical that you knew had to be false? Convinced yourself that it was your imagination running away with you, or some buried need for hope or acceptance that the rest of your life couldn't fulfill, all perfectly good reasons why it couldn't be so? Something you couldn't shake, no matter how hard you tried, even after you'd calmed down and worked the rest of your problems out?
Is it genetics? Is it delusion? Is it truth? Is it God? Is it the side effects of an old prescription? Is it the monkey in your soul?

All I can see is the trees, and they're covered in snow, and it's beautiful. I know that if I touched the twigs, I'd still feel the ice underneath, and I don't think it really means anything at all.