The World Idiot by Rhys Hughes

first evening thoughtlessly washed by boxed flickers had to be abandoned. He had no memory of moving the contraption elsewhere. Rousing himself he conducted a brief search of dim cupboards and obscure corners and then retired to bed in a trivial rage.
    He took the remote control with him and jabbed it as if to conjure images on his ceiling. His friends despised television as a poor substitute for real pleasure and never indulged the habit. He agreed in principle. But there was one curious way in which he approved of the invention and that was in its depiction of fictional violence.
    The argument that screen violence encouraged aggression in real life was too unimaginative. It seemed to him that as well as glorifying injury and death, fictional violence also set limits to the pain and destruction wrought by one person on another. A man inspired by a film to plunge a knife between the ribs of an innocent victim had by necessity also been inspired not to do anything worse . The moment an extreme was manifested in fiction it prevented itself from travelling beyond that extremity and lost all potential to become even more disagreeable.
    These were the thoughts that lulled him to sleep.
    He experienced a vivid dream: a landscape belonging to another world, a desert of blue dunes dotted with oases of strange trees. Figures moved between the branches picking fruit. He viewed this scene from a distance and was overcome with a feeling of dislocation. Then a sudden wind shifted the sands, uncovering the ruins of temples dedicated to gods with forms and faces he would never recall. Thin smoke drifted from oddly shaped doorways, trapped clouds of ancient incense released after an unimaginable number of centuries.
    He awoke with a start but did not know if it was morning or still night. The sun had been bricked out of his abode and there was not a single timepiece in any of the rooms. He looked at the level of oil in the lanterns but this meant nothing to him. So he rose and resumed his pacing of the floor, his senses painfully alert.
    He found it impossible to imagine the city outside, to remember the buildings and streets. He had lost Montevideo during his sleep. He still knew the names of his favourite haunts, the Museo Romántico, Teatro el Picadero and Plaza Zabala, the Bar Lobizón and Sala Zitarrosa, and those steak houses where he always ate, El Palenque, El Fogón and the others, but they seemed less real. There was a distance between them and his present situation, a gulf of time and space larger than a single night and wall of bricks.
    The world of blue dunes felt closer.
    He pressed his ears to the walls but heard nothing from outside, no traffic or arguments, none of those sounds that blanketed his normal existence in this house. One explanation was that the brick shell insulated him completely. He licked his lips.
    He waited impatiently for his daily meal, his appetite increased by the tea he sipped from a gourd, and when he heard fumbling on the far side of the chute he ran like a child to watch the arrival of dinner on his plate. It came and he gasped.
    Something flat and purple and very sticky.
    He carried it to his writing desk and sniffed it cautiously. Then he picked it up and crammed it into his mouth, chewing with a reckless joy. It was a fruit concoction of a mysterious kind — he had never known such a taste before. He wiped his lips with his sleeve and sat up in shock, toppling his chair.
    A thought had come to him and he could not dismiss it, despite the fact it was absurd. His house had left the Earth and travelled far across the universe to the planet in his dream. The figures in the oases had been picking fruit for this meal. It was they who had just fed him, not his friends. This was a better explanation for his feelings of loss and separation, his own alienation.
    It occurred to him that the remote control was responsible for bringing him here. Long months of inactivity had somehow altered its internal