Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

The Mask of a Dream

Illustrated by Maria Elizabeth Roussianos

In my life, the most disturbing and also the most wondrous things happen to me in dreams. But recently, my dreams have followed a twisted and repetitive pattern—I’ve been having the same dream for seven consecutive days. Therein lies my glitch of the moment. Interestingly enough, no sufficient amount of analyzing and dream interpreting has been able to chase this dream away. It is as if my neurons are stuck on this psychological theatre which they depict almost as an omen.

This “glitchy” dream follows the same order every time. I’ll find myself in a grand and majestic Viennese ballroom dancing among a crowd of well-dressed personages. It seems to be a masked ball as everyone’s face is covered. The whole thing is reminiscent of the 19^th century except for my presence. The music is slow and enchanting and guides the dancing but the cadence of the music slowly rises. As the music grows in volume and speed the room grows colder and the lights grow in radiance. The atmosphere gradually descends into disorder as people start to dance off tune or try to remove their masks. The most disturbing thing about this mood change is that the masks can’t be taken off since they’ve melted onto the wearers’ faces. During their petty struggles, my dance partner and I keep dancing faster while the music grows in horror and beauty. Ironically, while this disorder happens around, I am in a total state of euphoria regardless of my recognition of the horror and bizarreness of the situation. Quite suddenly I twirl and fall while my dance partner stands above me and effectively removes his mask. Underneath is the face of someone who has much sorrow. And then my partner removes this face, too, as if it was a mask. Another face, traumatic for me to witness, is revealed. He keeps revealing more faces as the previous ones lie at his feet. The music keeps going and my screams add to its hypnotic melody. The music stops when my dance partner, at last, reveals my very own face on his visage. At this point, I have a burst of the euphoria which possessed me and I faint. I then wake up in my bed cursing the dream.

When I’m trying to read this dream and the effect it has upon my present life, I keep thinking back to an English course I had during my first semester—The American Gothic with Kristopher Woofter. Ironically, most gothic tropes can be found within this dream: the abject, the grotesque, the Real and the Uncanny. What strikes me as the most significant element (I won’t bore you with my minute analyzations) is the cyclic nature of the dream and the reveal of my face. One of the biggest themes in the Gothic genre is how the repressed past or truth (depending on its definition) always comes back to haunt the present. I’m assuming this is the glitch and dream for me: repressed emotions that I used to hide behind masks are coming back to bite me since this dream has stirred forgotten things.  

To learn more about the American Gothic here’s a website I created with a few of my classmates about the American Gothic in a novel we read:

http://teatrogrottesco.weebly.com/