Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?

Spoken in the voice of a childlike philosopher, the line turns a mundane sight—a reflection in a puddle—into a classic metaphysical puzzle about reality and perception. It suggests that what we take as “the real world” might be contingent, secondary, or even illusory, and that identity could be reversible: the observer might be the observed. The humor lies in the disproportion between the everyday setting and the vertigo-inducing implication, a hallmark of Watterson’s work, where Calvin’s imaginative leaps expose how fragile our assumptions about certainty, selfhood, and the “given” world can be.