Saturday. And the weekend started with this telling dream:
I am in a room, sitting at a table. There are cups and plates, there is me and others. Family and friends. We sit and talk. Exchange stories and thoughts. Questions and answers. Tales of far away places.
It's all whole. Until one of us gets up, to look for a dessert, and opens a door that went unnoticed until that moment. Behind the door is a new room, like a gift, filled with soft cushions, under a shining light. There is a chocolate cake, on a silver plate, and things wrapped in glittering folio. All excited, we leave our table, and explore this new room. To taste the cake, to try the cushions, to unwrap the gifts that are brought from someone we don't know.
"That must be a very kind person," someone says, "to bring all this to us for free." ...
We run around like children. We look for other rooms. We forget to say goodbye. I see another door, and behind it, there's a stairway. It leads to a hall. There are people, sitting areas, further floors. It's all very exciting. But I have no clue how to act here. What to say. Where to go. I wander around, from one floor to the next. I am invited to join a table. I sit down. The people at the table smoke. The offer me to smoke, too. I don't want to reject. I want to belong. So I smoke. And try not to cough.
On and on I wander. Until I am tired. "I want to go back," I think. And look for the exit. But I can't find it. The place I am in now, it is far away from the place I was coming from. It is chilling cold here. There are gates. I want to ask someone, but I don't know how to put the question, there seems to be no word for the place I am coming from.
A man stands at one of the gates. "This way, this way," he says to me, and points at a stone house, which can be reached through the. I look at him, at the house. I know it's the wrong way, still I follow the direction he gave me.
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Stunned, I woke up. Then I remembered the docu I saw this week, about a village of Indian people in the jungles of Ecuador, that is faced with a deal one of the big oil companies is offering. The docu focused on a woman who belongs to the village, but who went to Quito, the capital city, to go to school. Now she is a journalist, living between two worlds, between the city and the village that is still following the traditional way of life. Yet, walking the streets of the city, she can see other Indians, who virtually sold their village, their home, hoping they would become rich, yet all that happened was that they become lost. For the companies aim, of course, is not to give free gifts to Indian. They only give what it takes to get the right to exploit the oil.
But that is only one level. The ending scene in the dream, I think it also is a symbol for our own society. For this endless rooms of entertainment it provides. All those tv channels and leisure malls, where you can wander around until you don't even exactly remember what you came there for, that always lead on towards the next floor, the next show.
Maybe the whole Western world should go into retreat for a week. Shut down all shops, all television, the web, everything, and for a change, contemplate on where we are coming from, and where we are actually going to.
Or maybe not. Maybe that would end in disaster. After all, this whole entertainment circus works like a drug, like a narcoticum it keeps us from facing the huge topics that are hidden underneath our blankets of leisure.