Plastic Dream
You dream because your conscious and unconscious need to manifest, concretely.
When you’re awake, you’re their shell. They exist inside and because of you. And so, they fight over you. And you’re torn between them.
When you’re asleep, you’re their canvas. So you dream, and your dreams are what they build, together.
Your dreams are the chaotic coexistence of conscious and unconscious, their incarnation.
Emphasis on chaotic. Their partial incompatibility is what makes the surrealism of a dream.
And so, one dreams.
One dreams of a planet named Anema. Breezes of light, ricocheting between its glass beaches and its shell of fluorescent gazes. Lights of all colours, often distorted, fractured. It needed no sun, it was the light itself. Its skies were a canopy of colours, a canvas of clouds of all hues. Water flowed out of them, gracefully cascading into the sea. Wisps inhabited it. Weightless, translucent, floating through the planet and riding its winds, or graciously swimming in its lucid lagoons. They sang, they harmonically plucked at strings stretched from sky to ground, weaving symphonies and melodies. It was their only instinct. They didn’t need any other, survival was granted.
But Anema was within the roche limit of another planet. They were separated by a River. Few crossed it. But curiosity killed, and some were curious.
And it is only in dreams that one can explore their unconscious.
And so, the dreamer, a wisp, followed the streams of Anema until she reached the River. Oily currents flowed above lucid water, lights dimmed at the River’s midpoint, winds recoiled upon themselves, the glass drowned in black, the confused middle ground of conscious and unconscious, the preconscious.
The wisp stood on the bank, clueless. The stark contrast scared her. But as her light went to kiss the water, it met a rock. For the first time, her light did not go through. It stopped on a dime at the reach of the rock, and behind the rock was the birth of a shadow. A silhouette emerged. Shapeless, two dimensional, the static hum of a broken stereo and the unblinking gaze of a killer. As soon as it emerged, it fled to the dark. Spurred by curiosity, the wisp followed it to its planet. The landscape morphed, the sight was blurred and the light was fogged. She was lost, and dark on dark, the Heliophobe was impossible to see. But the wisp’s light tore down the void, so the Heliophe lended a hand to the wisp. She held it, and the shadow walked her through its land.
They could not communicate, but they followed one another. It was a flawless dance of light and shadow. The Heliophobe guided the wisp through the planet, and the wisp’s light cleared the way.
It was the polar opposite of Anema, an orb of stolidness; Dry plastic beaches, seas of stillness, pools of petroleum and a horizon of motionless silhouettes, speaking exclusively in static noise. They were faceless, but their gaze was felt in millions. They had nothing else to look at. Life existed; Barely. Flowers don’t bloom, stars don’t twinkle, the moon doesn’t shine, birds don’t sing. They grow, they stare, it reflects, they scream.
Starring stars, oil floods, screams and whispers, plastic trees, absent winds, artificial nature, feigned flowers, Fordist sights, polypropylene pain. The heliophobes glared at her glare. They feared it. Occasionally, she understood some of their whispers. “Vivamus, moriendum est”. “Consummatum est, ab initio”. But the dreamer did not understand latin.
Yet she knew they were begging, for life, for death. They were stuck in between.
They walked further down the lane, but the voices and faces became fewer. It was cold. For the first time, the Wisp’s light was fading. A dimming beacon, dying to enlighten hideousness. She missed home. But she couldn’t let go of the shadow’s hand, nor could she talk to it. She didn’t know how to stop, she was never worried for her life before. She never had to be.
The land was becoming flatter, hills of plastic sleekness opened the way to frozen beaches. The water was black and iced, the sea reflected nothing but the nothingness above. In Anema, she could be swimming. Here, it was a dead end.
It was a dead end. The Heliophobe stopped walking. There was nowhere else to go, the ocean was the horizon. So the shadow stopped, and looked at her.
It went on for hours. Hours as the ice cracked, days as it rained thorium tears, weeks as it snowed fentanyl pills, months as the shadow still starred, and it wouldn’t let go. She didn’t know how to escape. She did not understand death, the concept of coming to an end, the finality of it all. Yet her light was fading as the cold blew it out. The beach’s cold air and the shadow’s cold gaze, the killing lull of watching yourself end and being unaware. The Heliophobe did not stop staring. And the ice still cracked from time to time, the ticks and tacks of a clock to demise.
The wisp was learning. There were no songs to sing, no winds to ride, no streams to bestride, no strings to pluck. For the first time, she considered death. She questioned. Were the shadows she saw alive? Did they need light to live? She’d help, if she wasn’t helpless herself. Why did they stare? Were they curious? Was it envy?
But as the wisp dimmed, the dreamer was more conscious.
A shadow exists not without a light, just like her shadow was born out of her light, in the River. They could be an unseen side of her, the dreamer. They could be her. The hypocrisy of consciousness, the light that turns a blind eye to the shadows it makes and a deaf ear to their screams.
The unconscious, the other bay of the river that rays don’t reach, the other side of the dreamer that she refuses to acknowledge, despite it dictating her with or without her consent.
The conscious was scopophobic, but the unconscious starred.
The wisp may be nothing but a Freudian slip; she was never supposed to be where she was. The shadows were not void, they were the unspoken, the forgotten, the feared, the unseen that dwell the larger half of her.
And the wisp was still fading. One last blaze, she looked at her shadow. It was still staring. For once, she feared it. The dreamer understood why she refused to acknowledge it — why would she? It wanted her dead.
But the wisp finally faded, and a war raged. Anema invaded Heliophobia, the River was a bloodbath. Life swelled, death thwarted, light pierced dark, dark doused light. A mountain of financial troubles, the tempest of an unfed family and the thunders of an untreated anxiety were tearing the sky apart. And the ice still cracked, more than ever, the ticks and tacks of an alarm clock.
The dream was over, the dreamer had awakened. Conscious and unconscious resumed their war.
(Thank you for reading! This prose poem was written to be intentionally confusing — you don’t suck, I do — but if you feel like it’s more confusing than it should be, I highly recommend reading it with some familiarity with the Freudian definition of conscious and subconscious. It is what this whole poem revolves around and expands upon.)
