Post by Kaden on Feb 3, 2007 23:13:37 GMT -5
Really. Don't ask what brought this burst of "creativity" on, cause even I don't know.
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What if my entire life past high school has been a delusion? The twist of the movie Jacob’s Ladder came in the very last scene: when the audience realizes that the entire movie had been a hallucination of the title character’s; his last-ditch attempts to stay alive even though he’s been mortally wounded in the Vietnam War. Even he, during the hallucination, is 100% percent certain that he’s living a real life. This makes me wonder: what if I’m suffering the same fate? What if the last true thing I’ve done in my life was to graduate high school….No, even stranger, what if I never even did that? Suppose I was slowly going insane during those 4 years of school. Having my own hallucinations and delusions, causing me to gradually fail my classes, and then during my senior year I realize that I’m not graduating. That completely snaps my already weakened mind, making me lose any and all touch with reality. By then, my family has definitely realized that I’m beyond help, so they admit me to a mental institution. This is, in reality, where I’ve been for this past year and a half (as of 12/21/06).
However, my life has continued in my mind. Was I ever actually accepted to New York University? The acceptance letter came weeks before graduation, so according to this theory, I could not have imagined that. But if I was failing all along, then there’s no way NYU would have accepted me. So, perhaps, could my mind have already compensated? Could my mind have already foreseen its own descent into insanity, and conjured up a fictional acceptance letter? I can only imagine the terrible sound of my mother’s heart breaking, confronted with the pathetic sight. Her son, her pride and joy, hopelessly mad. Him, beaming with glee about an acceptance that he only imagined, and she able to do no more than nod her head and smile in silent sorrow. Or maybe I imagined the smile too.
Do I even want to leave this dream? Leave this life and return to my real one, to padded walls and white straitjackets? It’s everything I wanted in this mirage. I’m attending my dream university in my dream city, getting very passable grades, and I still get to go back and see my family for Christmas and summer vacation. It seems too good to be true, and in fact, maybe it is.
When the street’s clear and it’s time for me to cross, I normally run across - or at least walk briskly. This may be because I’m normally in a rush to get somewhere, or it might be because I’m naturally an energetic person once I get up and around. Whatever the reason, I should, by all rights, be dead right now. There was a time when I had a street to cross. It was completely clear - except for one car coming down the street. It had to pass an intersection to get to the road I wanted to cross, and it had its left turn indicator flashing, showing that it was about to turn down a different road. At this point, knowing said car was about to turn, should I not have ran across the street? I didn’t. For some reason, I walked slowly across…something I never normally did. As I got about a third of the way across, the driver changed his or her mind. They continued barreling down the road, blasting right in front of me. Had I been walking any faster, I’d have been run over, and possibly killed at the speed the car was moving. How could I have subconsciously decided not to do something I’d normally done for months? I had no idea that driver would have come down my road. Another time, I’d went to this event. It was something about tolerance, or advertisement, or something. I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, this girl came up to me and started talking to me about my sneakers. Not once did I think, “Here’s a girl asking me about my sneakers”. Nothing about that seemed weird to me at the time. I’m starting to think something is seriously wrong with my head.
What I don’t understand is why this is happening to me. Before I flunked high school, I don’t remember anything particularly traumatic happening to me; something that would have warped my mind and started the downward spiral I was on. This kind of thing can’t be random. I wonder how my high school “friends” handled my issues. Each of those four years, I must have been getting increasingly bad, and high school kids are not known for being the most tolerant of individuals. Did I even have friends, or did I hallucinate them too? I got off the phone with one of them not too long ago. Or did I? Nothing makes sense anymore.
I haven’t even started on the dream I’ve been having. It’s not possible that normal people dream up the things I dream about. And it gets more vivid each time I have it. I’m on a train, packed with people. As the train goes through a tunnel and everything goes dark, I hear the screams. Oh God, I can still hear the terrible, terrible screams. I’m completely sightless and these tormented screams just consume my ears. During the screams, my body is splashed with a liquid that I’m sure is blood. However, as soon as I leave the tunnel…nothing. The only remnant of the madness is the blood covering my clothes. But there’s no blood anywhere else. Not on the seat, not on the floor, not even on the windows. Everything is spotless. The screams have stopped, though I still hear them echoing in my mind. When the train enters another tunnel, the cycle repeats. Screaming, more screaming, and blood. This continues for the rest of the dream, ending only when I wake up. The screams stay with me for about half the day even after I awaken. What I consider most scary about this is the fact that I’m wondering if those dreams are the rare times when I see what’s really around me. Not that I think my life is a recurring sequence of tunnels and blood-soaked screaming, but maybe the darkness of the tunnels signifies the darkness of my life. Everything’s been darkness. I have an obscured view of everything my life’s been up until now, only thinking of this now when it could be much too late. The lighted sections of the dream are what’s really been happening. I’m the only one to hear the screams, to feel the blood, because I’m the only person in my world. In my world off in the distant galaxy of my fragmented mind.
So what’s this all mean? If I really am living in a delusion, shouldn’t it all come crashing down at my realization of it? Or is this just a rare moment of coherence, or as Jay-Z put it, a moment of clarity? Once I close this document, will I forget about it and return to my “life”? I should consider it a blessing that I’m able to grant myself the kind of idyllic life that others merely wish for. Why would I, instead, wish to return to life? Returning to the world where I’m nothing more than mental patient #1234xxxx would offer me nothing. The only thing I can do is wait and see if my revelation will affect this. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t.
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What if my entire life past high school has been a delusion? The twist of the movie Jacob’s Ladder came in the very last scene: when the audience realizes that the entire movie had been a hallucination of the title character’s; his last-ditch attempts to stay alive even though he’s been mortally wounded in the Vietnam War. Even he, during the hallucination, is 100% percent certain that he’s living a real life. This makes me wonder: what if I’m suffering the same fate? What if the last true thing I’ve done in my life was to graduate high school….No, even stranger, what if I never even did that? Suppose I was slowly going insane during those 4 years of school. Having my own hallucinations and delusions, causing me to gradually fail my classes, and then during my senior year I realize that I’m not graduating. That completely snaps my already weakened mind, making me lose any and all touch with reality. By then, my family has definitely realized that I’m beyond help, so they admit me to a mental institution. This is, in reality, where I’ve been for this past year and a half (as of 12/21/06).
However, my life has continued in my mind. Was I ever actually accepted to New York University? The acceptance letter came weeks before graduation, so according to this theory, I could not have imagined that. But if I was failing all along, then there’s no way NYU would have accepted me. So, perhaps, could my mind have already compensated? Could my mind have already foreseen its own descent into insanity, and conjured up a fictional acceptance letter? I can only imagine the terrible sound of my mother’s heart breaking, confronted with the pathetic sight. Her son, her pride and joy, hopelessly mad. Him, beaming with glee about an acceptance that he only imagined, and she able to do no more than nod her head and smile in silent sorrow. Or maybe I imagined the smile too.
Do I even want to leave this dream? Leave this life and return to my real one, to padded walls and white straitjackets? It’s everything I wanted in this mirage. I’m attending my dream university in my dream city, getting very passable grades, and I still get to go back and see my family for Christmas and summer vacation. It seems too good to be true, and in fact, maybe it is.
When the street’s clear and it’s time for me to cross, I normally run across - or at least walk briskly. This may be because I’m normally in a rush to get somewhere, or it might be because I’m naturally an energetic person once I get up and around. Whatever the reason, I should, by all rights, be dead right now. There was a time when I had a street to cross. It was completely clear - except for one car coming down the street. It had to pass an intersection to get to the road I wanted to cross, and it had its left turn indicator flashing, showing that it was about to turn down a different road. At this point, knowing said car was about to turn, should I not have ran across the street? I didn’t. For some reason, I walked slowly across…something I never normally did. As I got about a third of the way across, the driver changed his or her mind. They continued barreling down the road, blasting right in front of me. Had I been walking any faster, I’d have been run over, and possibly killed at the speed the car was moving. How could I have subconsciously decided not to do something I’d normally done for months? I had no idea that driver would have come down my road. Another time, I’d went to this event. It was something about tolerance, or advertisement, or something. I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, this girl came up to me and started talking to me about my sneakers. Not once did I think, “Here’s a girl asking me about my sneakers”. Nothing about that seemed weird to me at the time. I’m starting to think something is seriously wrong with my head.
What I don’t understand is why this is happening to me. Before I flunked high school, I don’t remember anything particularly traumatic happening to me; something that would have warped my mind and started the downward spiral I was on. This kind of thing can’t be random. I wonder how my high school “friends” handled my issues. Each of those four years, I must have been getting increasingly bad, and high school kids are not known for being the most tolerant of individuals. Did I even have friends, or did I hallucinate them too? I got off the phone with one of them not too long ago. Or did I? Nothing makes sense anymore.
I haven’t even started on the dream I’ve been having. It’s not possible that normal people dream up the things I dream about. And it gets more vivid each time I have it. I’m on a train, packed with people. As the train goes through a tunnel and everything goes dark, I hear the screams. Oh God, I can still hear the terrible, terrible screams. I’m completely sightless and these tormented screams just consume my ears. During the screams, my body is splashed with a liquid that I’m sure is blood. However, as soon as I leave the tunnel…nothing. The only remnant of the madness is the blood covering my clothes. But there’s no blood anywhere else. Not on the seat, not on the floor, not even on the windows. Everything is spotless. The screams have stopped, though I still hear them echoing in my mind. When the train enters another tunnel, the cycle repeats. Screaming, more screaming, and blood. This continues for the rest of the dream, ending only when I wake up. The screams stay with me for about half the day even after I awaken. What I consider most scary about this is the fact that I’m wondering if those dreams are the rare times when I see what’s really around me. Not that I think my life is a recurring sequence of tunnels and blood-soaked screaming, but maybe the darkness of the tunnels signifies the darkness of my life. Everything’s been darkness. I have an obscured view of everything my life’s been up until now, only thinking of this now when it could be much too late. The lighted sections of the dream are what’s really been happening. I’m the only one to hear the screams, to feel the blood, because I’m the only person in my world. In my world off in the distant galaxy of my fragmented mind.
So what’s this all mean? If I really am living in a delusion, shouldn’t it all come crashing down at my realization of it? Or is this just a rare moment of coherence, or as Jay-Z put it, a moment of clarity? Once I close this document, will I forget about it and return to my “life”? I should consider it a blessing that I’m able to grant myself the kind of idyllic life that others merely wish for. Why would I, instead, wish to return to life? Returning to the world where I’m nothing more than mental patient #1234xxxx would offer me nothing. The only thing I can do is wait and see if my revelation will affect this. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t.