Returning To The Land of Dreams

The last year or two of my life has been a whirlwind. Looking back at it now, it's clear that I've been going through a transition from the pandemic era to the post-pandemic era. Pre-pandemic, I was a wannabe genre fiction writer who had moved to an up-and-coming city in the American southwest to take a job in a software company. My days were occupied with work or socializing about town. My mornings (and some evenings) revolved around imagining fantastical disaster scenarios in which the human race faces a challenge to its continuing existence – aliens, monsters, Biblical creatures of some shape or form emerging from myth to terrorize the living. In so doing, I indulged in the American fantasy of empire's collapse, the anxious suburban fear of the city as a chthonic place of danger and excitement.

And then a real disaster struck, and I found that the porous barrier between dreams and reality broke and I stepped into a Morphean hellscape of my own design. At one point early on in the experience, I experienced what I can only describe as visions. The vision that recurred to me was of a presence in my single bedroom apartment. It was standing frequently in my kitchen. The bedroom opened to the kitchen, and at night, I would awaken to a sudden awareness that someone was in the kitchen watching me. Each time I would turn on the lights, or stare into the darkness, until I had convinced myself it was nothing. Perhaps it was a manifestation of my anxieties about the pandemic, or a result of the month of isolation I had experienced before the poltergeist first appeared to me. Of course, I rationalized it. Then this poltergeist began appearing during the day time. I was standing in my kitchen preparing a meal when I had a sudden sensation that someone was standing right behind me.

At several points in 2020 I confess that I feared that I had summoned the pandemic from my own dark imagination. I began to find an interest in Kabbalah, mysticism, and the magick of Christ. To seal this nightmare away, I had to shut the door of my imagination then and grasp firmly, with trembling hands, the hard stuff of capital-r Reality. I stopped writing fiction. I stopped reading fiction. I even avoided television and movies for a while. I got a cat and a girlfriend. Gradually, the incursions into Reality stopped. The poltergeist left me and has not returned since.

Now two years has passed since the pandemic, and I must invite it back.

Any man who stays firmly within the confines of Reality is truly insane, because the Reality of life on earth is too much for a rational mind to bear. Unlike in the carefully constructed fictional worlds to which we compulsively escape, this Reality appears to have no narrative structure whatsoever. If there is a rational order governing our world, it is not possible for the human mind to grasp it. Fantasy solves this problem by constructed a simulacrum of reality. It is necessary to "cut" Reality with a healthy dose of imagination. Some would call this delusion. I do not. The only world that I truly fear is Reality. A fantastical world, however darkly imagined, is governed by the human psyche (Greek for soul) and so it is sensical in the way that the "real" world can never be. No one can properly explain, in moral or logical terms, the follies that human beings fall into and the nightmarish horrors that we inflict on one another. But a horror fiction story can explain it all, and in a way that allows the mind the grasp the nature of Man. In Biblical terms, you might say that fantastical fiction is a way for Man to grapple with sin, which suggests a solid continuums between the religious stories of old and today's commercialized multimedia fantastical fiction.

So come, O Morpheus! I invite you to send me whatever dark visitors you would dispatch to the shores of my mind.