“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”

E. A. Poe

A few nights ago, as often happens when one is driven by the unfamiliar and suspicious fervour of nocturnal illusions, I was pointlessly exhausting all my energy in a particularly vivid dream. I was racking my brains over some sort of article and had managed, through an elaborate series of metaphors and without directly mentioning people or events, to give a credible account of some of the less pleasant aspects I had encountered during my life as a climber. Nothing could be more inevitable — and perhaps more amusing, at least to an outside observer — than stumbling upon the many contradictions that lie at the heart of this activity, capable of trapping the individual in the “grotesque limbo of their own idiosyncrasies.”

In a society that is utterly exhausting and alienating, and that seems long ago to have drifted away from the cycles of nature and from a simpler, less neurotic way of life, a return to “Nature” could only represent an escape, an aspiration, perhaps even a lifeline. And yet, in an age obsessed with performance and virtuosity, even this attempt to reclaim “Paradise Lost” has proved suspect, triggering a series of bitter conflicts.

My thoughts turned first to the delicate subject of climbing guidebooks. In the age of artificial intelligence, there is a serious issue concerning the protection of content created by individual authors. Some might argue that good old-fashioned “copy and paste” was already a fairly widespread practice, carried out with varying degrees of awareness and legitimacy. But today even the source itself fades into the background: a single click is enough to produce an account extracted from various websites which, in turn, have drawn on other databases, in a hall of mirrors where the original author disappears.

It is a sleight of hand that, moreover, rarely produces anything genuinely useful or reliable for those seeking information. Just try asking AI for information about various crags and the results are often bewildering, ranging from completely false to incomplete information: the natural consequence of training based on second- or third-hand material cascading freely across the web. In the end, it is not only the author who disappears: the quality of the information itself risks being lost, with all the dangers that entails.

But woe betide anyone who points out such trifles: anyone who dares to voice even the slightest doubt is immediately branded an envious defeatist, the perennial malcontent who, on principle, opposes these titanic and commendable works of philanthropy!

With all romanticism now a thing of the past, the path ahead is inevitably clear: never display one’s “art” or passion light-heartedly; better to rely on cold calculation and colonise the field only when one stands on solid ground and has strength in numbers.

After all, history is not written by those who make it, but by those who have more time to devote to public relations.

That, more or less, was my dream, but its outlines are so blurred... After all, to quote Shakespeare almost word for word: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on...” — stuff far too insubstantial for the real world, and so the details fade away...

Or perhaps it was the fright of a hypnagogic hallucination, that moment before sleep when reality begins to crack, conjuring up the shadow of a nightmare with indistinct contours?

Does the sleep of reason produce monsters?

Or is it, rather, the undeniable disillusionment of reality?