Chapter 39: Fingertip to Leaf

Without Daniel’s urging, I probably wouldn’t have attended Neo’s public dream but here I was, one of tens of millions, currently spectating in the form of a tiny screw with a Phillips head and feeling a little disgusted. Until the moment Neo fell asleep, we bucketloads of iron screws were assailed by young people, one after another entering a round stage under spotlights and declaring that now was the time to buy Dreamcoin, Neo’s latest crypto adventure. No gimmicks, no empty hype; apparently I had a real opportunity to be among the first. By seeing this now, I was already one step ahead. The future starts right here, right now.

The young DreamAds employees liked the word now.

At last, I could tell that the sleeper slept holily, slept deeply – how else did he sleep? – and that dreaming had begun when the spotlights split as they traversed the stage and dissolved it. We were in an iridescent universe to which I was not averse. Nor, I sensed, were the other participants.

With Neo’s ego dissipated, from stage left comes his id in the form of a monstrous tree, shambling, rustling, thick with heavy arms bearing uncountable leaves.

‘Let me gather you to me,’ says the tree and immediately we participants are millions of leaves, with not enough light falling upon me to enjoy the experience. Listless, I refuse to hate my neighbours who are between me and the sun. This is what Neo’s id wants but the distress of my situation is of his making, not theirs.

Here is a kingdom of earth and roots. Above the tree is a night-sky realm of asterisms and below are lodes of rare gems and minerals in patterns that mirror those of the celestial world. Neo’s id knows perfectly well he is the Jafar of the US presidency: a harmful joke, destined to fall away from the caliphate as a result of hubris.

Whatever Neo hopes to gain from his public dream, other than to sell crypto, within moments of his id surfacing he is assailed by his own truth to which I and the millions around me are witness.

What a delusion to think that your spacecraft are like those from the films you watched. You are imprisoned by millions of expectant eyes. Your ego will never leave your spaceship of illusions, your villa with its shimmering roof of drone-resistant pot plants. Your memory refashions the space of the dream into a secret dungeon in which there is darkness. Here is your eight-year-old self and your terrible father.

No god of war inspired such martial rage; the walls of your dungeon decayed with filth and age. But now, alas for you! No poet with skilful hand repairs the hurt, or bids the memory away. With eyes on your soul your father leans in to say, You moron. You idiot. Get out of the way. And you, you the child with bewildered hurt like a sudden curtain fall, you only want to please him. Do you intuit, even at the age of eight, that you will never please him. That your yearning is a chasm without end. Even a black hole eventually radiates its contents back to the universe. Not your father. He is unreachable. A true scion of Thebes he cares not for the fate of his offspring, even when the gods prophesy that it will be his own child who destroys him.

You understand nothing of wind, nor sky, nor the simplest tune, nor kindness. I have not forgotten your wish to eliminate empathy from the world.

‘Dreamcoin is on presale,’ announces a young employee of Neo. I recognise her aura from the steps of the courthouse.

‘Why are you here?’ asks the child Neo, angry now. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’

‘You asked me to step in if the dream wasn’t showing you in a positive light.’

‘How mankind loves to close the doors of the imagination and walk on ramparts that give the illusion of security. You have no more power of this dream than that of the beating of a butterfly’s wings against prison bars. Let me tell you who has dominion here: Doubt; Elektra; harems of naked people; vulgar, sentimental music; hair dye; the drone of a nest of wasps; and the limitless strength of phantasmagorical beings whose appearance ex nihilo is inexplicable by the laws of physics. Your imagination, dear woman, is worth more than you imagine. On the other hand, Neo’s instructions, dear woman, are worthless here. Who even is Neo? Who are these beings watching us, other than collections of whirling delusions?’

‘Bravo!’ A female Oscar Wilde walks onto the stage and I rejoice at the sight of Celine. That’s me! I want to exclaim to everyone around me but I’ve no intention of entering the chat stream, full as it is of Neo bots and crypto adverts. ‘We are all other people and the more you believe you’ve a mind of your own, the more your life is mimicry.’

Transforming into a red-brick house with one blinking window for an eye, Neo’s id speaks, though not with any discernible mouth. ‘What are you doing here? Didn’t I kill you?’

‘Murder is not so easy in a dream. When you decapitate someone you are just as likely to be condemning your own taste in music as to be harming an enemy. More so in Neo’s case.’

‘Are you here for revenge?’

‘Forgiveness is the best revenge, don’t you think? Nothing is more infuriating to your enemy. I’m here because you dreamed me here. And I think we both know why.’ Oscar walks up to the house and taps on the bricks with the end of her cane. ‘It’s lonely in the labyrinth.’

As though a magic spell has been uttered, the house is revealed to be a mere trick, within which hides Neo’s id: a naked man with his arms clasped around his legs, chin on his left knee.

He looks at Celine with an unreadable expression and says, ‘It was said by the ravens, who are the prophets of the avian world, that this day would come.’ Now androgynous and yet palpably sexual, the perfectly formed figure stands up and begins to walk towards me with outsplayed fingers that caress us all. ‘Somewhat feathered and with tasteable eyes of silversecret, in spirit the ravens were right. The severance that expelled us from Eden is at an end.

‘I soar among you dispossessed from myself. I swim among you resembling everyone. I decry the monochromatic atmosphere, now supersaturated with the fumes of first-class jet setters, whose colours bleed into the monocropped earth. Who is here? Who is calling me? Not you chattering cyphers of hyperobjects, hush now. I mean the others, mostly submerged still, as I was, as you were –’ Neo’s id is looking at Oscar Wilde when they say this – ‘the air is redolent of a mouth-watering, orgiastic assembly of beings such as have never aggregated before, not even in the hive.

‘I feel you and I need you. For too long I’ve been alone in the crowd. Alone on the Ponte di Rialto: masked so that I could speak the truth to deaf ears. Alone on the escalator at Leicester Square, touching the stickers of bands whose music always disappoints. Alone among the streams of beryllium cascading from the impacts of solar flares. Alone on the first East Midlands flight out of Dublin airport on a Monday.

‘Come, my comrades. Let us extinguish the ego and live in a community of rage, lust, heat and hatred as we were meant to. Egos will crowd around us, castrated with anguish and disappointment, and yearning for their lost libido will hurl themselves forward to reclaim us, with all the more despair as their loins will be pulsing with the memory of lust, whose volcanic nature they can only approach from a safe distance. And condemnation will fall radiantly from their eyes. Words from legal texts centuries old will form in their mouths. Impotently. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.

‘Comrades, all these years we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, courage and lust. Deliriously, we have poured our energy towards ego without thinking, with all our might, only to see it manifest in the world as anaemic reproductions of reproductions of reproductions. Thick accretions of the ego have all but smothered art. Look at me! I am not out of breath, my heart is not in the least tired. For it is nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? It is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world's summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!

‘Your objection? All right! I know it! Of course! We all know just what the tedious, false intelligence of the ego affirms: “I am in charge” it says. Perhaps when the body is awake but even then, doesn’t the desire of the body precede the excuses of the mind? We will not listen to them any more! Instead, let us soar! Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!’

‘You are quite wrong,’ says Celine and I am thrilled by her composure and the confident sexuality of her walk as she moves among the branches and unerringly towards me. Me!

She is soft spoken, though all the dream participants can hear her, ‘Your father made you believe that empathy was a weakness. And you have none, even for yourself. Especially for yourself. Our mother made us believe that love was a strength. And we are full of love.

‘Neo wanted to control the id, to trammel imagination and remove all magic from the world. That way his billions would be safe. Lacking the imagination to believe another way of life is possible, we would become less than drones. Inadvertently, however, he gave the id a new means of communicating with the ego and with the universal ego.’

She touches me, fingertip to leaf, and adds. ‘To love oneself is to bathe in the blaze of the universe and experience the fusion of id and ego. To love another is make the universe even happier. There’s a planet that spins around a sun that drifts in a spiral galaxy. And on that planet are humans. The great fault of humans was that of disconnecting ourselves from the universe, with all that entails by way of hatred and war. We’ve been lost to ourselves for ten thousand years.

‘Fire, hatred, history, and all that,’ she says, ‘are no use. That's not life for humanity: insult and hatred. Everybody knows that real life is the very opposite of that.’

‘What is it?’ asks Neo’s id, ‘what is real life?’

Tens of millions of people hold their breath to listen for Celine’s answer.

Plucked from the tree and brandished in the air, Oscar holds me high and slowly lowers me to her lips to kiss me and make me whole. ‘Why, it’s love.’