Slaying the Dreamer

Time does not run in seconds, hours or days. For me it runs in nights. I wake up as the sun sets, eat dinner for breakfast, and say goodnight to my loved ones. Alone I sit through the endless nights, watching time fly by, wondering why the sun is rising before I’ve had the chance to live. As the first rays of dawn pierce my aching eyes, I begin to prepare for my journey into the dreamworld. The only place where I can truly live in vivid and terrifying detail. Nights pass by, one after the other, most of which I cannot remember. Vague images of video games, anime, comic books and fantasy novels resurface with effort. Is this life?

Another twelve hours pass by in the dreamworld, where I explore the streets of strange yet familiar cities built from memories of happier times. I embrace long lost friends and family. I taste, smell, hear, feel and fear. I love and I cry. The lingering memories upon awakening are as sharp as needles within my head. I drift in and out of sleep for hours, reluctant to leave this alternate reality. Is this life?

I have too much time to ponder, to think, to speculate and to prophesy.

What is reality, when the reality that I am told is true feels false, and its facsimile feels real? Which life will I remember more upon dying, the life I led in the physical world or the life I lived within my imagination?

I rarely leave my room. I rarely leave my apartment. The world outside feels hollow, distant, threatening. People feel strange, fake, cold. Time runs by too fast. I see everything change around me, people I once knew turn into strangers, people I love age and die. I see the harsh oblivion that awaits me and I turn cold in terror. The oblivion I once foolishly welcomed now frightens me more than anything. For if my life has been one meaningless speck lost in the noise of infinity, then why am I even here? Why should we strive for anything if it is to be torn from us in the end? Why not just live day by day in meaningless mundanity as I have done for the past two years? All that we are, all that we love, all that we thought to have achieved, our very memory… will someday disappear without a trace. I am obviously not here to procreate, nor to better the world with my ambition, therefore, what is my purpose?

I am expected to struggle for survival like everyone else. To be pushed and molded through all the conventions on the automatic assembly line of society.

Our culture has done the difficult task of questioning for us. Our artificial goals have been set in place since the moment we erupt from our mother’s womb. Make friends, become popular, do well in school, score high grades, become physically desirable, graduate, begin the whole process again in university, get a job, be successful, get married, have kids, make money, become famous…

If heavy social conditioning has failed to shape you into the perfect human being, what else is there left for you?

Life still goes on no matter who you are, time flies the same way every day and yet you have fallen through the cracks of an artificial world to become a ghost that haunts the periphery of human culture.

A pariah, ostracized, your humanity ripped right out of you.

Forgotten, laid aside, lost to apathetic glances on the street.

A parasite, a delinquent, a hippie, a commie, a punk, a bum, a hoodlum, a hobo, a loser, a nobody, a good-for-nothing, a ******, a dyke, a mutant, a freak, a waste-of-breath, a fucker, a hikikomori, a joke, a scarecrow, a geek, a pervert, a monster, a junkie, a spineless-bastard, a weirdo, a disappointment and an underachiever.

That’s what they’ll call me.

Yet still…

Your life becomes your own. Once you begin to make your own meaning, your own morals and beliefs, your own society…

You have found your purpose.