facades – Dreamyoga

A while back I wrote and entire blog around the notion of façade. It was called “Spiegelfassade”. The idea being is that people portray a façade, a persona, an ersatz, to others and then hide behind that. Rarely are human beings WYSWYG. They live in manner inconsistent with their authentic essence, life is a show-and-tell affair and they are not true. The public-relations-faux-façade is more present and giga-pixel ready these days. Insta-ready is not reality. One could make up a whole new identity with the help of AI and photoshop. This having a cover story is not new, it has been around for ever. There is tacit acceptance that some will need a cover in order to ply their trade. Others can take a face from the ancient gallery in a sociopathic manner. Others are knobheads.

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The trouble with cover stories is that people can struggle to know what is cover, what is real. There were cases in the UK of undercover cops fathering children whilst in deep cover. Who knows how wide the psychological damage from that propagated? I doubt national security warranted such cynical imposition.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I kept “getting” the number 37. Today I learned that 37 is a prime number, which I kind of knew anyway by sight. Apparently, that makes it useful for cryptography. If you ask human beings to pick a number at random between 1 and 100 it is the second most popular number after 7. Human random number generators are skewed. It is also a number used in a magician’s or mind reader’s force. They can, by prompting, guide you to this number. Ta-dah…magic!! 73 is also a prime number which makes 37 an unusual reversible prime. People choose numbers that are “lucky”. The odds for picking 37 are not 1 in 100. Humans have biases where they imagine there may be none.

The problem comes when façade interacts with façade and there is an illusion of reality on one or both sides. To an extent this is the basis of all 1:1 human interactions. We have a professional façade, a home one and perhaps are real only when we are alone. But if we have over egged the façade, it is impossible to understand or know our true authentic essence. People do not know themselves well and may deny a whole bunch of stuff. They may only know their shell, their façade, which they mistake for reality.

One of the answers in the University Challenge quiz last night was that “an unexamined life is not worth living”. People can quote philosophers in an erudite manner as a groovy tag to conversation. Rarely do they enact fully. Even those enamoured with the classics may quote more than do. We are selective. In this context fate is an interesting idea, that has on occasion a hackle tingling effect. We might like to believe it but only to an extent. We think we determine our life direction rationally, we choose. But a simple leaky condom can alter trajectory dramatically. We can be fated to meet someone who changes our life forever. We may miss a meeting that might be transformational by a hair’s breadth. We were not yet fated for that transformation; we came within a whisker.

If we live within the confines of our façade we may never know. If we are meant to find out, that façade might crack and perhaps violently so, revealing an unprotected nascent embryo beneath. It may evolve or develop another calcified shell quickly, lest the world sees an emperor unclad.

In all of us the authentic essence might leak through a crack. We might think, “what the fuck was that?” as we glue the porcelain mask quickly back together.

If like a Matryoshka doll there is façade after façade, identity after identity, it may take a long while to find that authentic essence. If we are fated to approach said essence then we will, no matter how much upheaval and struggle it entails. Layer after layer needs peeled back and like with onions we may cry along the way. If we are fated to stay in façade-land that is where we eke out our days.

Fate may engineer or come close, in one of these cases we will never know. Along the way we will have lent fate a hand by our choices, our decisions. It was fated thus.

This dream from just before 3 AM was of a new kind for me.

The dream opens in a UK city centre where there are lots of old-style shopping arcades. It is late at night. We are very urban and centre of town. The streets are emptying into various nightclubs; there are kebab vans and food stalls.

I find myself in a poorly lit basement nightclub. It is cavernous and with a high specification sound system and light show. There are a lot of people there all much younger than me. The crowd is predominantly white though there are some people from Asian and African origin there. They all consider themselves the “in” crowd. The club is expensive, exclusive and elite.

I am sat in a booth with a tall skinny man dressed in a black goth suit with winkle picker shoes. He has a dyed black “Ramones” style haircut and is holding court. He sees that I am less impressed than others so he slides a small jet black tablet or pill across the table towards me. It is shaped like the male part of a push button fastener and textured on the flat collar.

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He is leaning towards me and in a sense daring me to take it. He holds my gaze for a long time. I reach out and take the pill which I swallow with water. He eases himself back into his seat.

I can feel the pill start to “come up”. There is a bodily sensation of warmth and a sense of pupil dilation. I can feel my heart rate increase alarmingly and then calm. I am at first unsure if the heart will fail, then relax. I do not know what it is that I have swallowed. I feel fully alive almost immortal.

The room changes a little. I can see vividly all the people moving in time lapse and hear all of their conversations above the music. I see their “elite” faces extensively made up and styled as mask-like. Behind their facades I see their true natures. I can see animations of their motivations, fears and desires. It plays out in my mind’s eye. Despite the outer show many are deeply unhappy and some downright nasty.

I can hear some of their thoughts about each other. I see a young woman in a silver tasselled mini-dress look directly at me. I can hear her wondering what an old decrepit relic like me is doing in the midst of the young and the “it”. I can taste a hint of pity. She turns for comfort to those surrounding her.

Around the air, the mood, is of a concealed frantic below the outer show of glitz and hedonism. I realise it unwise to look at eyes because what I see behind is not pleasant nor calm. There is a stark vivid contrast between the outer and the inner.

The skinny man looks at me. I say that for the first time in years I need a cigarette because of what I have seen. In contrast to me he likes what the drug portrays, the darknesses within. It is where he lives and operates. He says that there is a news stand / booth outside which still sells cigarettes.

I leave the club and go to find the booth. I ask for a packet of cigarettes and the woman by the till says they are £20 a pack. I look down into my wallet and it is full of blue money notes amongst which is a £20 pound note.

I hand it to the woman who gives me a pack of cigarettes. I stand and look at the night time economy and its participants out on the streets in the early hours of the morning.

As I awake, I am almost tired by the vivid nature of the dream just had.

The dream ends.

Tag: facades

Fate and Façade

Ultra-vivid – Tablet – Nightclub Dream – 10-06-2025