“Dancing amid a thousand faces, her face glows with life… Never before had she danced with such passion. To any other person, she’d come across as someone who’s celebrating life; who’s ‘living it up’ in style… Did the thought ever cross your mind that she’s dancing away the blues? (No way!) She’s neither the ‘Lady in red’, nor is she ‘the girl next door’… She’s just another victim of the ‘Alice in Wonderland Syndrome’; dreaming her secret dreams, craving her secret life…”
Why are we afraid of admitting that we are day-dreamers? Why are we unwilling to accept that there’s a little bit of ‘Alice’ or ‘Walter Mitty’ in each of us? Do we fear what people would think of us; how they would laugh behind our backs; or is it simply the pre-conceived notion that “Nobody would understand”? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to real world! A world where one feels lost among 6.8 billion faces; and finds solace when he just whiles away hours staring at the ceiling fan, ‘pretending’ to sleep. In the real world, things couldn’t get more ‘realistic’ than this… Or could they?
“Life is a long-long road and we are but travelers.” And like good travelers who are faithful to their voyage, we must journey on; in search of a niche where we would ‘fit in’, a niche that is symbolic of our ‘selves’. Why aren’t we told to enrich our voyage with experiences as enthralling as the adventures of Alice in Wonderland? Perhaps that is the reason why we fade into a world of our own every now and then. Because the outside world has nothing to offer (or so it may seem…), we seek our “Some place far away…” within ourselves… There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude… The strangest thing is that in spite of having encountered both these emotions, none of us have the acumen of explaining the difference between the two. What we do not realize is that in this ‘space’ that we have created, there is no