This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series The Dream

My experience of the Dream came from the imaginal realm, I suppose- what communicated with me was all the lesser known and forgotten stories. The place of Dreams isn’t far from the space created between the story teller and the listener, and the membrane can become porous at times.

It’s really hard to get everything that isn’t something, to come together to be something cohesive, so the Dream was a bit of a fluke, and isn’t likely to happen again, the stories managed to say, in unity, through the magic of the Dream. These were all the stories with nuance, ambiguity and raw situational clarity. Deeply personal and specific (in-jokes and asides with a crowd of one), to draw that into a single declarative voice was definitely a one shot deal.

The Dream was a warning about the story of the conquering hero, and how it was absorbing and erasing all the other stories. A while ago, the conquering hero got the impression that if enough people believed in it, it would become “real and immortal”, and so, it set about to make itself the only story told- to turn all tales into a simplistic battle of good versus evil, the world reduced to binary black and white, with itself at the centre as saviour.

There was a mounting crisis that had brought about the need for the Dream- as the conquering hero has been realizing that it will never be ‘real’, that nothing based on life is immortal, in the physical sense, all the stories are turning bleak and lifeless. The realization of it’s own inevitable end has lead the conquering hero’s story into a destructive arc of dominance and annihilation.

The Dream, for me, was a plee to get us to see past the centre and realize there’s more to the world than this flattened Earth.

The trick, it would seem, is how to dis-empower the conquering hero without turning them into a villain and repeating the same story, yet again.