How to Kill a Man
…in one of the saddest ways possible.
Dreams have many names just as they take different forms. Usually, we see them first with the mind’s eye before slowly bringing them to the realm of substance. The physical. And it is not unusual for dreams to stay as ideas for a very long time. Ideas, after all, are how matter happens to come to existence. Matter takes the form that “idea” creates. And dreams, chief of all ideas, is the bedrock of everything we now see today within our world.
It matters little that dreams come from a place without form, in fact, that feature makes it possible for a dream to undergo several restructuring and shaping before being created into a model that can now take an actual form with substance or matter that already exists.
Think of limbo.
Limbo is not real, not in the sense of having a physical location or having substance we can touch. But limbo is very much a place that exists. Limbo is where dreams that were once imagined and somehow conceptualised into models — and even at times, materialised — go to die. But not that kind of death. Limbo is alive. It is beaming with remnants of dreams that never attained the full state of fruition, never totally realised. They are those elements that made it out of the dream world but never found their footing in reality.
Limbo is a sad, sad place. Because it is filled with potentials never fully attained, and with every element that exists in limbo, there is a piece of the soul of the dreamer forever lost — roaming.
From a happy beginning…
A man is born into a material world, but as he grows, an “ideal” forms within him so that a new realm of endless possibilities expands as his view of the natural physical world shrinks.
At first, he confuses one for the other by thinking they are one and the same. Then he learns that the physical world is merely an extension of the dream world. That is, the dream world is where the creation starts, but many never make it into the physical realm. So he learns to dream unbounded things. The extent to which his dreams are formed depends solely on how much he can imagine.
But here, man faces a problem: he quickly learns that many constraints in the physical realm prevent the realisation of dreams. And here, death begins. Now, the physical eye is limited in its view but so is the inner one. At first, it is a slow decline, a bit of giving up due to “understanding how the world works”. So that he no longer wishes to explore the possibilities because they are not realistic. And instead, he buries himself in mundane daily tasks that match the reality he lives in.
And this reinforces his new belief, because the more time he spends on these real things, the more he can create the semblance of a habitable order in the physical. But he doesn’t immediately realise that his ideas and dreams and aspirations are slowly slipping into limbo, where they would forever roam.
And man, once enlightened and optimistic, soon settles into a rot where he denies actual chaos by a continual strive to maintain physical order; where death slowly creeps in until at last, upon realisation, he no longer cares.
And man, once alive and vibrant, slowly learns to die in one of the saddest ways. He dies from within.
