The Dream Box had broken free from its moorings and was rocking uncontrollably back and forth. The space inside the box was slowly filling with acrid smoke, the type of smoke you get when the insulation on electrical cables starts to melt and burn. Not a good smell. Not a good smell at all. It was one of the worst smells you could imagine, in fact. It was the smell of something going very badly wrong.
None of this was real, of course. It was all happening in my head. It was yet another dream, in other words – it was yet another production of the Dream Box, albeit a defective one. Albeit a very defective one. Certainly not at all the type of production that you had in mind when you bought the damn thing. Indeed not. Certainly not what you had in mind when you went into the electrical appliances store and handed over your hard-earned money for it…
That’s the way it rolls though – you have to take the rough with the smooth in this life. Things don’t always get go to plan, as you know. Things very rarely go to plan, in my experience. Ultimately, they never do, of course. Everything screws up in the end. We all know that. The best laid plans, etc., etc. Even when it’s all safely happening inside your own head it still doesn’t go to plan, and that’s the ultimate insult as far as I’m concerned. That’s the ultimate ‘slap in the face’, I would say. You can’t even rely on your own fantasies! You’d think you’d be safe enough there but NO, you’re not. You can’t even rely on that.
The smell was getting worse – it wasn’t just acrid and unpleasant any more. It had gone way beyond that. It wasn’t just toxic and corrosive, either. That would have been bad enough, of course – that would have been hard enough to put up with. The smoke was actually hallucinogenic – it induced a dissociative state. A psychotic dissociative state, in fact. The very worst sort of toxic dissociative state. Truly horrendous. Reality itself was coming undone.
Life certainly doesn’t go to plan in the way you always thought it would. The way everyone always told you it would. The way your parents, your teachers, the professors at college, told you it would. They put you wrong in a big way; they sent you down the wrong road entirely and you believed them. Why wouldn’t you, after all? It all sounded so convincing at the time, didn’t it? How were you supposed to know that was all a lie? How were you to know that it was all a setup? We’re all so innocent and trusting when we’re young. So very easy to take advantage of. We’re so easy to take advantage of and theyalways, always do. They’ll take advantage of you every time.
The box was breaking up – it was now in the final, violent stages of self-destruction. It was shaking itself to pieces like some kind of mad thing. It was going off the rails entirely. Sitting inside it, my face was a frozen rictus of fear. I was in a state of utter terror. Reality itself was becoming undone – shards were flying off in all directions. Somewhere in the background the sound of mad hysterical laughter. My own mad hysterical laughter. ‘How could this be happening to me?’ I asked myself. ‘How was this even possible?’ My fear knew no bounds – it jumped right out of me like a jack-in-the-box and started laughing madly in my face. None of this is real, I told myself, none of this is real…
Image credit – zdzislaw beksinski