The
dream was as strange as dreams often are. I was living with my dad on one of
the top floors of a building several hundred stories tall, a golden tower
situated on the crest of a mountain ridge. It appeared that we occupied an
entire floor. We were surrounded by sunshine all day long, not by clouds. We
lived above the clouds. Our world had become a world of easy living, of
sun-filled days that had become taken for granted, and at the center of our
world appeared this thing. It seemed to be visible in some form everywhere
one looked. 'The Thing' was literally everywhere, but also nowhere.
Everybody knew it, not just us. Millions had seen it, but no one had ever
been able to touch 'The Thing,' or one of them, nor had a single specimen
ever been captured. It just was, and was always out of reach. It wasn't a
machine, so it seemed, or a biological entity, but it had a definite shape
and color. Its 'color' seemed richer than the rainbow, and its 'shape'
seemed so profound that it was echoed in works of art, such as paintings,
sculptures, and stories, even in public art, in the parks and plazas.
'The
Thing' had appeared first on television a long time ago. It had appeared
time-sliced between the ads. People were puzzled at the time, as I recalled.
Eventually they let it be as one of those things that simply can't be
explained. Nor could its effect be explained.
The
effect that I noticed was that the television became bigger, and its picture
clearer and brighter. Everything seemed to be effected by 'The Thing' in
some way. Our world became less confined, richer, and brighter. Our houses
became bigger, the world cleaner, the cities more beautiful. And above all
of that, which our world became, loomed 'The Thing' like an all-pervading
ghost that no one knew precisely and yet everybody 'knew' instinctively from
the bottom of their soul, for the simple realization that the world had been
transformed by it.
Many
people revered 'The Thing' that had no name. They revered it and gave it
noble names, but by and large its name remained simply, "The
Thing," just as everyone had called it from the beginning.
Some
people also feared 'The Thing'. They feared that that the boundless
development it caused would overburden our planet and thereby destroy it.
However, those were but a few and their fears were ignored in the sunshine
of the joy that this profound development unlocked. The joy became like the
sand on the beaches, an ever-present reality that gets into ones hair and
clothing, except in a nice way, that would be missed if it didn't.
Still,
the people who feared 'The Thing' tried to defeat it. They tried to turn the
world back to the way it was before 'The Thing' emerged on the horizon.
Since they couldn't capture 'The Thing' itself, they bulldozed down some of
the houses that had become wonderfully spacious and beautiful in its
presence. They did their attacks secretly at first, in the night, right with
the people sleeping in their houses, the very people who had benefited the
most from the influence of 'The Thing'. As far as I could tell from the
dream nothing happened that changed anything in the world. No one protested.
No one interfered. The sun kept on shining. Still, something did change.
Something
struck me as odd one day a long time later. It was something that didn't
seem to be linked to 'The Thing' at all in any particular manner. I found it
strange, because I hadn't noticed it before. I recalled that I needed new
running shoes at the time and had mentioned the fact to my dad in passing.
He nodded and said something about "accounts" and within moments a
list of financial portfolios and their value flashed onto the TV screen in
white letters. Seconds later the figures vanished and dad replied to me
sadly that the shoes would have to wait for a week. So I didn't think much
more about it, and in a week the new shoes were provided.
Another
thing also struck me as odd some time later. It seemed to me that the images
of 'The Thing' that were always time-sliced between TV ads appeared less
frequent than they had before, and were also less seen everywhere else. I
also suddenly realized that this trend had actually begun before the
incidence with the running shoes. I had dismissed the new trend at first as
insignificant, until it became glaringly obvious one day that the images
were no longer appearing as frequently as we had become accustomed to seeing
them. I mentioned the fact to my dad, who simply laughed and said that this
was a good sign, adding that we wouldn't be bothered with "this
nuisance" anymore.
Nevertheless
it seemed odd that something that I had grown fond of had gradually
disappeared until it could no longer be seen, except on rare occasions. All
of my nagging concerns about this trend came to the foreground one day when
our TV stopped functioning. The incidence of the failing TV had sorely upset
my dad. He had lost access to his portfolio. In a rage of his temper that
had become more intense, and always seemed linked to his portfolio, he
pounded his fist on the TV as if to jolt it back to life. Instead of it
coming back to life, however, the TV simply disintegrated.
We
rushed out immediately to buy a new one, an even bigger one than we had
before. We were fortunate that we did, because when we returned the entire
huge building in which we had lived had collapsed and crumbled into dust.
Nor were we the only ones so affected. As we beheld the catastrophe, and
cried over it, we looked into the valley below us, and there too, even while
we looked down onto the city, where we had just come from, purchasing the
new TV, as if an Earthquake had struck the whole world, the entire city in
the valley disintegrated before our very eyes into a pile of rubble and
dust. We suddenly found ourselves without a place to go to, forced to be
living in dust and shambles, scrambling to find things to eat in the forest
and to cover ourselves with leaves as shelter from the cold.
I awoke
in tears from this dream. I cried for our tragedy, but mostly because 'The
Thing' that had made everything beautiful, could no longer be seen anywhere.
Its images seemed to have been erased in my dream, throughout the universe,
as if they had never existed.
