Last night I dreamt I was Alice and I was falling down the Rabbit hole. I just kept falling and falling, for what seemed like hours. And as I fell, my life passed along beside me, like a movie real.
It started off with me in color, toddling along at two. Grinning with my school bag at five, a toothless smile at 6, as I fell the image of me began to grow older. Suddenly I was ten listening to the Spice Girls, then 13 and in High School. And as the images of me grew older, the color the picture began to fade.
What was at first bright, colored filled images and scenes, slowly began to fade to paler colors, where only a select few items had any color at all, then slowly to a world of black and white. A world without any colors at all.
Without really questioning it, my dream self knew exactly why the color was fading from my memories. I was growing older, and in doing so the joys and freedom of youth was going with it. The scenes where the colors faded most were images where ideas like responsibilities, expectations and obligations came into my life.
The loss of color was in many ways a loss of innocence. As we grow older, with the growing weight of our newly discovered obligations begins to weigh down on us, going unnoticed to the unsuspecting eye, our lives begin to lose a bit of the child-like color they once held, until eventually, no color remains.
I do not mean for it to sound as though I am complaining about the responsibilities age brings. I appreciate, and am willing to accept whatever roles life may have for me. All that I am trying to say is that I wish that certain aspects of childhood did not have to fade away. Society sees age as such a burden, and people do their best to avoid the visual signs of it in the appearance of their bodies, but what about in their minds? Is it right for our memories to lose their color?
Where does the laughter go? J.M. Barrie wrote that “When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” But where have all the fairies gone now? Is it any wonder that people stop believing in fairies? As we grow older we begin to have to face the realities, not only of our own lives, but within the world around us. Is it any wonder that the colors begin to fade? The truth is not always easily welcomed.
