It Was all a Dream
…where I was a ghost taken to another planet by a god, together with others. I think they were my friends, or at least we knew each other, but oddly, I was not me. My body looked like the ghost of someone else, unfamiliar, some unknown person who had had a different life. Nonetheless, in this dream, this was me and my conscious experience and I didn’t feel like I was someone else. Not until I woke up.
We were in a lush and beautiful landscape with animals, water, and a distant mountain range. It looked fantastic, like an amalgamation of all earthly beauty across time, brought together in a surreal painting. We were in a harbour by the water’s edge and all my friends boarded a boat, but I could not go. There was a knowing that I was not permitted. Once the ship had sailed, I collapsed onto the ground and began weeping. The god asked why I was crying, and I said, “I am the world, and I am fading away.”
Simultaneously, I felt my mortality and the mortality of the world and all the animals and all living things fading into oblivion. I wonder too if my friends sailing away had anything to do with my sobbing, yet the pain was not about feeling alone, but in knowing that I would miss all the beauty that once existed. For the first time in a long time, I valued life, and not just my life but the existence of all things. The god snickered and said, “Come on, where do you want to go?” I replied, “Let’s go home and watch Seinfeld.”
I had been reading Fisher’s Ghosts of my Life, a meditation on hauntology, depression, and capitalist realism. For so long I have been cynical about the world and my existence, having only just recently come out of a period of malaise. Not that I have now been feeling good per se, just no longer depressed. No real hope for the future or anything, but it was jarring to wake up from a dream in which I mourned the beauty of a fading world, almost as though I felt a bit of hope, a bit of wanting to live more.
The dream had a quiet whisper I just now remembered. Maybe the god whispered it when I wept, or perhaps it was my metaconsciousness saying “Don’t cry, you’ll finally get to rest now.” But in that dream’s moment, I wanted no rest. I wanted the beauty of that sunset beyond the lush green mountains and the mythical animals that resembled dinosaurs, the anachronistic and universal timeless existence of all things. I wanted more life. Like Camus’s Meursault, I found the meaning of existence only upon resignation to death. Then it was swept under the rug with a quick joke between me and the deity. I don’t know if he took pity on me when he offered me another chance. But as soon as he offered it, I accepted and knew I wouldn’t be dying anymore. Another chance to live and I resign myself to the comfort of watching Seinfeld.
As Fisher says, we cling to nostalgia to avoid facing the mediocrity of capitalist realism. Perhaps what he means is that if we had the courage to face the mediocrity of capitalism, we might revolt, but instead, we are inundated with nostalgic media for a timeless past. A fantasy time we never experienced. We become stuck in the timelessness of nostalgia and fail to act. In this dream, I saw beyond the veil of mediocrity and found the meaning of existence in the beauty of all things. But when offered more life, I immediately fell prey to the commodities and comforts that would soothe me rather than seizing that precious chance for meaning. Do I not know how to pursue it? Or is meaning just a flash of hope when we are faced with losing something we have, for so long, taken for granted?
How do we wake up from this somnambulistic state?