The corridors of Sanity

2/08/2015: 48 hours later....
IMAGE: MichaelBrack

This is a rather exciting dream I had but a few days ago. It was rich visually and, like all my best dreams: full of psychological intrigue and layered context. I awoke from it at about 3am, and spend the next 45 minutes mumbling to myself in the silence as I attempted to chronicle the dream by transcoding it from short term to long term memory. It seems to have worked; for here I am now typing. Alas, the extent of my mnemonic technique will only reveal itself as this entry plays out.

The dream begun with myself and a few nameless friends sitting at a small stone warf, bordered by steep cliff face and an unruly ocean. We were gathered around, fairly bored, waiting for a nameless transport to come and collect us. There was an East Asian guard in typical khaki and peaked cap, standing over us. I was trying to pass the time by playing with a small geode (volcanic rock). One of my friends commented "better be careful, we are in North Korea and the guards here mean business".

I joked and threw the geode on the ground, breaking it in half cleanly and revealing a jet black polished interior. The guard came over to me and said "That is very bad behaviour, you unfortunate visitor. It is too bad that you might bring trouble on yourself that you cannot comprehend" and I was touched by his sincerity and, and apparent empathy for my lack of street smarts. He sighed, and informed me however that the penalty for causing disturbance was 13 years prison, and casually but regretfully begun to call in my transgression on his radio. I would not be leaving this place after all. 

Panicked, I tracked my eyes to an obese Asian looking man, who was shirtless and wore an unkempt beard. I suppose in retrospect he appeared half way between the Chinese artist, Ai Wei Wei and a long distanced friend of mine, who developed drug induced psychosis. As I stared at him, his image morphed and contorted before my eyes and I knew him to be insane. And yet insanity was not my fear at this time, it was the rational sanity that facilitates tyranny to descend onto the individual from an impartial and unconscious state actor. I took my chances, and took his distorted otherworldly appearance as an omen of deliverance.

I followed the man through a tunnel in the stone cliff wall, it perhaps it was more like a cave: it was layered with thick soiled mattresses as a floor and seemed to just go on forever. As I ventured deeper into this corridor, I could smell the madness and the urine of the man and it literally had permeated everything within. I could ascertain that he indeed did live in here, and my repulsion and desire to leave was countered with an intense curiosity as to just how extensive this network was, and how and why he had manifested such bower-bird like instincts to construct it. Deeper and deeper I went, and he became a little agitated and hostile and told me not to venture into his inner sanctum; his final bedroom which of course I did anyway. I had figured the entire soft-floored coridoor complex to be his bedroom of sorts, alas there was a final room waiting at the end of the tunnel and while he was not looking I peaked inside. It was a large square room, with no flooring to speak of just hard stone. It was also dark, which was a real contrast to the sprawling tunnel network that had apparently enjoyed full ambient natural lighting, with no obvious source. On closer inspection, the square bedroom was bordered internally on all sides by wooden framework, the kind you see on an unfinished house, and it was all partially burned by a fire from the distant past.

The shirtless man was calling me, imploring me to follow him down another corridor. I obliged, and along the way stopped to open a door I found and saw on the inside a very similar square bedroom, only this time fully lit and cushioned by the same salvaged mattress material. I wondered why he did not just use this as his bedroom but continued on in his stead. Eventually he took me to a small and narrow tunnel, that branched off once again. I had to crawl through but it was so comfortable that I did not care. I came through the other side and saw an old room full of discarded and dusty furniture, broken woodwork, cleaning equipment and brooms. Pushing my way through the clutter I saw through an open doorway, a kind of underground driveway that opened up to a suburban street on one side, and led to an underground commercial premises of some type. And old style ambulance drove in and came to a halt, and white coated medical staff escorted an naked girl out and beyond another doorway where blue sparks and screams were distantly emanating. I realised it to be my good friend, Anna. "This is where they take her for her daily electroconvulsive therapy" the shirtless man told me, and I knew this to be a place of danger. I also knew that I was now back in Melbourne, and through a few hundred meters of tunnels had transversed several thousand kilometres. A nurse was starting to notice me, and I backed away to hide within the maintenance closest where the hidden tunnel was accessible. It was not enough, slowly others were beginning to notice too.

The shirtless man beckoned me to withdraw within, he said we would be safe inside and the others would not follow us. I wanted to return to my home but did not like my chances of running the gauntlet of the medical personnel, who radiated a cold danger very different from the warm and empathic guard I had escaped earlier. I turned back to re-enter the squalid tunnels when I heard the voice of my mother: she was in an old white station wagon of the same model that she drove in the 90's, when I was a young teen. She had the trunk open and was standing inside, like an animal trapper and was beckoning me to enter. "Come on, you must come with me! Come with me! There is a job waiting for you" she kept repeating, and I was tempted to oblige, but before I could get inside, images of being detained by the medical staff for psychiatric treatment flooded me and I swiftly turned around and ran back into the tunnel, where the fretting and anxious shirtless man showed great relief and ushered me deep inside the padded corridors. Behind me, I heard a frustrated expletive, followed by "oh damn it" which confirmed my suspicions that my mothers intentions were not genuine.

The dream becomes murky at this point, for a time we just explored the tunnel network and received guidance from the shirtless man about where the passages lead. He assured me that there were "many Melbourne outlets" and it would not matter much if they concreted this one up; so long as we were not phased at having to emerge through the floorboards of somebodies kitchen then we should be fine. I decided at this point that I would like to visit New York, and proceeded to follow the passage that lead there. On the way I stopped by the original entrance from which I begun this journey, and gazed out at the waiting people on the stone platform. They were still there in North Korea, and the guard was peering curiously down into the tunnels. We could see him but I somehow knew that he could not see us. Before I ever got to New York, I woke up.

๑๑๑

I would probably interpret this dream to be a metaphor for the power of insanity, or in more succinct terms, the evolutionary efficacy of selective delusional belief. Whether that belief is the superiority of the white race (when you just so happen to be white yourself) or the rules governing sexuality or the privilege of the wealthy, up to and including the social inclusion generated through a shared religious faith, we all to some extent blind ourselves to the true nature of the world to ensure our own prosperity and our own survival. It could be that in extreme cases: loss of sanity becomes the ultimate culmination of this process when taken to its extreme, and people may choose whatever system of mental organisation that keeps them the most insulated from terrors that be. From within this state of mind, no matter how temporarily entered into, any apprehension from the outside becomes a threat in of itself and the comfort of delusion becomes a one way ticket.

Not such deep thoughts, given recent events both domestic and abroad. I do not fear for my own sanity for one second, and if anything I have taken the clear and unobstructed vision of the truth to near pathological levels, trading unconscious access to my own privilege away at just about every turn. I suppose in the context of this dream, it was just nice to be able to feel what it feels like to take the "blue pill" and regress inside a safe and comfortable mental state in the face of external threat; the way in waking life I simply never could.