Last night I had a dream (or was it a nightmare?) - one of those surreal one's that linger with you for many days after. In a bid to claim this dream for posterity, and perhaps to better understand it, I document it here - in the duluxdreams archives. The dream starts off harmlesly enough but later descends into the darkest recesses of my black soul - transmogrifying itself into a nightmare.
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It starts with a small spaceship with me sitting inside the tiny cockpit; bare feet and slippers with legs crossed on a shaggy carpet. The cockpit is small and cozy and dark. Like those Japanese sleeping pods in Tokyo. There is no room to stand and all you can see are the winking lights of the control panel buttons and above these, on all sides, a long wide panel of glass, through which you can peer out into deep space. To my right is a white mini refridgerator that hums away continously, and above it, a little cupboard containing tinned food items; tuna, spaghetti-hoops, sardines, beans, and noodles (the instant 4min variety). I also have a kettle, fresh milk (from?) and a packet of teabags called 'Ceylon Premium Teas'. I am alone in the cockpit. In the dream I am aware that I have been sent by the good people of earth on a one-way mission to a distant planet. How long will it take me to get there? Two hundred and fifty years! I am all alone for these two hundred and fifty years with no contact. Just me in this cozy winking broom-cupboard of a ship; slowly, crawling through space. The ship is on autopilot - space being so vast and uneventful. And yet surprisingly I feel happy. Why am I happy? Because...
...The folks on earth have been wise enough to upload into the ships computer all the knowledge of earth. So, I have access to every conceivable thing that mankind knows. I can access scientific journals, obscure historical texts, reports, newspapers, magazines, porn, all the editions of National Geographic, Economist, and most importantly of all, all the books that have ever been published on earth; all the classics: Homer, Moby-Dick, Proust, Robinson Crusoe; you name it it's all there and not only Western literature but also Eastern tomes such as the Upanishads, Bhagavita and the Karma Sutra (what good?). So I spend my time; all two hundred and fifty years of it, reading this stuff! My favourite is Robinson Crusoe whom I love to read under the dim light of the winking buttons, with a cup of tea in hand, just me, in the cozy cockpit; legs crossed, sitting on the shaggy carpet, whilst outside the stars blink in an endless dancing charade. Occasionally my reading is interrupted when through the window I espie asteroids and whooshing funnel shaped comets with their bushy streaming tails and pink gaseous nebulae that look like splats of paint. I even wave and say 'Hi' to a family of wonderfully gay creatures that look like giant luminous jelly-fish that live in the vacuum of space. One of them offers me a chewing gum...Weird.
Eventually after hundreds of years of solo travel; and after having absorbed everything; after having read all the great books and no doubt thinking myself to be very clever indeed, my little spaceship finally lands on the distant planet - my destination. So, I open the hatch and walk out timidly, my legs a little stiff, squinting into a bright baking-yellow desert planet - all dunes and nothing else. Nothing else but sand dunes from the tip of my legs to the end of my ears. I am the only one there...I look back and the ship has disappeared. And then I realise that I don't know why I am here. Why am I here? And then like a speeding train the aloneness hits me. I am alone. And all the knowledge I have gained during the centuries of my journey is wholly useless. What good is Madame Bovary? What good is Virgil now? And suddenly this overwhelming feeling starts growing inside, this morbid despair - all black and gooey, and I start sobbing in the sand, sifting it through my fingers, pummelling it with my fists, smashing my head against the infinite hollowness in my heart. What a fool I've been! An idiot savant! - and I'll never see my family or nieces again (my nieces are quite prominent in the dream)...and then I realise that they're long dead, and now I'm really choking in tears, with spit drooling down my mouth and I can't breathe, and I look up to the sky and scream to god to help me, and then I wake up - crying.
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