DREAMS
On the metamorphosis of thoughts:
Visions, spellcraft, and the shifting shape of tales.
Forever on the edge between abstractness and concreteness, I'm doomed to live a dream – a bridge between illusion and reality, a double life.
The world of visions, similar to those that humans watch at night – the roads taken or forgotten – the roads of dreams.
Forever inventing the sky.
Morning routine with exercise and shower, followed by a cup of coffee while reading the news – clear-cut schedule of working hours in front of the screen, with a lunch break and a few breaks for coffee and cigarettes in between – boring tasks, consistent pattern, everything explicit, no dangers, sturdy shapes of objects around – safely reminding of what is what, no questions raised – evening relief with friends at a bar, subtly whining about meaninglessness encountered throughout the day, with a creamy twist of self-irony looking down at our ordinary lives – softly shushing shy voices inside that timidly ask –
where is wonder? ///
where is magic? ///
where is mystery? ///
where are enchanted creatures and miraculous events? ///
where is imagination?
do they live only in books and museums?
Many reported a permanent fog in their dream-world, only marking the hard-covered shapes of the already known.
Fantasy is a genre for children – magic is a practice for witches – myths are dusty relics of a bygone era, if still of assistance to anyone, then for pagans – dreams are deceitful visions of random firings of neurons for escapists – all superstitions in the light of leisurely amusement or, at most, of scientific inquiry for the curious few.
And so we drown, day after day, in a sea of facts and figures and shapes and opinions, but that voice within the ribs keeps yearning like a child for something more than the surfaces distinguished and events surely understood – a leap into the well transcending the mundane, where spirits speak of stars that never settled into patterns, of heavy woodlands where time folds on itself, of rivers running backward, carrying anthems of lives unlived.
Perhaps it was illusions all along that carried forward our herd – images of gods carved into stone and higher spirits singing through the wind, dreams spilling wisdom in half-lit tongues, shamanic visions revealing hidden staircases that spiral into the marrow of existence – through the rise and fall of civilizations across time, they dripped like liquid gold with hope and meaning, and shrouded breaking human shadows with a veil against the jagged edges of demonic days ahead.
- How my dreams were made -
Too many academic papers and logical arguments later:
Obscure Tomorrows struck like a Big Bang in my head and scattered these spheres that rebel, with all their might, against the structures of your ordinary article on life advice. They whirled through every inch of my being, mixing layers of mismatched images, shifting, repeating, turning over and upside down – day after day, like recurring night visions, or haunting desires that wouldn't sleep.
Some call it day-dreaming – reality inventions, or fantasies, functioning in frequencies and forms other than the eyes perceive. I call it my reality, where I step through into unspoken futures, inhale the ether that lets me fly across the worlds, drink blue tea with witches of the swamp, climb prehistoric mountains with foxes in the air.
All that happens across Obscure Tomorrows has been born from the logic of the night. There's a theory that what we experience while sleeping is not a dream but a series or layers of dreams that we cut together in our minds hoping to edit them into coherent narratives – a blurry line between real experiences and recurring content patterns of imagination – stories within stories, interrupting, characters metamorphosing into punishment or reward – images of individual, social and non-human levels merge – who is telling the story? Here, reality and unreality conspire – to explore what's painfully human – and to hold the traits they labeled flaws, so lightly on my palms like fragile gems that pulse with life.
But before I let you in, you should know 2 things about the how: 1. types of dreams; 2. the dreamer itself.
Type I:
A Nightmare
Thoughts unsettled, tasks unfinished, I drift – untethered yet stiff – into sleep, past control of my body, unsure what will happen when I loosen my grip.
Close your eyes, open your eyes, don't look inside – so I look around.
Screens rise from the ground, and through them, a serpent slithers – an electric tide flashing visions of the noble savage in Arcadia and of nymphs spinning gold-lit in rapture – for a second, before my skin splits open all over my body, and slow wounds bloom into hands – a thousand hands, black-veined and pale as memory – they wipe the screens bare of illusions, leaving a clean double vision: wisdom, they whisper, at last.
I run, but I can't move – tightening my breath like a closing throat the fabricated suns around me pulse, inhale, fold inward and curl into a maze – paralyzed, I watch the wisdom materialize full glow –
I watch magicians, white-coated silhouettes, clicking keyboards ad-infinitum in rhythmic incantation: click, click, clickity clack, clack, clackity graphs, neon-green eyewear –
I watch algorithms cleaving truth away from lies – such convenience, but my muscles still hurt – data points explaining mysteries to facts – nothing is a miracle, lull me banners on the screens, your time is precious, so wire-born oracles will finish housekeeping for you.
Here we stand in an orchestra pit, I among ivory suits hollow at the chest – playing bones of fallen satellites like instruments of the Age of Gods Rebranded, each performing our part in speechless dissonance – so we tune the truth from space debris, and walk in confidence, no prayers needed, reliant on our steel skeletons lighter than gravity –
See how we fly! – ecstatic, free to the mayhem with laughter – divine!
Magicians spin on sharp-mouthed reality’s rays, draped in wires that tell answers before anyone asks the questions. I reach for my cable suit, but my hands slip – I fall off the frozen sunrays, scratching my ankles, off the edges of knowing – and drown in a sticky mass swallowing me whole, sweet scent of iron thick on my tongue. Here goes my writing, a thousand pages of pebble letters – it bursts into flame, burns to a ghost.
I collapse on my kitchen table, powerless against the weight of my limbs. So familiar, almost soothing, is the maze of my invention – perpetual trying of symbols that I know won’t apply, repeating the ritual – not knowing, not fitting, familiar. I can survive pain, but what do I do with joy? If I succeed in escaping the maze, what happens beyond?
I wake up with my ankles split open and blood soaking the sheets.
Next time before falling asleep I rub my ankles with peppermint tea.
Type II:
Lucid Dreaming
A tooth cracks between my tongue and the dark – I bite down, and it crumbles like salt – another loosens, I swallow them all, the words I never spoke – the voices I lost learning the readability language while scribbling down the notes from the books torn by faceless critics – licking syntax deviations with red saliva, measuring legibility with rulers, punishing mad forms until they wear matching shoes and say excuse me – sanity presses her spotless hands over my mouth and smiles with wicked clarity:
System – Description – Answer.
My tongue doesn't answer, focused on sailing the roof of my mouth, counting the teeth – yet unresolved by the marble lucidity of the logical ones, a glitch shimmers, and I become aware of my dreaming –
I move my fingers one by one beneath the sheets – I reach beyond seconds of the Backbone of Night, slipping my arm into the hush of dark matter, where boundless particles hum spells between uneven breaths –
I watch in awe the universe that keeps no promises for us and yet keeps blooming – the waves that curl around kelp forests, stirring plankton in the moonlight, and cold amber that traps the tears of ancient ferns – equations of the alchemy of things too slow for our hasty eyes, too vast for our shaky steps – blinding us through scientific faith in what's present before the name of magic. What a strange turn, I ponder in my sleep – that the cult of knowing would silence wonder, making mystery unsafe and meanings thin.
But I keep going beneath the frenzy and the pleasures, well aware that in my labyrinth I choose the doors I open. Through the gap at the entrance, there glitch the miracles that we renamed – I kneel into the loosened ground to feel the soil, so new, so fresh, where wilted hands pressed centuries-old stories – and collective wisdom surges through my blood. The room is pulsing with new myths sprouting from the ground, some howling in iron tongues, some murmuring in silver breath – a hundred figures move slow motion in the mist, collecting harvest grown overnight like herbs – fantasies of their becoming big and bright and ideals stitched from longing of what others have – some cradle them like infants, others crush them into powdered tea, some dance the rites of the nourishing breakfast bowls and bow to color-coded gods of the fabric lining their coats – and all of us name our lovers and rivals, strangers and selves, only to crown and crush them again.
Where we fear,
where we love,
where we judge,
where we admire,
there is a mystery unwritten –
personal illusions, keyholes into claiming back our safe spaces to lean on, our brighter tomorrows to hope for, and our own meaning of life to follow along.
Still, the tides pull without knowing my name.
Still, the albatroses travel the globe.
And still, the tundra wails beneath the feet of a fighting wolf.
Type III:
Death
Coral-red ripples play on my eyelids – like a river-stream, like a sunrise – with ease, my body lifts above the maze and loosens the pain in the joints – from up high, I look my nightmares in the eye.
A wasteland below: white silhouettes lie still like splintered seashells on the shore – my body among them, lifeless, turning to stone – moss covers the ribs, an earthworm curls out from the sternum. Here I am, an earthworm – slick with mud and hunger, inching toward an acacia tree – they say it turns the brave into birds, and for eternity have I desired wings.
As I step into these dreams, I won't be the same anymore – smaller, rawer, not as finished or as mastered as within the walls of the maze. Here becoming eclipses arrival, spellbinding fluency with riddles starlit through unfinsihed words – here I flee for my respite from the sterile halls of rationality when the world of matter speaks too plainly and snaps its fingers expecting my obedience – to the soil, crisp renewal between my fingers, thick with essence that gives me presence instead of answers. I press my cheek to the coarse roots of the acacia tree and rest for a minute – no, I tell myself, not all rhythms must be sung by the clock.
Blended into molecules of time uncounted, where growing up isn't ticking with efficiency, I remember: to me, she's the most sacred of all goddesses and blessed spirits, the land – I pray to her, I worship her intelligence incomprehensible to our petty limited minds, her body that's a map of time, every hill a memory of fortune, every river a vein of power. I bow and pray to her, asking for solace, for inspiration, for I believe in the power of faith. And I don't care what you believe in, I just beg you – believe.
We too are an illusion, we too are a dream. I'm a mystery to me, I'm a mystery to you – imagine me, invent me, develop a universe in me, let me do the same with you. We'll meet in the mist between versions.
- The dreamer -
A composition in three movements.
Adagio Intimo.
Floating meditations of a human aspiring to make sense of a master plan for survival in the 21st-century world – where hearts ache in unison and matching hardships know everyone's soul, yet all narratives hum in solitary ways – and where demons sing in harmony as sharp-toothed tenderness protecting what's trembling dear at the core.
Cantabile Terra.
A wonder – how would the feelings of humans weave into the Earth? – visions rising from an inkling that our inner worlds and the state of the Earth look at each other like mirrors – that swirling together in the same vortex we stumble across mutual calamities and miracles, sharing a fate – hoping to discover silhouettes of our interdependence, letting nature tiptoe closer to a human heart.
Coda Celeste.
Fragments of tales on ancient spirits and sacred beasts that ignite my apparitions of magic beyond the powers of humans – fascinated, since I was a clueless child, by that innocent belief in the adventures of gods and their encounters with mortals, I gather their pieces like embers from silenced fires – to listen to suspended moments of when the Earth meets her anthropomorphic children – and to discover myths of our times, little games that we enact.
All but one subject possessed by multiple consciousnesses.
Dream,
Play,
Switch.
