[Spoiler Alert – Contains mild spoilers for Parasites]
When I was growing up, I used to write down my dreams and take inspiration from them for stories. They didn’t always make sense, but more often than not, they did, telling stories themselves of places I’d never been, people I’d never met.
For some unknown reason, I can’t pinpoint most of the origins of Parasites, but without question, the stormworld episode comes from a dream. I’d seen the two huge storm fronts racing towards each other, a vehicle not dissimilar to the car in the book racing to escape them. I remember being absolutely convinced that if it could just reach a certain point, keep in the area between the vast clouds, despite the gap growing smaller and smaller, that everything would be ok.
It’s a brief episode in the book, and a mysterious one at that. We learn about as much about the origins of the stormworld as we do about the world right at the start, with the cabbages and the rotting biodome. That said, it’s not a huge leap to say that the world was probably something like ours – the road is testament to that. Whatever species lived there, they – like most of the abandoned worlds that Kael and Alessia find – have left their mark, in terms of both the infrastructure and damage to the environment.
I’d imagine that the race inhabiting the planet had followed a similar path to us humans, slowly destroying it and using up the resources, messing up the environment and causing the weather to become increasingly hostile to life.
As I’ve gotten older, I take less and less inspiration from dreams, although a little still works itself in there now and again. I certainly dream less vividly – I suspect it’s a condition of getting old – but they’re still there, particularly after a memorable, immersive or emotional experience.
Of course, sometimes dreams are entirely nonsensical, but as a child I was a firm believer that they meant something, that they were important. Today, I’m not so sure, but there’s definitely a part of me that would still like to believe. It feels a bit silly, particularly as an adult, but I’m also a firm believer in the saying that we don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing. If we can’t hold onto a few ideals and concepts of meaningfulness from our childhood as we grow older, then we might as well just give up now!