Dreams

I managed to wake shortly after 5am. The sky is a steel blue, the air fresh and eerily quiet for now. I fed the cat, and then rested my thoughts on strange dreams I’ve been having... Such dreams are usually vivid enough for me to remember pieces of them.

The first one was two nights ago, and in that dream I was back in our old flat. You’d think that after all this time away, my memory of the place would betray me, but in the dream, the flat -the building itself- was painfully familiar, and even the detail of nasty neighbours I’d rather have forgotten was there. I wasn’t a kid in that dream, but I’d been playing like one with some boy who was a kid. We got back to my flat, panting from running around too much and the stinky next-door neighbour stormed out of his flat to warn the little boy to be quieter... The flood of emotions I felt within that dream was so realistic... It was the same type of scorn I used to feel for the low-life who used to beat his dogs ruthlessly and let his children stink, wearing dirty clothes - all 5 or 6 of them.

I sneered at the man’s threats but what changed in the dream was his response. He wasn’t fazed by my disdain for him, he laughed instead and pushed his way into my flat to sit on the pink sofa. I was going berserk by then, fearing mum’s wrath when she would come home to find the horrible man in our flat. The little boy was still there, hesitant. I could tell he was very afraid of the balding, overweight man with small, narrowed eyes. I kept trying to have him leave, but he ignored me, smirking. After another moment trying to get him out (I was even holding a baseball bat...) he suddenly leaned toward me to whisper words; words spoken so fast that I fail to remember them exactly, and it woke me up at once. It was something along the lines of “did you know about your father...”
It had to do with a secret, or some secret object that belonged to my father, or something stupid like that. In the end, the dream made no sense whatsoever...



Last night’s dream was a different breed altogether. It was about the black hole within me, or a part of it. It was such a convoluted dream that I wouldn’t even know how to describe it accurately. I saw myself wandering places, even getting to some beach at some point, crowded with people lying on the sand, by the strong waves that rolled against the shore. I was looking for someone I loved. I was so focused in the search - I ‘knew’ who it was only in the dream, but I had lost him- that I could intensely feel the pain of having lost him. It was a remnant of pure love, the crazy type that makes you obsess over a person. Within the dream, I had memories in which I drowned my sorrow, and I kept searching for the guy, in vain. I had memories of how it had felt to be with him, though I’ve never experienced anything like this in reality. Thinking of that imaginary love, the memories made me feel complete, but as I searched for him all alone, I could feel the emptiness his departure had caused in me. I didn’t want to wake up from that dream... I didn’t want to wake up because in that dream, the guy I was looking for was real, somehow, and there was hope that if I searched for him hard enough I could find him again. As soon as I woke up, of course, I realised that it was all nonsense.

Dreams that seem so real that they give you that fleeting hope are the hardest to bear, really. I love and hate them at the same time... I saw his beautiful face, full of love and care, and I longed to be with him again... He felt so real... So real even in absence... I woke up before I could find him, of course.

What I find strange about dreams sometimes, is how you move along the convoluted plot that makes no sense in reality and feel as though it is the continuity of some other backstory... For instance, I would be dreaming about something in particular, and within that same dream there would be remnants of some other, older dream I had in the past as though the latest dream was but a continuity of the other, somehow... It gives you the false sense of it being real.

Where is the beautiful, caring face I saw in my dream? I want to believe so much that he is in fact real, that there is a chance I could find him with my eyes wide open rather than closed...

Reality dictates that dreams are just what they are: dreams.

Stream of consciousness

The trouble with too much imagination is that it is bound to take you further than reality and therefore there is always a painful crashing down period.

I went to see the new batman yesterday. It’s hard to believe that heath ledger who played an amazing Jocker, is dead. That such talent killed itself, just like that, and all the world has left is one last breathtaking performance immortalised on screen.

There is something about feeling too much or being so sensitive, somehow, that every simple beauty or glimpse of what is hardly ever noticed becomes an epiphany of some sort, yet pain is as much emplified for no logical reason. As feelings keep burning lungs and spirit the mind grows weary and a mental torpor slowly eases its way through the body itself until the light is so faint that you stagger down the well you knew was there all along, but you can no longer avoid it. 

There is so much beauty through the pain of living that it is bound to kill a spirit in its bud when one dares to gaze at such spendor for too long. Written words are a painter’s brush forming infinite combinations of colors to mirror the hues of rain and sunlight. Alone they are little more than shadows of what they ought to become. Together suddenly the world is set alight and there are no limits. These days words seem to flow out of my hands and I watch the threads of thought slide along those lines without even knowing whether it is really me writing or something beyond my own self already. When one achieves greatness of any kind, does it mean the soul must have gone to other shores where only splendor and perfection prevail?

 Like a vessel the body translates or convey what little can be from those unphasomable shores and withers slowly under the strain, much like the one who one day built wings so he could reach the sun.

But what do I know? What am I? If there is but one thing I am aware of it is how tiny my body is amidst the ocean of life. But my mind? How far does it stretch? How far can one venture and be certain that it is not in fact an illusion of infinity? What if what I saw for infinity was only a trick of the light too bright and I kept flying in circles? Who would warn me? Who would even notice?

Sorrow tires me yet my mind feeds off it. The contradiction is again sublime. If I was made of words I would want to be a poem.

Why do I keep writing even though the writing itself is far from perfect? Because the process is the closest one can get to their own sense of perfect, which is always subjective in its very nature. Yes, of course the notion of perfection is subjective... The process of creating new lives, no matter how fictional, awakens a new lease of hope and opens the mind’s window to let your inner eye wander as free as can ever be. And so it is that with every page of any story I feel more of a sense of being alive than reality could ever grant me. But then there are the eyes to see what is real before you and life as it is is rarely more than one long cliche after the next. 

That’s why I used to love watching movies or read fantasy stories. They would open my inner window, you see. Throughout my early years this was enough for me to revel in my own little worlds but then as I grew older I was forced to stare reality in the face and that tiny window was no longer enough. Hanging onto it as I grow old now would blur the fine line between reason and folly, I suppose. As long as I find the strength to question myself I cannot be so bad. The day I take my own word for anything I will know that reason is morphing into something much darker, a shade closer to nothingness, perhaps.

Before the memories comes the rain

If there wasn’t even the slightest hint of pleasure in any of our actions then we wouldn’t bother in the first place. There can be pleasure in expectations of outcomes through actions, too. Thus we often force ourselves to do things we wouldn’t normally want to do simply because there is something appealing at the end of it. What it really comes down to is selfishness and its spectrum. What is called survival instinct in the animal kingdom has morphed into a destructive machine in man’s world. If I can assume so easily about others’motives and wonder endlessly about the whys of a world then I can easily imagine how anynone else could have ideas of grandeur in their head instead, justifying every action as legitimate or necessary.

It’s all a foul pile of garbage. Excuses, excuses. Men are the masters of dellusions. If there’s anything they have finally tamed it is the wondrous realm of lies and make-believe.

Pretence. Faux-semblants. Projection. 

Here are our talents. We don’t see the world- or reality, for that matter- as it is; we see it as we please. We don’t choose knowingly - or freely- we do so out of lust or envy or sloth.

Words are my only solace. The rest is out of reach. Reality is a sham, akin to a set on which all the pretty things one day were gathered. Everything around us- the buildings, the streets, the nice, glowing lamp posts- is made of cardboard the wind can blow to the ground in one swift stroke. It is cartboard we decided to see as gold. And that is why reality is a sham, it is nothing more, nothing less, than what we make it to be.

Anyway... We’re so poor and always on the verge of perdition that I’ve come to kind of like that way of life- almost. There’s a certain unfathomable charm to it and it does make me smile when I think of our life so far. In all my mortal flaws my spirit remains unspoilt. Take Paris, for example, or what I remember of it now. We lived in that flat in some council estate and it sucked. Not the appartment in itself but ever since our first cat had caught flees we’d had to remove all the carpet and I ended up with a bedroom whose floor was the concrete itself. Mum’s always been a cleaning freak and we weren’t to blame for the infestation of flees. We had a family for neighbours who were SO filthy that the corridor of the whole building floor stunk. Not only did they not wash but the children wore rags and nits as hairclips. Oh, and the parents were rude and brash while the kids were simply too young to have turned half as bad. They had two dogs the man of the house used to beat senseless. You’d hear the poor skeletal beasts roar in pain, high-pitched moans from big German Shepherds full of flees and years of neglect. Sometimes I’d go out to play in the square and I’d see him walk his dog- the other one had just magically disapeared one day, never to be seen again- and I’d see the meaning of despair in the glaze of its eyes. 

No, it was rather a glimpse of what unhappiness truly looked like, not just in a dog but in general. That day it felt to me like the epitome of pain and unhappiness in its most basic, intrinsic form. I then came to realise for myself that if a person was capable to inflict such pain to an animal there is no telling what that person could do to another human being. That, if anything, showed me the true extend of being human. Now, of course, it will take at least a life time to truly understand and define that extend for it is one thing to realise something or get a glimpse of a reality or notion, quite something else to truly understand its significance, the ramification beyond superficial knowledge where one only comments or utter empty statements- no matter how true they really are in the end- instead of being able to get to the latter through a proper reasoning.