IMAGINE for a moment you are reading this piece in your dream within a dream, within a dream, within a dream, within a dream.
With the daily in your hands, you are whisked to a familiar world with unfamiliar circumstances. What exactly is there, anyway?
You sip your heavily taxed and imported black coffee. No sugar. No cream. Who needs these additives when you could have a 3-in-1 drink from a sachet? But you still settle for that brewed americano because you believe your body still needs anti-oxidants. You take bites of your gluten-free sandwich laced with sodium-free grilled chicken breast, highly organic cherry tomatoes, and dashed with rock salt from the pristine waters of some remote rebel-infested island off the peninsula.
You buy clothes from international brand names whose designs are two years old since its debut in the runways of New York and Paris. Or if you are cash strapped, which you always are, you still go for those brand names but second hands. You don’t eat fresh. You devour meat from cans. You sip noodles from plastics. You ingest anything and everything processed.
When you get out, you see a city where perverted elected officials masquerade as honest, transparent and accountable. You hear a city of howls not of animals but of distraught parents growling for justice. You smell a city of fetid creeks and swamps under commercial centers. You feel a city of spineless citizens whose loyalty to the deposed dictator remains. You talk to friends whose reality is a product of the imagined. You wallow in the verisimilitude created by the so-called new intelligentsia.
A new religion has taken over. Gotham is real, indeed. Places of worship have become sordid grounds for sexual predators. Faith in the omnipotent no longer sells. Scientists are now high and almighty. One prick and you’re a goner.
When your raison d’être is no longer reasonable and sound, you begin to shake your head in utter disgust and ask, “Where am I?”
You wake up and see far worse situation than the first one. It’s no longer americano that you’re drinking. No more sandwiches. No chicken breasts. No cherry tomatoes. No rock salt. No brand names. Rationed cans of meat and sardines. Rationed rice. Rationed bread. Trigger-happy elected officials. Real howling animals. Fetid decaying human carcasses. Return of the dictator’s family. Newer imagined reality. Less religion. More predators. Less faith. More pricks.
You doubt. But don’t do anything about it.
The closer you get to reality, the worse it gets. Nothing to drink. Nothing to eat. You kill for meat. You murder for rice. You eat howling animals. Everything and anything that is corrupt is now the ruling party. You smile at carcasses, thinking that you are still luckier. Fake reality. No more religion. Everyone is a predator. No more faith. Everyone is a prick.
Finally, you wake to the real world and it’s a nightmare. You hunt. Or be hunted.
Then for a moment, you start imagining that you are in a dream, within a dream, within a dream, within a dream, within a dream, to be in your own reality.