"'Tis far off And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants"
The normal life of any other person seems like a dream to her because her perception of "real life" has been so altered. At the same time, I believe she is saying the memory is so dim that it seems as though it couldn't have happened. I guess this is applicable to my own life though. Sometimes things seem so long ago that I can't seem to recall if they ever happened or if I simply dreamed them or made them up! Sometimes when I wake from sleeping I have to remind myself what is real and what is not.
In fact this all reminds me of Inception. In case you haven't seen it you should it's a fantastic movie with a thrilling plot. Anyways, in the movie there is a line that I think applies to what Miranda is describing. When Cobbs go to get Saito out of limbo, Saito doesn't quite realize that he isn't in the real world. He has been trapped in limbo for so long that it has become his reality.
Saito: Have you come to kill me? I've been waiting for someone... Cobb: Someone from a half remembered dream.
Saito: Cobb? Impossible. We were young men together. I'm an old man.
Cobb: I've come back for you... to remind you of something. Something you once knew...That this world is not real.
Miranda is much like this! She has been living in the "world" her father created out of necessity, that she doesn't know what the real "world" is like. Her sense of reality and normalcy is different, so much so that the outside, normal world seems to be a dream. I'm sure that as we read on however that the other characters may feel as if they are in a dream, or if the life they left was one. I think it will be interesting to see.
And once again I wonder what sort of things I may be forgetting in my life that are real but I think to be a dream. Or what have I dreamed or wanted to be real, so I convince myself that it is? I guess there could be a whole slew of things, but I'd have to go back and analyze my life more closely to determine what my reality really is. And are there maybe some things that are just better to believe to be reality?
I was thinking back to Hamlet and his talk with R&G about Denmark:
ReplyDeleteHamlet.
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a
king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Guildenstern.
Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of
the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Hamlet.
A dream itself is but a shadow.
One thing that is interesting to me is the play on shadow...a shadow is a outline of something void of color and depth, but the representation of the thing. Socrates gave a similar illusion in Book 7 -- The Allegory of the Cave, he talks about how if people where locked in a cave there whole life only looking at the back wall of the cave as images threw their shadows on the wall. The people would believe that those images were reality, they would name them and hear their echos on off the wall. They would think this is the world, only once they are released from them cave with some shock to the light would they become enlightened to the real world.