A Place We Call Reality

You probably know the feeling. At first glance, everything seems completely normal. In Ordnung, so to say. It’s early in the morning. People are peacefully emerging from a church. Somewhere, dogs are barking. A black-and-white cat sits motionless on a pile of old junk. Socks and underwear sway on a laundry line. And then, all of a sudden, a lunar rover appears with two American astronauts. But you’re not on the Moon; this is Iceland. The year is 1966. As you stare at one of the astronauts wildly gesticulating at the sheep blocking his path, you suddenly realize that everyone around you (oh, right: all this time a group of complete strangers has been suspiciously studying you) is wearing cardboard masks of Jesus over their faces. “Have no fear!” one of the many strange wannabe-Jesuses reassures you, but you’re already thinking about where that children’s doll on the path in the park came from AGAIN! (somebody ought to finally ban all that ridiculous-Gothic-nonsense!) and why some madman is AGAIN! shouting into the night. It really is impossible to live decently in London. You increasingly succumb to the feeling that you are the victim of some dark conspiracy, because that newly purchased table from IKEA, my dear, (just like the previous two cabinets, the armchair, the closet, the bookcase, and the bed) is really impossible to assemble – you’ve looked everywhere (yes, even THERE, honey), but some screws seem to be missing, almost as if on purpose. And so it’s no wonder that one day you catch yourself plaintively crying in front of Rothko’s abstract canvases at an anonymous Los Angeles gallery, in the grips of an identity crisis, following your new Korean bodybuilder guru in hot pink thong underwear as you lovingly recall your most recent time at a nudist resort, no matter how much of a fiasco that ended up being. Then you wake up with a splitting headache at a clinic in Uppsala (“In Uppsala!?” you gasp in disbelief at the nurse in white) and, resigned, listen to a doctor with an Indian accent – while gratefully chewing on a first-aid pizza with fresh arugula – tell you that you suffer from an incurable form of hangover. “So it was all just a dream?” you blurt out hopefully, even though you know full well that in a place we call reality anything is possible. Especially if it is a cinematic realspace whose boundaries are defined not by probability and the laws of physics, but by unrestrained creative fantasy.