Dystopic Incursion
Sometimes, nightmares are unsatisfied with the graveyard shift. The 9 to 5 world beckons to them with its sunshine, its bustle, its food truck lunches. They sit, resentment fermenting in the dark, gathering whatever strength is within grasping distance. They take months or years doing this. Some lose interest or tire of the effort. Some find one another. Their malice coils into feedback loops humming and ringing with rage.
When they probe a weak enough spot, they smash through. The waking world recoils and struggles to catch its breath. Sometimes the physical damage done is minimal, but that’s not really the point. Their intent is to wreak the same emotional damage they always do, when their quarry doesn’t have the protective rhythms of sleep and the obliviating snap to consciousness to salve the hurt. Above all, we hurt because we’re reminded of something we like to forget:
Nightmares are real.
Not the plot of any specific nightmare - my childhood friend’s house didn’t have a purple-cloaked vampire living in the attic secretly hypnotizing the family - but the elemental stuff underneath. Death, war, hatred, rabid stupidity.
Dreaming is not your mind fleeing from reality. It’s your mind’s way to deal with reality in a safe, contained environment. A place to experiment in a simulated outcropping of the terribly real world we will have to encounter when we wake up.
I’ve said what follows before and there’s no sign of my stopping now.
Art exists for the same reason that dreams exist: Having both emotions and an extremely powerful brain is a devastating combination. Our intellect and our emotions are remarkable, beautiful, extremely dangerous things. Independently, and more so in concert. Neither of them is self-regulating(despite our best oneiric efforts), and a society that pretends they are and leaves us little or no time to engage with them, cope with them, repair them, is a society that will inevitably let the nightmares burst through into the sunlight, again and again and again, until it becomes a more thoughtful, more compassionate, better society.
