Fairytales are often said to be rife with symbolism (um, not exactly the kind laden with sexual innuendo), and encrypted with secret meaning, reflective or even mocking of real life, of the human condition.

I believe, in utter seriousness, that fairytales are autobiographical, or biographical, should the prince or princess or dwarf featured in the tale be too lazy to actually be the writer of his or her or its story, or if there are no pencils large enough, or keyboards resilient enough to endure the toughness of dragon claws (some say that Mothergoose actually relayed her story to a certain controversial Hollywood columnist, so I suppose it applies to nursery rhyme characters as well), some of them hire ghost writers, or else pay unemployed tabloid hacks to make them look good, to portray them as glamorous, unfortunately ending up with 'fairytales' which are just a little too much on the lurid side to make bedtime stories for the below eighteen audience, at least.

Anyway, Anne Rice's perversions aside, I still think Sleeping Beauty, as well as Rip Van Winkle since he actually falls along the same lines, were in truth actual people. In Beauty's case, there was no evil fairy disguised as an old woman who was armed with a bespelled spindle and needle who put her to sleep for a hundred years, besides, Beauty, being about as undomesticated as a Princess could possibly be would never have been interested in knitting or any such similar activity. It was, in truth, life and the world in general which cast its spell upon her, she grew disenchanted with it, and decided to sleep it off for a hundred years.

Who knows, maybe Beauty was ahead of her time and possessed not just feminine wiles, but her fair share of feminist sensibilities as well and found the men of her time to be too domineering and too dominant, as well as too obsessed with conquest to tolerate. Maybe there were no 'Fionaesque' types yet then and the princesses who were the same age as her were too witless and insipid to be bothered with. Maybe she wanted to talk philosophy and discuss the Tolkien trilogies which she was enthralled with and all her parents wanted to have her do was to play court to the suitors in various colored tights parading like beauty pageant contestants around the Grand Hall of their palace. Maybe they wanted her to settle down to marriage, cooking, and cleaning, and Beauty was a career woman, and found the tiaras and the gowns, and worst of all, the men of court too unbearable for words, and they put her to sleep.

Maybe she thought humanity would be better a hundred years from then (if she were lucky enough maybe the prince who'd wake her would actually be able to hold conversations about things other than his broadsword and what metal it was made from and at least know who Plato is).

Upon her waking, she would've found that humanity has changed in many ways but has essentially remained the same, our current preoccupation seeming to center around the creation of an environment intelligent enough to support our life 'lest the day comes that we render ourselves too stupid to be trusted with the continuation of our own existence.

It could've been any number of things (not discounting boredom), though all of them are justifiable, I still believe that it was a disenchantment, and not an enchantment, that put her to sleep which is something I can empathize with perfectly. These days I have difficulty waking up to be able to face the day. It used to be that I could rouse myself at seven in the morning on a respectably regular basis, these days, the sun has to practically rise inside our room and direct its glare to my face, sneak up into my eyelids and sting my contact lenses for me to be able to drag myself out of bed.

For no specific reason, I feel as if the minimal amount of endorphins which I was given to start with has been sucked out of me without my consent and has been released into the atmosphere for heaven knows what reason, though I strongly suspect it's part of the plan to develop that uber intelligent environment which will be responsible for the sustenance of stupefied human life, whatever the reason or reasons, it seems to me as if anything vaguely hormonal has been drained from my body along with my endorphins, and I am left a hypochondriac who is tempted to spend the next couple of years in slumber, and the worst thing about it is that I don't even have a good reason for it. Maybe that ultra-intelligent-stupid-life-sustaining environment is being tested in its beta phase and this is a side effect which will be inconsequential anyway by the time it's fully operational (human beings being so stupefied by then that they won't know the difference) which might very well explain why I feel no reason or inclination to justify or explain my need for reclusion and hibernation. At least I still have enough functioning brain cells left to realize that the reason isn't beauty sleep.

What can I say? Life has me running for cover.