Dreamers and Realists

Charlene Nicole V. Chua                                                                11302720

Dreamers and Realists

When it comes to dreaming and living a life filled with imagination, there’s usually no argument when it is being said that kids do it better than adults. As Laura has said in the movie “El Orfanato”, the lighthouse as she saw it worked before, and it has an invisible light. From this, it can be derived that she could see the world of fantasy when she was much younger, but not anymore. It happens to a lot of people—almost everyone. Growing up, all the material needs we become aware of suck up our time and concern for dreams; it gets really bad, as people see dreamers as crazy, delusional, useless citizens who only waste resources. In a way, it is like being a dreamer is not good.

In the movie, we have a small family consisting of Laura, her husband, and their adopted son, Simon. Simon was clearly living in mostly fantasy—a dreamer. It was unmentioned in the movie, but I think he may have been schizophrenic (although other forces have been at work in the movie, since there is no way Simon knows all the other kids in Laura’s orphanage from childhood). I know someone with schizophrenia. He had an imaginary friend named Steve, and he interacted with him a lot; he was grieved when he found out Steve was not real. In the same way, Simon was very convinced that his friends were real, even playing actual games with them. On the other hand, Simon’s parents, being the adults they were, were realists. The likely reason why they did not talk about his friends being imaginary is to avoid shocking the young child and getting him depressed. However, because of an incident—Simon’s disappearance—Laura had, once again, decided to believe the unbelievable. She started to heed the words of paranormal experts who were deemed phony by both her husband and the psychiatrist. There was one very remarkable thing said by one of the experts: “Seeing is not believing; it’s the other way around”. After those words, she had done every single thing to do the believing, and sure enough, the “ghost”, Thomas, guided her to her son. However, her son had died. Refusing to believe such, she brings her child to the bedroom, where she sees all the other children and the lit-up lighthouse, signifying how she went off the deep end and sank in the sea of dreams entirely. She had been confirmed dead thereafter, the cause surely being drug overdose; possibly, she was following through another thing the expert said, which was that those closer to death will see “them”. At the end of the story, it seemed as if Laura was Wendy, who was being brought back to her childhood days, Thomas was Peter Pan, who had been leading the children to Neverland, and the rest of the kids were the lost children who followed Thomas’ lead.