A Waking Dream

There is a surreal quality to waking up. The world transforms in an eyeblink from darkness to color. From vague, meandering dreams to vivid life all around. The mind doesn’t adjust quickly enough and it seems, for a moment, that this world, with all its confounding complexity and striking beauty, can’t possibly be real. Then, you remember: You’re in your bed, laying on your sofa, or dozing off in the math classroom (the worst of the three). Truly, sleep is an amazing thing. It is interdimensional travel, a trip to a different realm and restorative all at once. It can be disorienting to return to a world that seems infinitely more ordinary and logical than your dreams. Sometimes I prefer the infinite possibilities of sleep and other times the orderliness of consciousness is safer and preferable. However, during the last few days, the boundaries between imagined fantasies and reality seem to have blurred more than ever. If anything, this election cycle has proven to me that anything is possible even in the real world.

As I watched the final hours of the election tick by, I could not help but feel as if I was dreaming. Last Tuesday night passed in spurts, at first very quickly and then mind-numbingly slow. On CNN, the reporters seemed to be in a state of panic themselves, unbelieving. They cut frantically from the map to the individual states to the main panel sitting at their desk. Everywhere there was flashing updates, yet they, too, were helpless, waiting for the final polls to close. Some states would never be called. They did not want to fall silent lest they be forced to reflect on what was truly happening. It was a paradox that could have driven anyone insane. By the time Pennsylvania was declared for Trump, it was 2:00 am. I had neither the time nor the energy to contemplate the vast changes that had passed me by. Somehow, the world had changed entirely, but I could not yet see how. Only time would reveal the alterations to come.

Even throughout the next day, the sheer implication of the change was impossible to confront. The election made me realize that the world I thought that I knew so well was only an illusion, a fleeting dream. In fact, my world was in complete contradiction with what others wanted. My foundational values were not, in fact, universal laws. It was as if every physicist had suddenly told me that gravity no longer applied. I had been rudely awakened and could not seem to adjust. We always see the world in half-realized glimpses from severely limited perspectives, beautiful bubbles that need to be popped. Even when moments of clarity are gained, it is far too easy to lose them in the following hubbub.

You don’t get to wake up many times in this world, not nearly as many as you think. More and more, people talk only to those who share the same opinions, only click on the articles from certain publications. There is always an “us” and a nefarious “them”. Democracy represents a choice and the people’s voice, whether we like to hear it or not. This election was not only a mere wake-up call, it was a blaring fire alarm. There are serious problems in the real world and there is no point in seeing it as only a bad dream. No more hiding. It can’t be worse than realizing that your entire math class has been staring at you while you’ve been asleep.