Hugo Race
Fatalists

"I dreamed that we buried something down in the dirt. Out back of where we live. Something that was a secret... And now it only comes back when I sleep. And dream... Dream... Will you wake up before you hit the ground?"

Man always dreams. He is made to dream. With open eyes or while sleeping, dreams to take refuge in or nightmares to escape from. Man dreams his entire life.

Have you ever dreamed? Have you ever had a dream where you were about to fall? Did you wake up before hitting the ground?

Why do we always wake up in dreams when we are close to death?

Our mind probably refuses to give us an end. We have never lived our end in real life, so how could it find a way to personify such an act in a dream? It doesn't. It abruptly interrupts the sequence and throws us back into our reality, where when we die, we still won't know what it will be like.

The other night I had a dream. I believe it was a dream. The last minutes of unconsciousness before returning to this world of certainties and realities.

The other night I had a dream. It was night, in the middle of a desert. Or at least it seemed so. I was there, in the middle of nowhere. Or I believed I was there. Around me, only sand, a vast expanse of billions of grains of sand that, for all I knew, might have no end. The sky was completely black, there was no moon or even a star. That useless place where I found myself could have been the only tangible creation in the entire reality. That sky, so black, might have been so not because light sources were nonexistent, but because the sky itself perhaps did not exist.

I walked aimlessly for what seemed like hours, but were probably two minutes. Two minutes of our reality. On that sand, I left the slightest trace of footprints, no sign that someone or something was there at the moment. Perhaps I was not actually there at that moment. Perhaps even that place was not there at that moment.

I found a dune, from its top I looked ahead into that expanse. It seemed infinite. Perhaps it was.

I began to question myself. It all seemed so real, yet so absurd. I screamed, but no sound came out. If this was reality, I didn't want it.

Suddenly I had a sinister feeling. I looked up, that black sky-non-sky more than nothing opened onto more black. It was impossible, of course, and I couldn't possibly have seen nothing making space for more nothing. It is irrational. But I knew it happened.

I started to run, I wished to arrive somewhere, and a moment later I was there. A spot absolutely identical to any other spot in that senseless, illogical, paradoxical absurdity. I began to believe that no "somewhere" existed. Everywhere was there, there I was everywhere. Or nowhere.

The unsustainability of the situation brought me to the most extreme of wishes: that of falling. And I fell. I actually didn't move an inch, but what was around me started to decay, that everything which was actually nothing gave way to nothing that was truly nothing. A real nothingness... A reality... Impossible. Not there. But where...

And then I began to fall. I wasn't moving, but I know I was falling. Seconds passed, which were actually hours, or hours that were seconds. Perhaps they were nothing. I don't think time existed.

While I was falling, I kept trying to conceive a coherent thought. I knew it would end soon. Everything would return to rational.

But was it really so? Perhaps that was the reality. Perhaps the dream is this. Our mind perhaps creates our end when we return to the real world or what we believe it is. Perhaps this is our end. Perhaps reality itself is our end.

I was falling, continuing to fall, close to the end, my end, the end of everything...

And then I woke up.