T.S. Eliot once said, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality," and I find that very much to be true in certain cases. May of us find ourselves trying to escape reality, whether it be by reading a book or watching a movie. This quote also applies to the movie Inception and in the short story Was it a Dream? by Guy de Maupassant. The characters Mallorie Cobb and the main character in the short story (he will be referred to as the narrator) find themselves in a situation where they reject/escape their reality.
In Inception, Mal and Dom spend years building their own world in their dreams, but when they return to reality, she finds herself in a state of uncertainty. Partially due to Dom planting an idea inside her mind, she begins to doubt whether the reality they live in is actually real. "An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you." Through Dom's memories, the audience can tell how psychological unstable Mal became after waking up from their dream world, and the idea he had planted within her eventually leads to her death. Mal rejected reality by insisting their children weren't really their children in this world, that they'd have to go back to the world they made to find their real children. This reiterates to the quote; Mal couldn't bear the reality where the world they made was not real.
In Was it a Dream? the narrator mourns for his dead lover. Surrounded by memories all over the apartment, all he can think about is her which drives him to the point where he himself wishes for death, he "felt like opening the window and throwing [himself] out..." (Maupassant 150). Feeling trapped, the narrator quickly exits the place to visit her grave. As the grief of her death is too much to bear, the narrator alters his interpretation of reality to cope with her death. "They were all writing at the same time, on the threshold of their eternal abode, the truth, the terrible and the holy truth, of which everybody was ignorant, or pretending to be ignorant while they were alive" (Maupassant 153). For closure, the narrator wanted his lover to have wronged him; he makes her out to be deceiving and unfaithful in his dream instead of seeing her as the loving person she was. It would be easier to get over her if she wasn't a good person.
Both stories show that the characters would rather not bear with reality as their dreams seem more ideal. For Mal, the life she lived with Dom in their own world was more appealing and for the narrator of Was it a Dream?, he made his lover to be a worse person that she was to find a way to move on from her passing.
Do you ever find yourself wishing your dreams to be reality? Do you think dreams are often too good to be true?
