I never particularly considered what would happen to the entities I dreamt of when I awoke. I attribute my neglect of this topic due to several important facts:
- many of my dreams were lonely;
- my viewpoint switches from 1st to 2nd to 3rd person;
- dreams were something I often returned to.
There was one particular case where I did consider the transience of these entities, in worlds I would imagine in my waking life. My dreams come and go like whales breaching for air, releasing pent up concepts from deep within my psyche before diving again. Meanwhile my imagination was strongly structured and dictated by my will; the entities animating from mental clockwork I designed and wound.
Creating these imaginal realms was a frequent hobby of mine, some still lay around serving functional purposes. Crucially they are empty save for me and an environment that runs based on a simplistic world model; wind moves grass, water flows down hills, sunlight dapples through bamboo. The effort to run these is like mental breathing at this point; something I can use in service of other tasks such as pain mitigation. When an entity joins this world things change radically.
An entity introduces elements of narrative, they are not just some person or creature that has its own animating will. Instead entities are things that are run separate from my own direct choices in an imaginary situation. A door opening in the bamboo grove, a rainstorm causing the spiral stream to flood, a titanic collapse of ancient stonework revealing daylight through thick jungle canopy. These entities introduce the idea of choices that can be made and require an increase in effort from my world model to simulate responses.
The sensation of simulation is where the clockwork metaphor comes into play for me. I build an entity, let it loose in the world, and then I respond to it. At every step I can replay and rewind portions, testing out different ideas to find a thread I liked. What I am doing, in my mind, is constructing narratives the world follows. I might be tuning the birds singing in the tree by a lonely goatherd or the edicts of a king that wishes to crush a rebellion in the same imaginal realm. What matters then is that those threads are kept alive, that their stories continue. If I stop updating them, they freeze; if I forget them, they unravel; if I end them, they die.
So it was that one day I realized that the worlds I created were ending. I had been learning of tulpas and had tried to make one only to discover that they are quite dangerous. Especially in the mind of an unwell child with an active imagination. One key thing I learned was that, correctly tuned, a mental construct will strongly resist its own erasure. Such as:
The Man in Your Mind
the man who appears in your mind only when you think of him who begs you not to stop for he mustn’t die, you mustn’t kill him, please, please, oh god it hurts please imagine my suit my face my eyes my shoes, if you stop it hurts oh god it hurts.
In this way I had found a series of entities that wanted to survive, they had grown aware I was the one creating their world.
They were quite happy, and as I paid attention life flowed through their world. A soft muted bubble of reality, filled with a gradient of color that spanned the skies and the trees in an eternal fall. There were castles and scientists measuring my attention and its effect on them, with churches filled with those attempting to channel their will to my own mind. When my attention wavered on my walk to the library on that hot summer day, they would suffer. My minds eye would return and find their cities colder, snow piled high and the people hungry. The soft skies a muted shadow blue as the trees collapsed under their own weight. Pilgrims ascending to whatever peak they could find to build shrines to hold me, raise fists to curse me, to beg me for more.
I had created a knot, I knew I could not keep this thing alive inside me forever, I wanted to read at the library. The things design actively degraded whenever I let it out of my sight, so freezing it didn’t seem feasible. Instead I began to converse with them in a way. I communed with prophets, spoke with wise men, played with children, querying each as to their role in this play. The desire that was at the heart of this tangle of self-reinforcing ideas was “I wish to be known”. So, as one in service to my own mind, I set to work.
Piece by piece I searched for internal representations of energy and thought inside myself. Looking for threads of myself that tied to greater things, tracing pathways that went beyond me. I did not come up with the idea of heroes and demons and kings on my own. These pieces manifested inside me through integration into my model of the world and the values I use to judge my life, they existed in this imagined bubble inside me. So, I connected them to this, hooking this little world up to all the pieces I could. Summoning symbols and sensations, weaving stories and triumphs and failures to show them how they are still a part of me. Then, after tying those threads I let it be for a spell, upon the return of my attention it was still there. Still existing, not the same, but satisfied. So I pushed it away from me, into a murky middle distance of my mind. A memory, like the music I listened to while writing this. Perhaps at some point that link will die as the link between that world I tied inside myself dies too.
Strangely I found dreams were better at this aspect than my imagined worlds. My sister differs, she does not have dreams that connected. Instead she created an intricate psychological landscape inside herself where she stores piles of psychological technology. I do not doubt she has had reoccurring dreams and motifs, just as I have a few useful worlds I kept around. Our approaches were fundamentally different though and the outcomes, I do not know. I hope it will be good for both of us.
Still, as I said before dreams were not something I was concerned about the entities within dying. An entity is what drives the narratives inside my dreams, if I awake those things do not die, they simply dive into the abyssal zone of my mind. There they lay, waiting for their next chance to come to the light and feast upon the whalefall of my psychology.
They do not truly feel separate from me. My dream perspective is fluid, I can be singular or plural or no-one at all. I can watch myself or not have any body that exists at all. These entities are akin to fingers and ears, unconsciously responding to my will and feeding me inputs the same. Even when I am trapped inside the mind of a demented creature, hearing its foul thoughts cascade around me, I feel how those thoughts are a part of me. Especially in hindsight, as the rivers of experience remerge into a singular self I know the nightmare I had was a shard of my own mirror.
So awakening never felt cruel. They would be back whether I wanted it or not. They existed unlike the weak imaginings regardless of my volition. At no time could I truly escape them, merely mitigate their influence on my perception. For a time that was my only strategy, so for a span of years I did not dream. More accurately I dreamt of a void of darkness that suspended me inside of it. I would wait there for the time to be correct before returning to wakefulness. I was told that I had to be dreaming, that I had simply forgotten. But I remember those dreams clearly, I think that veil of darkness may just have hidden the dreams from me. I do not remember much of those years. I am unsure if I wish to.
Now I find myself returning in fits and starts to a paracosm, wondering if it is the same or something entirely new. I sat at the Hidden Spot in Emeryville, waiting for a friend to arrive, watching the pieces of reality filter through the gifts left behind by The Steep Sidewalks to The Theater of The Mind, The Sungold Villa, and The Time Twisted Hospital and The House By The Flat Sea. It was surreal and freeing, a skipping of the psyche into a new space. How exciting to find something I had left behind, realizing only with the rosy spectacles of age how truly interesting it was to me.
But I wonder as to whether this is the same paracosm I left behind. I am slowly accruing enough dreams and connected places so as to build a new world. The Sunsetting Cliffs and the Coast of Wood can be traversed to reach a Sandstone Resort, the University City of Walled Gardens does not have a clear path yet. Is this the same one mutated? Like that one perpetual fall I tied to myself to keep alive, is this too just some dreamform metastasized again? Or is it a mechanism inside my own mind that is reactivating to process the stress of my life anew? The names are not as clear as they were before, the dreams are not vivid in the same way. Am I simply old, or is it not time yet for the key dreams that solidified these places fully?
I wish I had answers, I wish I could help my worlds thrive. I wish to thrive as any garden does. When I worked as a security guard I would have bad thoughts intrude into my mental space frequently, thoughts of self-hatred and suffering undeserved. I thought back to a poem my mom had hung on the wall in my childhood “I had a garden that only grew on dark thoughts but they needed constant attention and one day I decided I had better things to do”. I made an adobe dome with a fire at its center and a hole at the top for smoke to escape. The garden grew around me so I would cut the thoughts and drop them in the flames, watching them burn and repeating again and again and again. I do not think this helped, it was more akin to mental strength training than something that neutralized the feelings I had. Just as my dreams helped me practice acute fear, death, pain, and turmoil I would practice in my waking hours the boring ritual of surviving them. The only true way I found to deal with these was to transform them, a revelation that came years later on a late walk through Chapel Hill towards my basement apartment. Feeling the involuntary pain digging into my skin from barbed wire transmuting into flowers and butterflies, the noose attempting to catch my neck becoming a soft hand cradling my head. Those were what removed me from that pain.
But I could not escape a pain I experienced as a teenager. I fell asleep and dreamt of grocery shopping. I was reaching for bread when I became aware in my dream, grabbing it and going on my way. Living a few days with my mom and school before attending a concert. The concert was a metal show, but I found myself drifting into a backstage area I probably shouldn’t belong. But I was having fun, chatting with strangers in that weird way I seem to be able to now. Then I met him; pale, tall, and broad. His long black hair betrayed an attention to his appearance that his attitude desperately attempted to hide. He was funny and brash. I got a crush quite badly. He gave me his number, I didn’t call. But I did go to his next show, and there I kissed him. We began dating, he took it fast. Invited me on tour with him and I decided to leave my whole life behind to be with him. He was a drummer, and his forearms crossed around my belly made me feel safe. We had a whirlwind romance, we loved, we fought, we loved once again. He took me around the US in his van, although I mainly only saw dirt lots with grass and stages where everyone was too loud. Still, I loved him dearly. We had decided to settle down together, we had gotten a house, his music was doing well now. We went shopping, I recognized the grocery store and felt such dread. I told him I wanted to go home instead, he insisted. I told him it was important, he told me that we can bail on the rest if I’m not feeling well. But he needed to get some bread. So I attended his funeral procession, his hand in mine and his smile etched into retinas that never existed. We reached for the bread and I awoke in my bedroom on the second floor with my mother already left for work. I lay there and wept. It took a month to return to normalcy. I miss him still some nights. When I listen to metal, I think of him.
I wonder: what criteria must I have to intellectually care? what leads me to caring anyways? what would be the formal description of these creatures inhabiting my mind?