Sumire:
On the flip side of everything we think we аbsоlutely have pegged lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings. […]

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don’t know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion. Confusion, confusion. Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness? […]

As I said before, inside if us what we know and what we don’t know share the same adobe. For convenience’ sake most people erect a wall between them. It makes life easier. […]

To use the image of the Siamese twins again, it’s not like they always get along. They don’t always try to understand each other. In fact the opposite is more often true. The right hand doesn’t try to know what the left hand’s doing – and vise versa. Confusion reigns, we end up lost – and we crash smack-dab right into something. Thud.

What I’m getting at is that people have to come up with a clever strategy if they want what they know and what they don’t know to live together in peace. And that strategy – yep, you’ve got it! – is thinking. We have to find a secure anchor. Otherwise, no mistake about it, we’re on an awful collision course.
A question.
So what are people supposed to do if they want to avoid a collision (thud!) but still lie in the field, enjoying the clouds drifting by, listening to the grass grow – not thinking, in other words? Sounds hard? Not at all. Logically, it’s easy. C’est simple. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living dreams for the rest of time.
In dreams you don’t have to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites.
Reality, reality.

Way back when the Sam Peckinpah movie The Wild Bunch premiered, a woman journalist raised her hand at the press conference and asked the following: “Why in the world do you have to have to show so much blood all over the place?” She was pretty worked up about it. One of the actors, Ernest Borgnine, looked a bit perplexed and fielded the question. “Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?” This film came out at the height of the Vietnam War.
I love that line. That’s gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding. […]


Miu:
I was still on this side, here. But another me, maybe half of me, had gone over to the other side. Taking with is my black hair, my sexual desire, my periods, my ovulation, perhaps eve the will to live. And the half that was left is the person you see here. I’ve felt this way for the longest time – that in a Ferris wheel in a small Swiss town, for a reason I can’t explain, I was split into two forever. For all I know, this may have been some kind of transaction. It’s not like something was stolen from away from me, because it still exists, on the other side. Just a single mirror separates us from the other side. But I can never cross the boundary of that single pane of glass. Never. […] I guess never is too strong a word. Maybe someday, somewhere, we’ll meet again, and merge back into one. A very important question remains unanswered, however. Which me? On which side of the mirror, is the real me?


K:
At the time, in my imagination – something like the world of dreams Sumire wrote of – I made love to her. And the sensation was far more real than any sex I’d ever had.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams – just as Sumire said. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.