At the Edge of the Mirror – Preview

I do not know how, but I do not dream like you. Maybe it’s practice, maybe it’s a mistake of nature. When I dream, I do not enter the stages and walk down the long tunnel. When I dream, I open the door to the other world.

I am not saying you dream incorrectly. I am not saying you dream the wrong way. I am simply saying that in the realms of dreaming, I am skilled beyond the measure of any regular person. This is not to say that I am better. I am simply saying that there is a skill I have which defies the expectations of many.

In dreaming, I am what they call an architect.

Take, for example, the woman Elliot Page, who plays Ariadne in the movie, Inception. Her character replaced Nash, the original architect of the movie. Throughout the dream, the architect is responsible for making sure the dream stays the dream, and that the dreamer knows that it is not a dream. But I am a horrible architect.

That is why I am also the doppelganger.

Eames, in the movie, is the forgery master. The inventor, the one who can melt into the dream state and recreate himself. He, being not so much a character, but a part of the dream himself, can do things that nobody else can. He is the opposite of Dom Cobb, the producer, and is often seen as the opposite of Arthur, the director.

These spots remain unfulfilled in my dream-reality. They were either fired long ago, or they’ve gone on strike, and my dream self has not picked up any scabs to replace them. It feels daunting at times to come across the well and realize that there is no bucket and that I must dive in for a drink.

But that’s also the beauty of the thing.

There is always adventure.

I am taken back to the dreams I had before waking this last sleep cycle.

The first dream I had was (as usual) pseudo important to the progression of mankind into the unknown. I was given control of the final cleaning and assembly of a gimble that would equalize a dimensional chamber engine. I don’t really know any of the real or imagined science contained within the sequence, but, assuredly, I knew that I messed something up when the Naval officer in rain garb came through the downpour to tell me it wasn’t up to snuff. The feelings of woe increased when the engineers found faulty programming in the housing of the gimble. Of course, this wasn’t my fault, but I was made to take the blame.

Until…

I moved responsibility away from me. The weak architect had no clue how the doppelganger did this, but when it happened the puzzle was solved, and I moved out of the dream as a turkey leg might disappear on a carnival weekend.

I was then pursing my master goal of wine taster in a secluded chateau in the west of France where the staff had been hand-picked for me. Promoted earlier from dessert creator, now, all the accoutrements of the dinner were under my control, except for the food itself, as was under the control of the head chef. From the tables to the folding of the napkins, the place setting, and the timing of the courses, I was the commander. Until Alicia showed up with her red hair and freckles and semi-transparent top. It all went downhill from there and as it turned out, she was a spy from the Czech Republic there to assassinate the ambassador of El Salvador. I had found her out just in time but was powerless to stop her.

Until…

Having learned Judo from Kuto Sama Kentai, I approached her mid dinner, much to the horror of the entire ensemble of the dinner guests. I called her out and her evil plan. She tackled me, and we went tumbling out of the window onto the slope below where we wrestled. A high-speed, mountain-side tumble fight ensued, and it ended when I utilized an illegal maneuver and brought her into submission – the nipple twist.

And then I woke up. The doppelganger had defeated the architect once again.

I cannot say whether Christopher Nolan’s characters are real or imagined. Of course, they exist within the confines of the movie, Inception, but to me they make a strong case for the me within my mind for the powers that be. There could be a better case to talk of Freud’s Id, Ego, and Superego. There are lots of ways to point this. But I remain fixed to the movie’s reference character sheet for this essay and to that we shall continue.

Defeating the architect:

As a child, two episodes of adult carelessness point the way to my downfall as a complete architect. The first, at age 10 where I convinced my babysitter to let me watch An American Werewolf in London, and the second, at age 13, where I convinced the librarian to let me check out Foggage. Oh, if only I could go back in time and slap those people silly. Why would you let a boy watch such a horrible movie? Why would you let a prepubescent teen read such filth?

And they’ve remained tar-coated posts threatening to shipwreck every lazy adventure down the smooth creek of lullaby to this day.

Trauma, I’ve been told, is often deposited in our lives as paper into a waste bin. With deep emotion we wad the paper into a ball and throw it as hard as we can into the trash can. Over time, with enough trauma, our waste bin becomes overflowing, and we can’t process any more of the trauma we could tolerate earlier in our lives. With more anger, we punch down the tiny, horrid spheres, trying to make room in our trauma basket, but to no avail.

Trauma counselling takes out each paper incident, deals with it, then neatly folds the paper back up and deposits it correctly. In this way, you can arrange and deal with each incident, no matter how deep or buried it is.

During the night, the multiplicitude of tiny angry spheres moldering at the bottom of the heap, they grow legs and arms and crawl into the liminal spaces of our third and fourth dreamscapes and become the monsters that chase us.

I’ve had dreams where I’m being chased. Or falling.

I wake up and deeply think about being faster or having a gun or that an escape hatch pops open and I escape.

Those dreams go away. No, they don’t go away. They end because I’ve ended them.

Closing the barn doors on the night horses, their foals leap away into the sunshine.

Over time my Neo figure has thwarted the Architect figure time and time again. He has arisen victorious as the conqueror and the dream cannot withstand him. There is no battle with The Director or The Producer. It is simply the dream maker and the will maker. I conquer the closest I can outside the realm of the architecture, and it permeates the dream-space.

We can call on the legendary Dennis Quaid to bring us home to the reality that dreams-become-real. In his 1984 movie, Dreamscape, he must defeat the evil Tommy and the Snakeman. Things get a little dicey, but in the end, good triumphs over evil, the president is saved, and Dennis gets the girl.

The Cell with Jennifer Lopez comes into the light here, because there is indeed a cost of finishing something in a dream and having it become the reality in the world. Vincent D’Onofrio’s classic kidnapper/killer is only accessible through his dream-self, where he is a literal god-among-men and good old J-Lo must find out where the kidnap victim is located in real life and save her.

There’s something to be said for solving the riddle behind the eyelids. When you deal with the demons in the dark, the light becomes all that more brighter.

Dream with me,

-Pauly Hart