dreamtox

1/28/2021

It took some time to realize the film we were viewing was our present reality — a theme park filled with vivid, emotive characters performing daring feats of fearlessness and sharing vulnerable accounts of struggle and triumph. The electric, eclectic, ecstatic energy was palpable, drawing forth from us our own sense of feverish, kinetic, blissful surrender. We could do anything, be everything, slip inside another or face each other in our starkness and never be less than held, coddled, and tenderized in our enchantment.

Then the torture parade came. At first we were entertained by the provocative displays of gruesome indulgence, the screams we heard held harmonics of hedonism. But as the floats lumbered past, we saw the blood, felt the fear, beheld the gore, and smelled the corruption. We stared with cold curiosity at the pleading eyes of those drawn up in spectacle, the realness of our realization pulling our hearts toward shock and dismay.

We turned to our counterparts for empathic consolation, and found some semblance of alignment there, but the others’ eyes were rapt in sadistic, salacious satisfaction. It was at that moment we saw the full scope of the scenario before us — our playplace was but a single symbiosis in a vast human ecosystem, where benevolent healers and nefarious necromancers roamed as nomadic, egoistic agonists.