Surreality

Ever wake up from a dream and feel that the dream was more real than real life.

I do. All the time. In fact, there was a period in my life when I was convinced (or I hoped) that my dreams were my real life and my waking life was my dream life, or more precisely my nightmare life.

“I find out a lot about myself by sleeping. Dreams, they are who I am when I’m too tired to be me.” ― Jarod Kintz

Sometimes my dreams make more sense than what is happening in my waking life.

I had a dream, which I call Apple Green Shoes, because the main character wore apple green high heels.

Apple Green Shoes girl was the owner of a song, on CD, which was the antidote to all pop music.

In the dream world, pop music was used to hypnotise the masses, to keep us all in a state of relative calm, stable, safety-oriented, believing that there was such a thing as normal life. Encouraging us to strive to live it and be normal, or at least as normal as we could pretend to be, because this was the thing to do and everyone was doing it, and it might lead to happiness.

It was a conspiracy of sorts, but not the evil mastermind kind of conspiracy, just a couple of people who had realised that humans were a volatile race, and that the best way to stop us from killing each other in one big blood lust fest was to lull us into a state of relative calm. Hide the chaos with a veneer of order. Pop music became the way to do this.

Pop music was then distributed into all other media to be sure that it reached as many ears as possible. It became embedded in advertising, films, the news, shops, the workplace, elevators, the street, and anywhere, everywhere else, and thus embedded in our psyche whether we wanted to hear it or not.

 

 

Because not everyone listens to pop music, or music at all in some cases, but it was not about reaching every ear on every human alive, just about getting at a majority, and through that majority influencing the rest to keep calm.

 

Keep Calm And… by chengwesley

 

For some reason Apple Green Shoes girl was out to wreck the calm and liberate everyone from the hypnosis.

She was being hunted by those who wanted to maintain the status quo. They didn’t want to kill her, just stop her from doing what she wanted to do, destroy her song and CD, because once she played it to an audience they believed all hell would break loose upon the world.

 

 

My part as the dreamer was just to watch the whole story, and not participate. Which was odd. I am usually very active in my dreams, sometimes to the point of waking up completely exhausted. So to be an bystander in my own dream was surreal.

At some point my cat tapped my face with a soft paw and woke me up. That’s my cue to lift the covers and let it crawl underneath. It’s a ritual. As I lay, half-awake, half-asleep, snuggling soft kitty fur, listening to and feeling the rhythmic sound of purring, I reviewed the dream as the memory of it was still warm.

I used to have a pair of apple green shoes, many years ago, far away in a time which now seems more like a dream.

I used to listen to pop music, now I often forget there is such a thing as music.

And…

There are times when I think I’m completely out of touch with the rest of the human race. Times when I don’t think I’m even part of it. I feel alienated, alien, disconnected, detached… but many people feel that way.

We belong, and we don’t belong. We’re a member of the human tribe, and yet also a maverick, going it alone. Sometimes we’re in sync, and sometimes we are totally out of everyone else’s sync, dancing to the beat of our inner music.

But the dream was not about me, even if it was my dream. I was an observer… perhaps of someone else’s dream.

I have no idea what that dream was saying. If it was saying anything. Maybe it meant nothing, it was just there to entertain the sleeper. And then give the waker something to ponder over and distract them for a while from reality, a reality which others might find surreal, but which the waker considers it to be real.