Waking Nightmares

Filling the unsaid spaces between opinions with champagne last week, I was toasting my friend’s birthday when we settled on a sudden death we could agree on. A charming man, a club member no less, had taken his girlfriend out in a hot air balloon, when something malfunctioned. As the envelope erupted in flames at 200 feet, the pilot leapt from danger, while the couple, in their moment of hesitation, were swept up and up into the endless skies, the balloon ablaze. Sobering. Conversation settled on the dangers of ballooning, when someone interjected that, dangers aside, he personally couldn’t think of a less appealing activity: “What if you needed to pee?” he exclaimed, “Or worse,” he added darkly. More sobering. “I suppose,” I suggested tentatively, “that if you sensed stomach trouble, in a basket, at altitude, in front of a new lover, you would pray for literally anything else to happen.” 

Several flutes later I collected my children. My little one insists I take our rubbish into school each morning for the “workshop”. Invariably, when I pick him up, I also pick up our rubbish, now sellotaped together. On this occasion he was boasting a novel dream catcher: if you press the picture of the chicken (on the water bottle strung between the empty egg cartons), you dream of chickens. It doesn’t work, but it’s a lovely idea, destined though it is, to be dismembered and returned to the workshop. On our way home he collects free newspapers. I don’t object because he can’t read. Sometimes I flick through them, as one might peruse a catalogue from the Little Shop of Horrors, to see what freakeries are being pitched to the tired commuter.  I learned that we, the people, have ambitions. Our latest icon, Mr. Musk, is realising them with his brain chips. Someone somewhere can now move a mouse by thinking. Ah, to be able to fulfil the day’s alienating administrative tasks simply by dreading them! The mouse reappeared a few pages later. Its testicles can be grown independently in a lab, and this, I discovered, is succour for the seedless everyman. 

I’m not sure I’m into it. Certainly, if we’re the stuff that dreams are made of, we shouldn’t sleep through these. For as long as we’re captured by every fear of physical limitation, and untethered from any apprehension of the sacred, we must surrender all to the scientist’s table. We have collectively forgotten that questions of what can be done, are secondary to questions of what should be done. Our residual repugnance at this cutting and splicing, delving and dicing, might be our only saving grace. In this moment of discomfort, we can abandon the waxen winged pursuit of progress, or for ever be swept into the most unholy recesses of the human imagination.