It happened again – a dream from another world.
Although this dream was on a whole other level!
I wasn’t myself. Rather, I was a self that I have been trying to discipline my whole life
(Well, would be more accurate to say it is a self that I have been trying to annihilate my whole life; “my worst self” or “my demons” would be the common expression– Fire. Explosive. Violent. Angry.)
Let’s go check the guest wing of this huge-ass apartment of yours! Maybe you can host some students who have been living in camps like refugees!
– But I don’t have a “guest wing”… That was just a dream..
Surely you do! Do you remember that time when you spent the night there because your ex-lover had to spend the night at yours? Or the day you had a fancy dinner together with your old and new friends?
– Ah yes… I do remember those moments, true! OK .. Let’s check it out… Although sleeping is so comfortable and cozy and fun I don’t wanna get up yet..
Yesterday my watch died. That was very hurtful as they don’t make those anymore. And the new breed of “smart” watches feel so intrusive (demonic) to me…
Today, the watch in my water-room died. That was very shocking and destabilizing, because it was the one that told me the time of moon/sun cycles.
Both things happened ‘first thing in the morning’.
Under ‘normal’ circumstances, “intimacy” designates a closeness, a proximity, an alignment, a fusion even. Such intimacy is then attributed to two souls, minds, hearts, or bodies.
But there is an other sense of intimacy that I have never noticed this vividly before. It is more profound, yet very subtle. It is only the pandemic + alienation experience that led me to see it like this.
Typically, people politely criticise this online-everything life as being “not the same”. Of course it is not the same when your work, your social life, your love life, your entertainment, travel, and… being are all done behind a screen. But what is actually missing?
It’s been two months since I arrived in Utrecht after an abrupt lockdown in Jeddah for 7 months. It was (/is) so surreal to be back here. Suddenly, I was (mentally) sent back in time – the places, the memories, the scents, the scenes… Thoughts I thought I had ‘gotten over’ simply resurrected themselves out of things. Automatic behaviors that I forgot, suddenly were reflexive out of nothing.
