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Invasion of the Body Snatchers



It is a pity one cannot sustain the lucidity and vividness of dreams into waking day as last night I had a remake on my hands of this science fiction favourite.

It was one of those dreams that are prolonged, detailed, vividly imagined and continue even after your sleep has been broken. I woke at 5.30am, visited the bathroom, went back to bed and picked up where I had left off!

In the interval, before returning to sleep, I even reflected on its possible meanings and remember thinking that it was a commentary on the tendency to say, 'if only, I was my true and proper self, what could I not be or become?' The self-serving fantasy that it is not my self-disciplined 'inner work' that is missing, lost in the swamp of my laziness, but 'an external other'!  Hovering in the back of my mind too was St Paul's lament that his body refused to follow the desire of his will. The very things that he wished not to be, he became.

My body snatchers, however, were not as comprehensively victorious as in the 1978 film version, indeed by the end of the dream, the humans appeared able to both defend themselves against invasion and identify (and expel) the invader: a sign of hope for me!

There was, however, one especially glorious (and melancholy) moment.

In some way unexplained, in the manner of dreams, the world had warmed up (as a result of the invasion - of us blindly following our disordered desires)? The sun was setting over a lake of very warm water and I decided to go for a swim for one last time before the world (as I had known it) disappeared.

I found myself feeling-thinking how rare it is we simply taste the world, in the enjoyment of its just being so, and now it was passing. But just as I dissolved in this state of being from the apparently deserted houses by the lake shore emerged dazed and reawakening people (not apparently any longer 'snatched'). As if stepping into being is the 'trick' whose answering activity is a (re)newed world.

There was also a nice Freudian (or it might be Adlerian) moment of wish fulfilment of riding straight through a red light (telling myself since we were all being snatched who would care - if that is how the world is, is not everything permitted to paraphrase Dostoevsky)! 

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