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Wise King Taken by the Foolish Oneessay no. 18 Shuttling Back and Forth Between KingdomsDan Plonsey Keywords: Two Realms, Reality, Dreamland, voluntary vs. the involuntary, saxophone, blanket.
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Does everybody say the same thing every time, or is there a variation?
-- A. Fishio
Might there be a secret that some of us are keeping from others? A secret way out? As if all of this life is taking place in a single room, but a select few know of a secret door out - and they are able to go from here to another realm, for a time out, and then come back again, at the same moment they left. That's science fiction. Sheer speculation. But what if it's this way instead:
There are two realms: this one, which we will call Dreamland, and the other, which we will call Reality. One may only escape from Dreamland to Reality by waking up - in Reality. Thus, leaving Dreamland is entirely involuntary from the point of view of Dreamland. However, to enter Dreamland from Reality is simple, and may be done consciously. The inevitable waking from Dreamland will most likely be followed by a subsequent de-valuing of Dreamland ("it was all just a dream"). This Reality, then, is very much "realer" than what we've got here in Dreamland. You see, I do not posit a symmetry or equivalence of these realms; the first asymmetry is the movement from one to the other: involuntary from Dreamland to Reality, and voluntary from Reality to Dreamland.
One enters into Dreamland from Reality as one goes to a movie in Dreamland (hence, the popularity of movies and television: this going to see is a reenactment of our only-vaguely-recalled entrance into this world). One returns to Reality by waking from Dreamland - which means that only an event in the other realm - of which we have no consciousness here - can take us back. Time continues to flow there, presumably roughly as it does here, if we may guess on the basis of the analogy of our own dreams.
Our own dreams are experienced more for their ending than for their actual content, for the most important aspect of dreaming of which to be aware is the simple observation that dreams do end, and that the dream ends with waking, waking being the experience we may expect at the point of "death," at which time we will shake off this Dreamland as dim and quickly fading illusion. (If anything, we remember more of "real life" within our dreams than the other way around, but of course different rules apply, especially regarding identity, transformation, and personal powers.) When we re-emerge into Reality we may expect to find ourselves in a realm which will seem much more reasonable than Dreamland - in fact, we'll suddenly be able to "see" clearly, and perhaps we will laugh at the many inconsistencies and illogicalities and absurdities that we take for granted here in Dreamland, with but a vague sense of unease that this realm doesn't really "hold together," that it is jury-rigged, that rules are made up as we go along... And on the other hand, we may occasionally recall an image or scene from Dreamland that seem to speak of a potentially more beautiful realm - perhaps more or less meaningful, more or less fluid, spontaneous, balanced...
As from last night: I was whirling around and around, playing the tenor sax with a long, plain, thick woolen blanket whose end was wrapped around the saxophone - and I must have had a lot of space around me on a smooth wooden dance studio floor. The saxophone was making mostly a range of muffled metallic squeaks and thin shrieks. Was I performing? Was this the overture to an opera?
Two of the elements which I would expect to operate fairly similarly in both Dreamland and Reality would be music and emotional movement: there is always some of each, and also, there's always something worthy of our attention, the hint of a narrative... Perhaps there is yet a third realm, in which Narrative is no longer merely the jester, but finally the King.
-- Dan Plonsey, November 2001,
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