Messages From My Dream-Self #16 – Looking Into The Void

Nietzsche was right, it does stare back and its stare is penetrating and unmerciful. It draws you like heights draw some people to an edge. You want to fall into it, step over into the empty air and trust to a belief that the fall won’t hurt.

It will.

It’ll do far worse.

I stare into the Void at the memory stars of my life and some of them draw me like a splinter from a wound filled with the puss of infection.

Is this why we die, I wonder. Is death just life ejecting us from it like any other intruder to perfection?

I look at the Void and it returns my attention.

I see the memory stars, and each second I see another born.

Memory in the making, this moments thoughts are tomorrows memories.

Radu walks the crystal, I hear him but I do not watch. I see the memory of him in the distance, I see his fierce beautiful roar and fleeing figures. I smile and remember my other friend, the one I abandoned, and the smile falters.

The edge draws me, the memory stars’ beckon.

I appear in none of them of course, the memories of me belonging to others and never to myself. Recordings of myself imprinted within someone else’s mind, outside of my ownership, outside of me by design. We meet almost a hundred thousand people in an average lifetime, leaving perhaps a million memories of us which are not our own. Are there more memories of me out there than in here I wonder?

And if so who owns me?

I see memories of those no longer with us, people who have not walked the world in a decade or more and I wonder…

A million memories of them still exist, even if their own do not.

Are they really gone?

My Grandfather laughs his deep boisterous laugh and my Grandmother shakes her head in exasperation. My mother working, my uncle up to his mischief. Some of them still walking the world, some of them not, but all alive in here until the day I die.

Perhaps longer.

A dream does not exist; we’re told they are just a random firing of synapses that a waking mind imprints meaning on; but is that what we truly believe?

Memory, meaning, dreams…

History, love, existence…

All caught in dreams that have no meaning but those we give them?

Dreams are the flint that lights the spark.

If they don’t exist nothing does.

I see the memory stars grow and shift, ever changing and never still. They move at the speed of dream, faster than the speed of idea; and the speed of idea is swift indeed.

Even these dreams, even my ideas.

Reality sits in the corner of imagination like a naughty child who does not know how to share, while Imagination plays and lives; while Dream watches over them all, the master of all regardless of how they deny its mastery.

Dream does not care; you do not have to believe in it to be under its thrall.

We all belong to dream.

We are the children who look up into an adult’s eyes with awe.

While Dream looks down on us and, like a kind man with deep pockets, it passes its gifts to us; and then we deny it, and still it smiles.

posted by Alan Preece
on November, 27