Dream:
Out of all the dirty jobs in the world, the worst was working in the spaghetti mines. We had been cooped up for what felt like years in a cylindrical hole in the ground, 600 meters wide, 800 meters deep. Dozens of us toiled away in the sun, digging up chunks of meat sauce and the cold noodles that they stained. There was an observation deck situated along a portion of the hole’s perimeter, located halfway between the surface of the ground and the level of the spaghetti. Behind the glass windows were the authorities, insuring that the workers do their duties and that they never escape.
Presumably by crawling through vents, I found myself standing right behind the leader of the operation, who was standing at a podium with an open-air view of the spaghetti mine. One small push would send him falling and let me pull the lever to shut down the whole system. I don’t exactly recall how or whether I followed through on this.
True:
As a kid, not getting into trouble seemed like the primary challenge in life. Remember that a child’s use of “in trouble” has a special meaning of “punished for a wrongdoing.” The small private Christian school I went to didn’t have the resources or expertise to handle my anger issues, so my parents sent me to public school in the middle of 1st grade. I only learned this fact in high school. Before, I was told a narrative that I was expelled from school due to misbehaving, which only further cemented my idea that I might as well get used to living with “trouble.” In school, I heard stories of how the Christians in ancient Rome withstood mockery, imprisonment, and even death just because they fought for the truth.
Living in trouble would be hard, but totally worth it. I mentally prepared myself for whatever punishment the world would try to give me. The principal’s office, prison, North Korea, forced labor of harvesting naturally occurring spaghetti—it was all part of a bigger picture. Doing good is necessary, but getting in trouble is not a matter of if, but when.
Dream:
My friends and I were on a field trip to the headquarters of the largest spy agency in the world. It wasn’t affiliated with any country, but they were a force to be reckoned with. We were given a private tour of the many different rooms in their giant black building. We took a quick peek into one of the rooms and saw someone getting executed by a spy. He saw us and alerted the whole agency, who now had to kill us since we knew too much. We skirted through the corridors and out the revolving glass door leading outside. We dispersed ourselves across the city streets without looking back. I ran for quite a distance and realized I finally lost the spies pursuing me.
Apparently, we now had knowledge that was too dangerous for us to know. The spy agency decided that since they couldn’t track us down and kill us individually, they would have to take more drastic measures to prevent the secret from getting out more than it did already. They split the universe into chunks, exposing a blurry, dark red void in the “background” of the universe. Each chunk was then sealed in its own box, the surfaces of which were squares in a grid formation and made of a transparent indestructible material. The entire universe was locked away in boxes, each with their own color, floating in a void of dark red.
Despite the extent of the spy agency’s tyranny, they missed one spot. There was a small bit of land with green grass and blue skies. I saw that about a hundred other people had made it to this haven, whose name was sculpted into stone letters that stood at the entrance of the region (but I don’t remember the name). Everyone wore white togas because the plan was to restart civilization here. If, from these humble beginnings, our history were to imitate the millennia leading up to the enslavement of the universe, we would trace our steps back to the eve of the calamity and be strong enough to fight against the spy agency and restore the universe.
True:
Out of the 10 or so movies I constantly watched as a kid, one of them was Pixar’s Wall-E. I loved the futuristic setting, not for its message, which I didn’t understand yet, but just because it looked cool. The Earth would be covered in trash and that would be fine. That’s just the next stage of evolution. If it was ok for the planet to be lifeless 4.5 billion years ago, why couldn’t it be lifeless 4.5 billion years from now? Humans are thriving on a utopian ship in space. Sure, they’re overweight, but that’s where the part about getting off the ship comes into play. They come back to Earth anyway. I saw how they got off the planet and how they got back on.
In Walking with Dinosaurs, I saw how an asteroid sent fire and ash ravaging through the world, killing dinosaurs as we know it. Yet I was still alive to see it happen on TV? The end of the world didn’t scare me. Individual people might get you in trouble for stupid reasons, but the universe doesn’t operate off of bias. The bigger the problem, the bigger the contingency plan. The asteroid killed the dinosaurs, and mammals took their place. The Earth was uninhabitable, and the spaceship from Wall-E took its place. The spy agency from the dream set humanity back to the stone age, and humanity started once again from the stone age.
Dream:
My philosophy professor was lecturing outdoors. “The key to understanding the line between living and non-living lies in the sinistrabad. The sinistrabad is a type of formation in deciduous trees.” He pointed to a nearby tree. It branched out into two, with each branch being about 4 feet long and 4 inches wide. The second branch had a small thin stub coming out. “You see this third protrusion? This is the sinistrabad. The tree branched out into two, but it’s trying to do the second branch again. That is because this entire branch is dead. It appears to be alive, but the sinistrabad shows us it is dead. I can even take it out without anything snapping.” He took the entire branch out, exposing a dome-like shape on its end, while the tree had a dome-like cavity where the branch was, right above the sinistrabad stub.
“Why is this significant? It is theorized that prehistoric humans gathered wood this way. They respected the tree as a beautiful living thing that should not be harmed. Trees could not talk or run or even visibly breathe, but they were still considered alive enough to be a living thing with a soul and emotions. The sinistrabad (actually, the branch above it) was still part of the tree, but it was considered a non-living thing. The border between the sinistrabad and the rest of the tree was their border from living to non-living.”
I was fascinated because, in the dream, philosophers, historians, and scientists believed that humans were extreme pacifists who did not want to harm any living thing. Thus, it was a paradox that wood was so common in prehistoric tools, houses, fuel, etc. The sinistrabad was a potential answer to the age-old question. I was getting a little distracted because the branch he was holding had ants and bees crawling on it, each up to 3 inches long. I accidentally fell on the grass and such bugs crawled on me. This freaked me out enough to wake me up.
True:
“Sinistrabad” is a made-up word from the dream, but I learned a lot of weird things in real life. In school, I learned that I was weird. We were all weird: western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. What we experienced wasn’t the default for humanity. But what we learned about poverty and modern technology was only the tip of the iceberg. I learned a lot of things on my own time, not by reading books, but by watching videos from people who probably did. Even if half of it was far-fetched, I learned that being human didn’t mean I knew everything about being human.
I heard about how Aldous Huxley took psychedelic drugs and saw the world differently. Supposedly, the way we saw the world when sober was just our brain blocking out a significant portion of reality for the sake of our survival, and hallucination breaks that barrier. As if what we see is not all there is.
I heard about how hunter-gatherers might have fought against the spread of agriculture, against the hierarchy, disease, and intense labor it produced. The hunter-gatherers had better health than the people who ate the same few crops, and their society was egalitarian. Being democratic was weird, but only among the agricultural societies. I supposed that we don’t innately crave authority after all.
I heard about how, supposedly, the turning point for human evolution was when apes consumed psychedelic mushrooms and gained exposure to ideas and mental faculties they previously did not have. Such ideas helped them think about things that were not right in front of them, like the future, the abstract, the imaginary.
I heard about how humans probably used to sleep twice, waking up in the middle of the night and going back to sleep an hour later. “What is left of humanity if even sleeping was different?” I thought. “What has stayed the same?” But then again, what we see is not all there is.
I heard about how humans used to be pacifists and did not even collect wood from living trees, only looking for dead wood. I only heard it from a dream, but it might as well be true with how weird this subject gets.
I heard about how, supposedly, humans used to have two minds, a normal one, and one that had complex reasoning and even gave advice, like a disembodied voice that they heard. Hence, humans used to have dreams that were less like experiences and more like someone speaking to them. In these dreams, people could obtain knowledge they had, but couldn’t see with their eyes, with their normal mind. Hence, people said, “It was revealed to me in a dream.”
*****
Fyodor Merzliakov, or simply “Teddy”, studies Linguistics and PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) at the University of Maryland. In his free time, he composes music and creates fictional languages.
