Dreams and Distortions

A take on how dreams in all their absurdity still mirror our thoughts

It’s a dream alright. Standing at the base of the l’arc de triomphe de l’etoile. The dream mirrors her thought, exaggerated like the oblong mirror images of ourselves that we laugh at in fun houses, but an image nonetheless. Strange are our ways of laughing at ourselves. Prim and proper in appearance, a smile pasted on the face, head held back to give the air of confidence, a definitive stride to connote the control… and the world is fooled. The mirror at the funhouse cuts through the layers of pretence. Oblong, distorted, ugly and a slew of unflattering words from the English dictionary. And we merrily laugh at ourselves…but the mirror wasn’t fooling.

The dream, the image of her thoughts, in the funhouse we call life.

 

The arc de triomphe is grand in proportions aptly decorating the victor’s pride. It’s her pride too, all that she achieved, all that she has, all that she fought for and all that she won. But the grandness is at once her pride and her folly. It’s an anticlimax of adjectives. Big, large, immense, massive, bulky, cumbersome and now burdensome. On a fragile foundation of the simple, continuous and perfect past, she merrily built the ‘will be’s cementing them with verbal promises. Little did she know that they were all subjunctives. The architecture is a fine example of the late 18th century romantic neoclassicism. The promises were the same, too verbose to be true but the romantic style offered the camouflage. Today it’s a tomb of the unknown soldier (le soldat inconnu), to her it’s a tomb of all her dead desires. The subjunctives are etched on the inner walls, they died somewhere in between the battle from the present to the future, just like some of the 558 ‘underlined’ generals who did not live to see the dawn of victory. Standing at the base, staring at the top of the monument which is more than 25 times her height she suddenly realizes her folly. She can’t possibly carry it with her, but this is all that she has.

 

The bird’s eye view of the monument exhibits the spectacular 12 radiating avenues, a ‘stellar’ view, literally. She can see the ‘avenues’… not one but all 12 at once, beckoning her to move on. Cognizance of the options is not a battle half won, infact it marks the beginning of a battle by acknowledging the presence of the ‘enemy’. The options confuse her, if only parallel universes existed for her to evaluate them.  She instead clings on to the monument she built, her pride, her folly, her everything.

 

She wakes up and laughs at the absurdness of her dream. Standing at the base of the l’arc de triomphe de l’etoile. It’s a dream alright

 

The dream, the image of her thoughts, in the funhouse we call life.