Looking into such a beautiful face, it brings to mind all the lives I have lived, all the dreams that I followed in some alternate reality, and all the lives that I will never, can never, live. It is as though all of these dreams, aspirations and desires have followed every possible path and configuration of events, people, places and in sum total have cancelled out all those other times and spaces, leaving me with this one, projected along the helical axis of my own self-inflected experience, alone.

The sum over paths of all possibility – leaving me hanging from a single thread of actuality; the total of all fiction and dream amounts to the diminishing arc of fact, of reality and of my lived experience. This is why beauty (of form, of concept, of impossible dreams) is so important – it reminds us that all of those other branching paths and possible worlds still exist out there, somewhere, in a multiverse of probability and random chance.  This is the power of art – it defies the logic of facts in the most mischievous, mystical and enigmatic ways.

The true power of a beautiful dream is that it allows us to see, as it were – from the corner of our eye – that all of those possible worlds still exist, within (and as) ourselves. I am falling through all of space and time, lost in a glorious labyrinth of mirrored shadows, dreams and the astounding, hypnotic and delightful idea of that dream – and it is a wonderful feeling. Poets and philosophers need dreams like these – the more unattainable they are, the more powerfully creative is their influence.

You are that reality and you are that dream. And so am I.