Fun and responsibility: When nothing is as it seems

The same exhausting nightmare over and over again, after which I wake up exhausted: I’m walking down a flight of stairs with my eyes closed. I see myself in a dream, I see myself keeping my eyelids closed like a sleepwalker. I don’t know why I ban myself from seeing.

So I go down the stairs, and as I put one foot in front of the other, the steps get smaller and smaller. At first it’s just an impression that I can’t place. It’s not clear to me if it’s my feet that have grown or if it’s actually the steps that are slowly shrinking. With each step my shoes seem to stick a little further over the edge.

I try to hold on to the handrail that is to my left. My eyes are still closed, but I know where to expect him. In my dream I am quite sure that I have climbed down these stairs many times – and certainly up them too, but I don’t remember that.

Literally losing my footing, I try to hold on to the metal handrail. With difficulty I reach the metal object that saves me, but it twists under my grip and stretches in the other direction. It bends away from me, snaking away.

Or varying: It has changed its physical state, has become liquid, melts under the touch of my hands, the nails claw into the heels of my hands. Or: The handrail collapses, separates from the wall and falls to the floor. You don’t hear any sound, but you can still see the holes left in the wall. Or: The metal crumbles between my fingers. My long fingernails cut into the heel of my hand again.

No matter how different the seemingly mundane horror scenarios are, the end of the dream is always the same: I fall. And before I hit the (already disappearing) ground, I wake up. When I wake up, nothing is as it seems. The room that I see from the bed is falling apart into its individual parts. The walls no longer seem solid, just as the objects seem to have lost their function. Perception itself – in its differentiated light and shadowy nature – has moved to the foreground.

When you recognize something or at least believe you recognize something, you unconsciously stop the cognitive process. The state of association as well as the state of dissociation is interrupted. You see, you identify, you name, you categorize. But what if the touch remains in the semi-darkness? If the vague answer is answered in the affirmative, if the classification and assignment occurs from time to time, but then loses it again and is replaced by a new one? Is that a cuckoo clock or a real cuckoo?

After all, recognition does not only take place visually, but with all the senses. The screech owl calls, we think it’s real and then we think it’s fake. Sometimes the grass is extra green because it’s fake. And sometimes it is particularly soft, just like the carpet in the children’s room. The hips are a little too wide to be able to sit relaxed on the swing, the legs are a little too long to slide down the slide smoothly. So you ambitiously wedge your body, in which you still feel like a stranger, between the metal chains or the whitened hard plastic parts of the slide and stay there, miming a relaxed posture, miming that you are neither dizzy nor sick from the cigarette. The distinction between real and fake is blurring.

I think of adults who step on their children’s toys at night as they walk through the dark children’s room where the child woke up. Maybe it cries or babbles in its sleep. The pain in the sole of the foot turns the adult into a child, that is, the one who should actually be cared for instead of looked after. Toys become something potentially dangerous. The distribution of roles is also dynamic. Slight traces of blood remain on the carpet – it is and remains unclear whether they are the traces of the child who recently had a nosebleed, or one of the parents who injured themselves on part of the marble run or on a Playmobil pirate.

Parents in the children’s room are too big for the gimmicks that surround them – they become giants. In contrast, young people who smoke their first cigarettes in suburban playgrounds are just a little oversized for the playground equipment. The proportions are constantly shifting; only a year or two earlier they were here, playing, still in the right place. Now they are again, but in a different role.

On a park bench it says: “I was here”. Maybe this small, mundane piece of self-assurance is enough for now. There is no need to define who this “I” and what this “here” is – it remains as interchangeable as it is specific.