You startle awake from your sleep. Your heart is pounding. Something is strange. There’s a dim, fluorescent light in the room that you don’t know where it’s coming from. You look around. There are no windows. The walls are bare. The room is empty, except for your bed and a chair to your left, on which your clothes are carefully folded. Your shoes are on the floor in front of it. To your right is an empty doorway without a door or frame. You get dressed, walk through it and enter a room that looks like the first one: windowless and empty. This time there is a doorway on the left. You continue along the path; one room follows the other. They all look the same. With no end in sight, you start to run. The same dim light prevails everywhere. Some rooms are bigger, some smaller. Sometimes there are two or more doorways that lead further. You choose your path at random.
Suddenly, you find yourself outdoors, standing on a beach. The sky is cloudy, and the wind is blowing. You pause for a moment. You look out over the water and the beach. Out of nowhere, you see a reflection of yourself, first single, then double, then multiple, a hundred, a thousand times. You are in a hall of mirrors; the landscape is an illusion. Then you see beetles crawling across the mirror surfaces. They are spreading rapidly. Everything starts to spin around you, slowly at first, then faster and faster. You feel like you’re on a merry-go-round. Whoosh! You’re back where you started, running through empty rooms. You are trapped in a maze and there is no way out. You can’t even find the way back to the room with your bed, where it all began. You are lost. You are alone.
Of course, you’re still sleeping and having a nightmare, but it feels like your personality is cracking and about to shatter into a thousand pieces. You better wake up soon – really wake up.
ROMA MUSIC 