The video embedded only tells the story. The interpretation of the story is covered on the texts!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/YHEBkSgOPnA?si=ndGxYTJpqUvz8ks9
I had a dream. I lived in a tower-shaped inn. Approximately 6 levels and it was barely maintained. It was made of bricks and wood. There was no one there but me and my wife. Things feel natural as I feel that I have memories of experiences with her rather than a stranger that just happened to be on the same bed as me when I woke up. It was quite nice and lovely. After breakfast we went to see the gardens, greenlands, mountains, and talk about how much we like the things we like. It’s almost as if “wow what is this, this is nice.” There is no one around our tower and the greenscapes for miles. I just happen to be reminded from flashing memory that it turns out it’s my retirement age, I have done most things in life and I’m just spending my time with my wife exchanging ideas and just being drawn into each and every moment I spend with her. Every day feels blissful. We spent most of every day around our tower and gravitating towards our bookshelves and reading other humans’ ideas and criticising them or laugh about them how they relate so much to us or how we realised we never seen language being put in such intricate way that makes us feel feelings that we are feeling. The towered-shaped inn is barely maintained because it’s only maintained for basic necessities of two people. We used to run this business together until we realised we had enough money until the remainder of our life. We realised that we don’t want anything more out of life that can be spent with money. “It’s human relationships that matter the most”, said my wife. We only want money because money enables us to have things that can be spent with other people. It’s a part of our nature to be in such a way we invent money but after fulfilling our primary needs, money doesn’t help us much with our happiness. After that we kind of closed our business and just spent the rest of our remaining old lifes being human.
One day while I was outside from my regular sightseeing of nature I came back home to realise that my tower is filled with people I have never seen. With slight panic I asked a bystander “What happened here?” He said “There’s a witch hunt, witches would like to spend her lives alone doing whatever, and we happen to find a witch here that lives on this barren tower.” It’s almost as if my life flashed before my eyes. I rushed through the crowds to the centre and heard the sound of a backbone just broken as my wife lay there on the ground lifeless and full of blood on her face. The villagers were almost done killing my wife as they left in a hurry and went through a pilgrimage together. I stand there never ever so lifelessly. I kneeled and cried. My sadness goes beyond any language that I know… The memories that I’ve spent with her, what should I do with them now…? The times we spent together redefined me. “Is this even real..? Was this ever in my control to happen..? Why did I decide to go outside leaving my wife in the tower this morning..? But we always do that and nothing wrong has ever happened. We never heard of any witch hunt. Why did I let this happen? Was this ever in my control to begin with? Why…?”
Countless tears dropped from my face. My wife. My beautiful wife. We have achieved so many great things together. Why must your death be phrased in a way that is in my control..? Maybe I could’ve saved you, my dear wife. Is this the cost of being human? “Why would God do this?” Is there a reason why this happened? Tears just get to flow more after the accumulation of frustration as I rest my head on my wife’s lifeless body. “Why would those humans do this?” “Under what any good reason they justify the things they do?” Me and my wife are quite human-centric beings. We love humanity as much as we credit the nature of evolution and love that made us able to feel love towards one another. We are selfless to the core. We intertwine ourselves in our daily life as much as we thrive our happiness between each other. Her happiness is my happiness as much as her sadness is my sadness. We never bother other humans. We were just about to die, we are old and crippled. We are spending the remaining of our lives doing what we think makes us feel human. “The sunset is beginning to set down… And I would like to spend another moment of seeing the sunset with you… But it’s impossible now isn’t it? I hold her hand for one last time and close her eyes with my fingertips. By any definition of being human, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to still be human after this…”
I stand up and gaze down at my wife’s lifeless body. I’m not ready to let go… This is absurd… The tower, the mountains, the trees stood there, remaining ever so lifelessly. “Meaning will never present itself in front of me, it never does… Everything will still remain there and stand ever so lifelessly.
“You always want to be buried under your favourite sequoia tree and I should fulfil your one last wish.” I carried her dead body to the path we used to walk together ever so lively. I remember chasing after her under the clear beaming sunlight tracing fragmented lights over small spaces of the leaves as she jumped and walked from her excitement. With her nonsense rambling how amazing sequoia trees can live up to three thousand years. I was relatively younger back then and didn’t even put much thought into what three thousand years really of something significance for a tree is. “I mean if it’s really valuable to you, who am I to tell you otherwise, I quite like your incoherent rambling anyways, I never hear anyone be so excited about trees.”
The walk of despair got more intense and intense as more memories of her kept flying inside my head. Her favourite flowers. Her favourite angle on how to see the river that is picturesque or whatever she called it. “I miss having arguments with you about how your angles are always rubbish…” “Strange how much I hate it when you raise your voice over silly little arguments about angles now I want to purposely debate about angles just to piss each other off.” “I never cared about the angles, I just wanted to talk to you about anything… Something that has some weight on you may make you want to talk, I thought… That’s why I always tease you about angles but I don’t know if you ever realised my hidden cheeky intentions…”
Oh it’s Laura, our favourite grey cat. “I’m sorry Laura… She’s dead now… I can’t save her… I wasn’t there… I’m now doing the last deed that I’ll ever possibly do. And that is to bury her in a place that she loves the most. Even I don’t think I understand holistically about her admiration of this sequoia tree. Maybe it’s just because I never had the experience or the same thought as she does that gives birth to her admiration towards trees.
I searched for a decent plank of wood to use as an improvised shovel. Every wave of digging gets heavier and heavier as each wave symbolises the actualization of moving on. I’m not ready… But it must be done… It’s much better than to let her body decompose in front of our tower. Thinking on what I could’ve done is just going to make me suffer worse. There’s literally nothing I can do to save her. I was out of the information curve. Maybe had I known there’s a witch hunt I could’ve prevented her death but how would I know that in the first place?!
Laura meows. “Oh you’re still here. Ah, it’s your dinner time isn’t it? I’m sorry I was out of the loop today… I don’t have your treats with me right now… Sorry…” Laura meows again, I reached out my hand to pet her head. “Do you understand how I feel laura? Truly you are more human than those humans who have murdered my wife. How could they not foresee this? Maybe if they were able to feel these feelings that I’m feeling right now maybe they wouldn’t have murdered her. How are they incapable of imagining that and justify murdering for the sake of the witch hunt. But I would never know how they really feel regarding their own personal problems and backstories that drove them for the witch hunt… Humans are complex… I wish I could be just like you Laura… Yet I was also troubled when I saw you in tears while holding your last pup in your mouth last winter as me and my wife let you go inside our house and nurture you and your child…” Your life must be hard too…
“Existing is hard… I just want to kill myself right now but It would make her sad, I can’t break a promise even a promise to a passed soul. Maybe her soul is still alive right now and is holding me tightly through hands that I cannot see. She understood me, Laura. She’s the most human amongst all humans that I know. She was just there existing as a human and I enjoy her company as much as I see part of myself in her and she sees part of herself in me..Truly she is right, there is nothing more beautiful than human relationships as we as humans are constantly intertwined with the presence of other human beings.” Laura meows in reply and moves her head against my hand. I brought her up to my lap and sat down to rest leaning back on the great sequoia tree. “Thank you for being here Laura… I don’t know if you understand me with all these human languages but your presence here and your longing towards me made me feel understood.”
My hands are fading… The wrinkles on my hand no longer held any significance. I am ready to embrace death. I can’t turn down the past that has already happened. I can’t bring myself towards the tower knowing it contains too many beautiful memories that will make me suffer even more. The way out of these sufferings is through forgetting and through forgetting I will lose some part of myself as the day by day interactions with her has shaped my thoughts and the decisions that I make or rather used to make. Yet I must still live because I know her soul wants me to live.
I do the regularities to sustain my biological body so as not to disintegrate. I ate sitting on the great sequoia tree and played make believe through a playful interaction imagining how she would reply to my questions and jokes. I believe it what kept me sane enough not to kill myself yet it’s very own behavior by face value is insanity. I am going to die soon anyway, other people that I care about are dead. Let me enjoy my last moments of life reminiscing about the beautiful life I used to have and through playful make believe imagination I could place myself again in a state of bliss that I used to have… If I can’t be happy facing this unbefitting death then at least let me be happy in a fake world that intoxicates me. Nothing else matters now. I just wish death could come any sooner.
Even though the accident seems lacking in reason, if anything it gave me a reason to commit suicide. I found myself out of the absurdity and alone-ness, the need for a miracle to materialise. But a miracle never happens.
I walked back to the tower after some months living in the forest just to see somewhat familiar faces living on my tower. Through a quite distant glance I see my wife wearing a white dress at the entrance of the tower. She’s waving her hand as if she notices me. I couldn’t believe what I’m seeing. Her smile oh that god-forsaken puppy smile that I have long so much to see again materialises in front of me. I hold her cheek by my right arm as if questioning “are you real?” She just smiles and I am drowned in memories again. She held my hand and guided me to the kitchen as I was astonished at how beautiful her hair smells when she turned back. “Surely my brain is hallucinating, she couldn’t be alive! I buried her! Yet she does not need to explain herself. She is here! Existing! Just how I wanted it to be! Inside my Tower! Inside our Tower! We built this place together! She gazed at a machete and gazed back at me. Through that millisecond interaction, all of the details of how my wife was brutally murdered in front of me materialised before my own very eyes. In great vivid detail even the last few voices of her screaming in pain and her bones breaking. The image of her now feels stronger than ever. This is vengeance. These humans have brought me severe suffering beyond their comprehension. Had they tried to comprehend my emotions they would not murder her in the first place. You animals! I grabbed the machete and went through each door of my inn that I designed. I know every brick and wood that is used for every wall and stairs. How could they place themselves inside my house after murdering my wife. I killed each and every one of them even when they begged me for a reason. Reason was a problem in the past, now it’s time for vengeance. I will make you suffer as much as I have suffered. I will project my pain onto every human being on each of every floor until we reach the top floor in which that is our bedroom. She stands at the balcony letting her hair blown away by the wind. “Are.. Are you real..? Can we finally do the things we used to do again…? I knew it was just one really bad dream of losing you… Oh how much I have missed you. I love you. Can we go back on how we used to again? Talking about how cats are weird or how the shape of clouds is different every day. Or how incompetent you are at placing the books at the bookshelves. I just wanted the things we used to have. We had those for years and it can’t be just stripped away from me without a good reason. You promised me to spend the rest of the remainder of the little life we have together. Please don’t go away… Ever again…”
I woke up from my dream through the Apple default alarm and I never hate the sound of the alarm so much. “What the actual fuck was that… Who is she? I have never seen her face before… What the fuck was that dream all about? What part of human nature has a reason to give me such a dream? Oh and Fuck it’s only 7.30 I literally able to afford to hit on the snooze button on a Tuesday and maybe I can meet her again.” Hit the snooze button and woke up at 8.15 and I wasn’t able to meet her again and ask her questions. I decided to get a grip on reality and woke up and prepared myself for work. “There is no way that dream showed up without any reason, my subconscious is fucking me up right now.” I tried to think about the nature of the dream while I was standing on the MRT. The reason why that man does the thing he does. Surely I am at least in great advantage to experience it in POV only for even some small part of that man’s life.
Had I done the same thing, had I been placed in that man’s life? I couldn’t tell since I don’t feel holistically what that man has gone through. Still it was extremely extremely sad for the man. The thought of my parents dying is already sad to me, let alone imagining me standing lifelessly seeing their dead bodies after a brutal beatdown with people responsible are still around yet I need time to process the death of my parents. Maybe I would understand what the word “vengeance” really means…
Maybe I would understand only if I have experienced it… Since imagination could only take me so far but not near enough to trigger the same physiological reaction. Maybe I would do the same thing… We never know… Is it in our human nature to do the same thing…?
At the end of the dream, was she even real? I don’t think so because it doesn’t make sense that she has died. Maybe it’s only because it’s what that man really wants and crave so much to the point that its intoxicating him she actually materializes in a form of fluid and filmsy memories that lives inside the tower. Was that schizophrenia? I will never know for certain. Has been a series of reading memoirs of other humans previous mental episodes and extreme emotions has revealed me such story in my dream? I don’t know…
At the end of the dream, was she even real? I don’t think so because it seems too perfect. Maybe it’s only because it’s what that man really wants and craves so much to the point that it’s intoxicating him; she actually materialises in a form of fluid and flimsy memories that lives inside the tower. Was that schizophrenia? I will never know for certain. Has a series of reading memoirs of other humans’ previous mental episodes and extreme emotions revealed to me such a story in my dream? I don’t know…
The image of “her” or rather what that man thinks is her wife even though he still doubts it and asks her at the end of story is what I would best describe as “the phantom”. There’s this phenomenon where amputees still experience sensations, whether painful or otherwise, in a limb that no longer exists. It’s a testimony on how our brain doesn’t accept an “alien” condition and is fragile to trace back its own path back home even when the “self” is consciously unwilling to. It’s part natural. The man grieves sadness possibly beyond any human comprehension. Who really knows what he has gone through and how he lived alone under the sequoia tree beside her buried dead wife. Though, accounting that he is old and is free from financial constraints and just wanting days to pass like most elderly it sounds like it’s almost a human reaction towards despair, hate, and agony. The phantom of his wife will naturally appear from his mind as much as he can’t reason what has happened and still feels alien on how his wife passed away brutally without a comprehensible reason.
The phantom of his wife is fueled by memory of what he used to have. The timeless years that he’s unable to experience again. The one that has helped form the man he is and now has lost part of himself as he has departed forever from his wife and he can’t accept it as he deemed it to be an unreasonable death. The phantom is also fuelled by raw human motivation to feel good as much as the man was happy from his experiences with the person that cared about him. The phantom to some certain extent I would call it to have a degree of intensity. Without the phantom the man wouldn’t be able to have imaginations or mentally project the things he wants inside his head. Yet when his feelings goes overload and his wants exceed what reality can give him and he starts to bend reality helped by the extreme emotions, suffering, vengeance, and eventually shaped reality towards the thing that he wants, fucking ultimate insanity fuelled by standard human nature, phantom overdrive.
Technically, by all language, everything that is inside our mind is illusory, not real, or by definition is phantom. Yet through these ideas we are able to form the world the way we imagined it to be. Experience experiences the way we imagined it to be as we drive conscious acts that originated from our phantom.
The phantom and the ability to imagine is a wonderful human attribute to have. Really what can you do without imagination? Everything must have started somewhere and that is your mind.
The phantom was the inner will that exists in each human. The ability to fabricate reality in each to its own mind. We create the world through ideas. The phantom is what draws the man close to the woman on his first encounter to begin with, a playful imagination of spending time with her. Though, through years of experiences with her and loving her, the man has dissolutioned to his wife. His wife happiness is his happiness, his wife sadness is his sadness. The phantom cries when she dies. The phantom goes stronger and stronger as it resents the unbefitting cause of her death. The phantom is part of the man and the man is subjugated to his emotions as his will is now the will of his own imagination. Thus the imagination becomes as strong as his desire wanted to be. Out of intense grief and sadness the man no longer can distinguish between figment of his imagination and reality. Through the lack of acceptance, the man wanted vengeance, the man wanted fairness, just like any human beings wanted fairness in an unreasoning world. Through grief and despair the man killed every other men who has murdered his wife. The phantom enabled the man to do things he wouldn’t have done. Just like any humans. Are we really human without our feelings and phantoms or our ability to fabricate reality in our mind? What are we really without our feelings? Just a lifeless fleeting soul.
I don’t know if there’s an actual “objectively good moral conclusion” out of the dream. All I can percieve is that the concept of phantom as my best effort of reasning by extrapolating the concept to emphasize and put myself more in the shoes of the man in the dream.” I don’t want to be rude and say “Man fuck this guy, obviously his wife is dead, he’s hallucinating.” After series of books that I’ve read about the human condition there’s really a slippery slope of insanity that is derived from the same human nature or behaviors that makes us simply happy and sad.
The phantom was the inner will that exists in each human. The ability to fabricate reality in each to its own mind. We create the world through ideas. The phantom is what draws the man close to the woman on his first encounter to begin with, a playful imagination of spending time with her. Though, through years of experiences with her and loving her, the man has dissolved to his wife. His wife happiness is his happiness, his wife sadness is his sadness. The phantom cries when she dies. The phantom goes stronger and stronger as it resents the unbefitting cause of her death. The phantom is part of the man and the man is subjugated to his emotions as his will is now the will of his own imagination. Thus the imagination becomes as strong as his desire wanted to be. Out of intense grief and sadness the man no longer can distinguish between figment of his imagination and reality. Through the lack of acceptance, the man wanted vengeance, the man wanted fairness, just like any human beings wanted fairness in an unreasoning world. Through grief and despair the man killed every other men who has murdered his wife. The phantom enabled the man to do things he wouldn’t have done. Just like any humans. Are we really human without our feelings and phantoms or our ability to fabricate reality in our mind? What are we really without our feelings? Just a lifeless fleeting soul.
I don’t know if there’s an actual “objectively good moral conclusion” out of the dream. All I can perceive is that the concept of phantom as my best effort of reasoning by extrapolating the concept to emphasise and put myself more in the shoes of the man in the dream.” I don’t want to be rude and say “Man fuck this guy, obviously his wife is dead, he’s hallucinating.” After a series of books that I’ve read about the human condition there’s really a slippery slope of insanity that is derived from the same human nature or behaviours that makes us simply happy and sad. Or in other words, human.
I don’t even know why the dream came to me in the first place. Maybe because it was the conversation with Luca that I had before I slept that he wants a sad story. All I can say for Luca is “Luca maybe you really don’t have a strong phantom but are you even fucking sure you want a strong phantom? I cried while writing this piece today. I went to the toilet and cried after the glimpses of memory of the man inside my dream as I tried to distil it into words from moving pictures inside my head. I quite frankly accidentally slipped again. Just like in many things in life we don’t get to decide the circumstances that are brought to us. I didn’t choose the type of parents that gave me immense pressure of expectations, selfish love, and self-alienation. I didn’t choose the type of people that are around me to happen to alienate my depression in the past and drove me to be hyper-aware and have countless self-reflection literally every day to the point that I believe the only person who can understand myself is only myself. Out of sheer fucking loneliness. No one wants to take their time and sit down and listen instead they find it much easier to call me that i’m out of touch with God. Out of sheer loneliness, alienation, and self-isolation I have become bleak. And somehow through the bleakness I came to draw something of an art that has colours. Sometimes I feel that I write not because I want to but because I need to. I cry while making the process. I do not know of the alien feelings that are driving me. Such is part of human nature. It’s always the phantom. Maybe there hasn’t been a huge bad thing or character defining moment that has happened to you. Or maybe you lack an intense strong phantom or desire to the point that the same phantom could be the same reason to bring you down harder and break you mentally. To see the people who you thought trusted you looked back on you with distrust and hate. The hard thing about these things is that it couldn’t be intentionaly, it must be coincidental and thus is absurd.
As absurd as when death comes to the man’s wife on a fine afternoon. The absurd that wears no reason. Not experiencing extreme phantoms could be taken lightly as a curse to you as well as much as it is a curse to me to be too philosophical and cry sometimes.
Each to its own problems and experiences.
I'm writing on The Awe by 9 Dec right now and would like to add the following: (Dont read the awe if you havent read The Regret) by the way
We never followed a strict introduction, conflict, and resolution path anyway. Even for the phantom story there are no clear defined resolution. Although I hope the readers understand that the resolution is to be able to resonate with the man's phenomena or path from selflessness towards his wife and human-centric ideologies that they never bother other humans yet other humans bothered him through the murder of his wife in which left the man towards an alien condition. The alien condition or the realization of his condition is alien that absurdity wears no reason and his inability to accept the alien condition and create meaning out of something else as strong as his neural pathway of memory of his wife has been too finessed. The phantom cries for her even after his death and the phantom out of raw desire of wanting to see her again materializes in a form of the hallucination of his wife and his desire for vengeance out of the absurdity materializes as the drive to kill his wife killers. I really think it's as flat out as that. Although there are some themes about a sense "humanity" in animals through the ability for animals for empathy and care. But the main theme should remain as described in the story.