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Dreams and reality
Tonight I watched one of my favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone. It’s an adaptation of a French film shot in the early 1960s about a man convicted to death for, apparently, sabotaging railroad transport during the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s.
In the beginning the convicted man is placed into a noose tied to the top beam of a wooden bridge constructed about 100 feet over a creek. With all the pomp and ceremony of a 19th century execution, snare drums rattle, military orders barked. Then he is thrown off the edge of the bridge. The rope snaps, and the man plunges into the river below. Stunned, he swims as fast as he can away from the soldiers as they fire at him from afar with their rifles, missing him as he eventually comes ashore. The escapee then runs through the forest and eventually arrives at a home. He sees a beautiful and finely attired woman emerging from the front entrance and run toward him. As they approach one another they slow and prepare to embrace. Just as they are about to touch, they are interrupted by the jarring sound of choking. The man reaches around his neck. A jump-cut takes us back to the bridge, as the escapee turns out not to have escaped after all. His lifeless body swings haphazardly from the noose.
Who was this woman? Where was he running? Was she somebody he knew in real life? Was she just a fantasy he envisioned as he prepared to meet his end? And what difference would it make in any case? Either way, the dream is gone, and there was nothing he could do to bring it back as he stood on the edge of the bridge, neck in noose, contemplating an alternative to the remaining seconds of his life. For a moment in time, though, you are treated to his inner world and invited to consider what kind of world would have enabled that to become a reality.
But what happens when dreams die before the person does, when what were once the desires and joys of life become painful memories? Dreams aren’t just palliative visions of alternative futures. They can also be the painful reminders of lost opportunities, the dull droning pain of regrets.
I can tell you what happens. You begin to rely on distractions. A drink every few nights turns into a bottle a day, then two a day. At first you begin to fixate on what you did wrong and how you got to be in such a sad, pathetic state. Then you begin just not to care to contemplate the past too in depth. It’s too full of things you’d rather forget. Instead the future becomes clearer, but what consumes your mind are logistics regarding how not to have too much of a future. Suicide, formerly invoked as a weapon to shock or scare, more and more becomes a practical goal around which a strategy needs to be constructed. It becomes something you keep to yourself. You don’t want interlopers. Is there anything left in my possessions that I don’t want anybody to find? Are there people who should have things returned to them? What, really, is the most painless way to go? And why does everybody think that death is such a bad thing, when it can be a joyous release from a dead end?
Last edited by Spectre of Spartacism; 13th December 2015 at 01:51.
Maybe we've all tried to kill ourselves in the past - and we actually did it, but this is the dream we have where we think we didn't actually kill ourselves, and went on to live a fun-filled revolutionary life ^^
Maybe when you think others die, in their reality, they merely avoided death, and went on to live the life they truly wanted.
See also: http://reddit.com/r/socialism http://www.reddit.com/r/anarchistnews http://reddit.com/r/anarchism
The only slaves who are happy, are the crazy ones.
If God can create a universe, we create a universe when we dream.
See also: http://reddit.com/r/socialism http://www.reddit.com/r/anarchistnews http://reddit.com/r/anarchism
The only slaves who are happy, are the crazy ones.
And not all of those universes end well, as the episode narrated above demonstrates.
Maybe we're all just a collection of the nightmares we died in, until we finally find a dream in which we don't die.
See also: http://reddit.com/r/socialism http://www.reddit.com/r/anarchistnews http://reddit.com/r/anarchism
The only slaves who are happy, are the crazy ones.
You love "maybe," don't you? I strongly dislike it.
What failed dreams do people here have? I used to be motivated by setting how far I could go as an athlete. Then, one day, I decided I wasn't going to go any further, I had already done everything I could accomplish, and lost all ambition.
Now I seem to have some sort of existential crisis. What can I immerse myself in to give my life meaning to me, rather than a banal march to the grave? I haven't really figured it out yet. I'm coaching a couple athletes right now, but it still feels like something is missing. I got into martial arts fit a while, and felt the same about that too.
In a way, my biggest dream is communism now, but it's not really doing much for me right now at all.
Sous les paves, la merde!
You don't really want to know, do you?
I don't have much else to say, but I need to re-watch that episode now!
"Everybody thinks death is such a bad thing" primarily because we're 'built' to instinctively feel that way as much as any living organism is. Sorry if that's too crude an answer, but I think it's the most logical one.
It's a curiously self-defeating aspect of the human species that its greatest evolutionary advantage could also be its undoing.
As for dreams, I'm not sure what their function or purpose is. I haven't had many in a while, but aside from the rare blissful one they really are painful reminders.
"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will." - Antonio Gramsci
"If he did advocate revolutionary change, such advocacy could not, of course, receive constitutional protection, since it would be by definition anti-constitutional."
- J.A. MacGuigan in Roach v. Canada, 1994
Are you so sure that death is something we're instinctively averse to? It seems to operate at cross-purposes with our incredibly large prefrontal lobe. Sometimes things just don't work out, and it's better to say goodbye. At least that is what I am thinking more and more.
And yeah, it's one hell of an episode. The best.
the secret is to really begin
"whatever they might make would never be the same as that world of dark streets and bright dreams"
http://youtu.be/g-PwIDYbDqI
What was it the enrages in the occupied Sorbonne said in May '68? "Start by forming dream committees."
"It is slaves, struggling to throw off their chains, who unleash the movement whereby history abolishes masters." - Raoul Vaneigem
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." - Karl Marx
"What distinguishes reform from revolution is not that revolution is violent, but that it links insurrection and communisation." - Gilles Dauvé
