CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE. EPILOGUE.
Be careful not to dream. The dream might come true!
I dreamt last night that I attended the performance of a play. This performance was in a special theatre that had been built inside a19th century insane asylum, the play written and directed by the inmates, who also acted in the production. The play depicted a trial in a courtroom. The court officers and personnel were all psychopaths and sociopaths, most of them “delusional”. In this play, the inmates had “taken over the asylum”, and also controlled the courtroom, and controlled the dispensation of justice. The object of the exercise was to secure a conviction “by whatever means necessary”.
Every time exonerating evidence came to light, a group of inmates in the wings, all wearing Joseph Stalin masks shouted out “Not allowed! Not allowed!” The defendant was Snow White, and the seven dwarves were members of the jury. The prosecution had devised a strange chart or spreadsheet which purported that Snow White was present at seven deaths, and therefore must be the perpetrator. There were ten other deaths where she was not present, but when this was mentioned, the chorus in the wings shouted “Not allowed! Not allowed!”. These deaths were all by natural causes, but when the coroner tried to give this evidence, he was hustled out of the courtroom. The judge solemnly proclaimed “We have spent so much money in this investigation, we HAVE to secure a conviction, and damn the evidence!”
The leading prosecution “expert” witness was a concoction of a collaboration of Lewis Carrol, Franz Kafka, and (to add a touch of menace) Harold Pinter. They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and no literary genius could have dreamed this character up. He deserves to be one of the great characters of literature, like Don Quixote or Hannibal Lector. He put forward speculations as to cause of death which were truly in keeping with the insane asylum in which he was housed. But the beauty of it was that he uttered these insane speculations and hypotheses with absolute plausibility. Every few minutes, during his testimony, he would alter the means used to murder. First he insisted that murder was committed by air into the stomach. Then he decided – no, the murder was by punching the victim. Then the murder method was altered again to injection of air into the veins.
The defendant shouted out “But I wasn’t even there at the time.; but the chorus in the wings shouted out “Shut her up! Shut her up! Silence in court!”
Defence witnesses came forward, but the chorus in the wings shouted out “You will lose your career if you give evidence. She must go to The Gulag!”
At this point, even in my dream, I was thinking – “Wait a minute. No court would accept evidence this “hokey”, even in an insane asylum!” But then, of course, in a dream anything is possible.
In this dream, I came out of the auditorium, and was immediately approached to write a review. I started writing this review. I wrote – “Implausible. No court would accept this kind of bull s(expletive deleted)t evidence. No jury would convict. In the play, Snow white had indeed (implausibly) been convicted and led away to a dark dungeon. I suppose that, in an insane asylum, logic can be turned on its head, but in the real world, logic and common sense prevails – right!? WRONG!
Be careful not to dream The dream might come true!