Wait no stop.

Stop going wherever it is you’re going. I woke up in the middle of the night to get this down on paper. My blood shot eyes and groggy brain need to get this out of their systems. Please:

Sometimes, in the murky purple space I wade through before I truly fall asleep, I picture a different world. This alternate existence of mine, it’s so much unlike everything we believe in, here, on our green-tinted-cotton chasing rock floating through the cosmos. So different, that it is almost entirely the same. Except for one key aspect. See, I dream of a world where children are encouraged to draw on the walls and play with their food and stay in the bathtub for hours, just day dreaming. Young, aspiring innovators are told by their parents that pursuing their craft is the foremost method to make them proud. Because that’s what they were told when they were kids. Because that was the foundation of their ancestors. I dream of a world in which photography students, theater majors, sculptors, architects, magicians, designers, mimes, painters, writers, singers, creators of all kinds are praised for being the pioneers on the road to national advancement. A world in which a country’s worth isn’t defined by capital investment and gross domestic product and by how much they are beating their competitors in a race to financial domination, but by its art. 

We live in fear of our neighbors because they may be plotting our destruction. We strive for envy from the people we care about because success is measured by the relative misery of others. We kill, we torture, we bully, we exclude, and we pray for our own salvation. And I succumb to my own fatigue and try to stay there for as long as possible because I’ve finally found a place where I feel like I am useful. I am important. I have wasted entire days repeatedly writing arbitrary words on the soles of my shoes, and dousing miniature cities in liquid rainbows, and achieving a sense of purpose because of it. People on the streets join in and whistle tunes of fresh flowers and burning fire places and by the end of it, we’re being photographed for international newspapers and congratulated on our intellectual excellence. This is the definition of prosperity. Creative collaboration. This is all possible in my dreams. This is my salvation. 

And when I awake, I am encompassed by an overwhelming sense of guilt because those dreams won’t lead me to financial success. Those dreams won’t get me in history books and win me a nobel prize and change the world and put the grand ol’ United States ahead of dog’gon China. My aspirations are nothing out there in “the real world”.  And the further I delve into my slumber induced society, the further I want to be from my dauntingly bleak looking future chasing my every move as we speak. 

I don’t want to live in fear of my neighbors. I don’t want to measure my success through the self-dissatisfaction of my friends. And I don’t want to feel at home in a far off world that only exists in my near-subconscious mental state. I want to go back and change history so that we will prosper through our passions, not our credit scores. 

You may not know, but, there is a suspiciously wide black hole sprouting up through the depths of society itself and it feeds off the “hush-hush” attitude of the greedy. I fear it will swallow us whole if we continue to drag our feet along with the herd and hold keys between our fingers ready to fight our own kind. I’m not ready to fight, and I’m not ready to run, but I’m certainly not going to let the aching tremors in my legs keep me from moving. 

But what can I do? Commit fact and equation after equation and fact to memory until I fall asleep, drifting back into my unconscious utopia. And I am happy here, amongst the whistling city folk, banding together to advance our beautiful world into artistically effervescent opulence. I am happy with my half theories and ideals floating amongst a colorfully clouded in-between. So, please, don’t tell me when it’s time to wake up. I am well aware. But I am afraid. 

I hear them calling for me. I can’t keep my eyes open.