Down to the burning city.

I’ve always had this recurring dream: I’m standing in the middle of a road looking forward into the horizon of a cityscape. I’m young—about five—and to my left is a home, rather modest, with two girls my age sitting on steps that attach to the porch. They stand in some of this dream’s different variants; they sit in others. But they’re always in the dream. To my right is a larger home. It’s were I live and I can intuitively sense this. From the cityscape a billow of smoke winds skyward—it’s as though there is a building on fire, or maybe the whole city is one fire?

The houses to my left and right are the only ones down this long road, surrounded by brush and expansive, colorful vegetation. My perspective is elevated since I’m able to look down toward the burning building or buildings or city, which are quiet a distance away. Behind me there is nothing but blue sky—blue sky that appears to have no depth whatsoever; or maybe it’s the edge of a cliff? Only a small piece of road—five feet in length, maybe—a patch of fresh grass and a bush are behind my left shoulder. It feels like the end of the world or the end of the universe is behind me—as though nothing exists beyond this point.

Or maybe it’s the beginning of existence; the start of consciousness for me. Behind me is quite possibly the unconscious slumber of thought searching for manifestation, of the “I” searching for ontology. I remember this dream because it’s historical; at least in an allegorical sense.

These are some of my first living memories. I’ve had other dreams that correspond to actual historical events in my earlier childhood, confirmed and attested to by older relatives. Sequentially, these other early dreams of childhood recollection are equivocal and contain elements of fuller spatial depth. Three dimensions of space and another one of time pervades in these recollections. In this recurring dream, I’m almost stepping into time—into existence. The two girls are historical: when I was about three I lived across from two young girls my age. We were playmates. Our home was elevated and looked down towards a cityscape.

The symbolism of this dream became far more salient as I read an essay be Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek—of Marxist Lacanian bent. (And of course, Lacan theorizes that the infant moves from the unconscious non-subjectivity to the objective “I” referent.)

In his essay, The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion, Zizek posits that the reality we attempt to escape to—away from the unreality of a capitalist consumerist paradigm—is itself an ideology. Wondering what could be behind our societal veneer, Zizek says this:

This final shot of The Truman Show may seem to enact the liberating experience of breaking out from the ideological suture of the enclosed universe into its outside, invisible from the ideological inside. However, what if it is precisely this "happy" denouement of the film (let us not forget: applauded by the millions around the world watching the last minutes of the show), with the hero breaking out and, as we are led to believe, soon to join his true love (so that we have again the formula of the production of the couple!), that is ideology at its purest? What if ideology resides in the very belief that, outside the closure of the finite universe, there is some "true reality" to be entered?

The entire essay is loaded with Lacanian jargon and inscrutable psychoanalytic allusions. Yet it is nonetheless an interesting read; humorous and measured in tone. Why I recalled my recurring dream during the essay, I’m not particularly sure. But the questions and symbols still remain. What do these two girls embody? Am I stepping into consciousness away from non-existence? And why this road down towards the burning city?