Labyrinth

Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange. ~ Inception

It was just another manic Monday of melancholy madness. Except that it wasn’t. It was actually two days in the future. The present can feel like the past when winter merriment gets involved. Ah, the Genesis of a new rotation around the good ol’ Sol. If you and I found ourselves in a conversation post the omega of the most recent full moon, odds are you might find a piece of it woven within this labyrinth of literary lunacy. An idea has been twisting and turning lately. Something I want to create…a belletristic maze within a maze, just so I can revel…nay…get lost in the depth of it. A multi-sensory aesthetic experience.

Unsolvable mysteries. I love and yet hate the conundrum, and I also love and hate the ensuing paradox. (And the reality that I can both love and hate a paradox is another paradox in and of itself. And on and on we climb the Penrose Stairs, never really getting anywhere. Or are we?) The Queen of the Air lost at sea. Dark matter. Consciousness. Endlessly pondering the complexities of the universe. All the rabbit holes, black holes, plot holes, and interrupted holes. My curiosity is insatiable. If I was granted three wishes before the end of my existence, after ending human and animal suffering, I would ask for answers to all of life’s puzzles (at least the ones that plague me on the daily). Thirdly, I would wish for a second chance to return and once again live life with the acquired answers. A girl can dream, right?

But what if life actually is a dream, and death is a waking up to the reality that we’ve been living a dream within a dream, day after day. Could reality be an illusion? Maybe I’m just prone to the fantastical. I fancy stumbling upon places where my imagination can run wild…like a stallion. Wonderland. Metaphorically speaking, sometimes it’s an amusement park. Or a ballroom within a castle. Or a computer lab where we can sync our brains to understand each other without that insufficient means of expression known as “words.” As much as I revel in their beauty, life often transcends what words can say. (Is what I utter ever the truest and deepest essence of what I intend to convey?) If we could step into each others’ minds, oh what intricate labyrinths we would find. Metaphors. Mazes. Energy. Endless endings that turn into even more beginnings. Feelings. Neurons firing like fireworks on New Year’s Day. Consciousness. Wondrous magic galore.

Perchance our reality isn’t indeed a dream, do we appreciate the convergences we are ever experiencing with our fellow humans on this planet? Maybe we’ll only share a few chapters. Maybe we’ll make it to the end of the maze together, wrestling with the unsolvable mysteries along the way. (Do we actually want to solve all these mysteries or do we just thrive on the mental stimulation (or perhaps torture) they bring? It seems to me to be slightly masochistic.) Ideas. They’re infectious. They’re twisting and turning, and going down slides over overpasses and up up and away above sunsets, and spinning around and around on continuous go-rounds of merriment, and bullet-speeding ahead down train tracks, and jumping into pools that transform into oceans the further and further we go. Life. It’s a two-sided, four-billion piece puzzle. (Sometimes people ever so rudely throw paint on the pieces, and we can’t see what the picture is supposed to be.) Life is an infinite game of hopscotch. It’s a lucid dream within a dream within a dream… It’s madness really. A paradoxically delightful mad world. I’m enchanted and quite frankly exhausted being a part of it.

A knock at the door. I…ever so slowly…slip back to reality. Glancing at the time on my ever-present technological rectangular pocket watch, I see that I have really lost track of the time this time, as the word-chase through this maze has lasted at least 700,000 tick-tockings. Knocks, clocks, tick-tocks. Time to dock this Word doc and put a lock on the metaphorical mental maze, before I inadvertently unlock a secret door opening up into another l a b y r i n t h. I do, however, anticipate some peculiar, wild dreaming following this late night exposition expedition.

This is an example of why I wrestle with sleep.

(The topics that haphazardly found their way into this word chase derive from random past memories (in addition to what’s been on my mind this past week). Fragments that came to mind as I attempted to create a literary maze. I wasn’t quite sure where this would go, but I feel satisfied…and in need of sleep. Special thanks to the movie Inception and the people in my life for unwittingly inspiring this blog. Cheers to 2024.)