Space is everywhere.
When I strip away the sentimental value of Earth, of Home, when I lose my perception of Earth as being the centre of existence, then I find myself on a rock in outer space. Outer space is the only space.
Between all matter is emptyness; Space. Quantum theory suggests that on a subatomic level there is no difference between being "here" and being "there". Space is everywhere.
In 2003 I built myself a spaceship similar to the one above. What happened when I used it was this: I spontaneously combusted. Literally. I felt the vibration of each and every atom increase until they spun apart, and I was nothing. Paradoxically, there I was. This experience had absolutely nothing to do with drugs or religion.
I'm not entirely sure that I woke up in the same universe that I left.
I Built This Spaceship in order to investigate a theory that was itself born of a previous vision. That same year I awoke one night in the "lightwater realm", breathing water. The walls of my room glowed orange and yellow and seemed to be made of music. Everything glittered church bells and soft symbols.
I had no fingers. This was a little disturbing, but not as disturbing as the fact that I was shrinking, growing younger and younger until I was a baby and still shrinking. My first reaction was to reach for a cigarette. Bad idea. My tobacco pouch launched itself like a rocket into the air, taking the ceiling with it, and leaving in it's wake a trail of images like an un-spun cinema reel. Immediately after this every object in the room follow suit, until I was surrounded by walls of images and my body had completely disappeared.
The experience didn't stop there. Everyone of those moving images then open up, until I was surrounded by countless eyes. These eyes then shattered like glass.
Beyond those eyes, the world spun beneath me as a complex series of interwoven circles, all spinning around a centre point.
Space is everywhere.
Reality is a dream.
Everything I perceived is composed of those reals spinning so fast that they give the impression of being one thing: the world before me. This world then became a different sort of territory for me - it was inhabited by other beings - dreams - that I do not notice on an ordinary level of awareness. They exist within this thing I call "reality". The dreamtime and the....'wake-time'....are interwoven, and both are simply platforms for the creation of story.
We are playing a game we have forgotten the rules to. My dream-self and my waking-self have become separated not by a difference in space or time, but by a difference in perception.
There are plenty of people out there who will disagree with this, but I am not trying to have "the right way of seeing". I am simply using what I have at my disposal.
I give myself the right to be a "schmuck" and to grow a massive ego when i come close to articulating these visions and manifesting them as story. Nothing is more important than realising these visions, than creating a mechanics and geography of dream, not even being a "rounded human being", or a popular one. Truth is, I put myself on the line for these things. When I get close to them, things like drugs, sex, philosophy, charity and even liberty and equality become trite and pathetic. That's just the way I currently see it, and I see those things in myself as well.
But if people need these things to give their lives meaning, they haven't been where I've been. I try to remain aware of the unfolding story in each person I meet, otherwise I would write the world off and shoot myself.
At this time, three things get my goat. I present them here in order of least important to most important: the first is the drug, dance, rave scene - which I grew out of years ago. My personal opinion is that no one in this scene "has the love", no one knows what "all is one" means, and no one is experiencing anything more than a chemical imbalance. Anything you can do with drugs, you can do without them. No one, in my gross opinion, in this scene has anything like the "secret" they think they do. I know a lot of people who will not like to hear this, but it has nothing to do with them.
The second thing are those specific people who like to take control of other people's minds. The "barging", "raping", "cutting" crew who do stuff like attempt to talk to peoples subconscious minds while they are asleep and shock them with violent images when they least expect it. The "psychonauts" who use what they've learnt to further their own quest for power and influence, and who look at other people's minds like they are property up for grabs simply because the people who own those minds don't have the wherewithal to protect themselves from sociopaths.
The third and most important thing that gets my goat is the any opinion or perception based on the idea "that's the way it is". Nothing needs be said about this. These are notes to prompt myself, and I only need to read the words "that's the way it is" to know how much this jiggles my jangles.
These are the things that push my big red button, that offend me on a core level.
So those are the personal reflections out of the way, my gris to the mill milled.
I spent several hours yesterday working on the same piece as I have been for the last few weeks. It's still evolving, changing, and at times I wonder whether I've written the life out of it.
I've been rewriting it and rewriting it, solely those first 200 words, compacting them and refining them and reordering them because even if the first draft was a "good piece of writing" I'm aiming to make it something more than that. Yes, this is a quest for perfection. I'm not trying to get good marks or get an audience, I'm aiming to relay the vision in accurate terms. Dream is the prime component of my mindscape. These 200 words are the voice of a creature from that realm. They have to be authentic.
It's for this reason that I keep going from my desk to meditation to my desk to meditation, because I need to hold a clear vision of that voice. I'm now spending more time meditating than I am writing as at times it takes 40 minutes of meditation to find a single line or image.
The process of this meditation is as follows:
1. Still the mind. Ease away thoughts of facebook, social interaction, work (the three prime movers of my conscious mind at present).
2. Find the voice.
3. Allow the voice to move and create a mindscape.
I can't ask it to do anything. I have to wait for it to speak on it's own terms.
At the beginning of this course I came to the conclusion that I needed to spend less time theorising and more time taking sketches of people and the world around me. This worked for a time, in that it revealed the things that interest me and gave me practice in wordsmithing.
However, things have changed. The ideas are back, the inspiration is back, and a few weeks ago I made contact with a larger sentience that my simple self - whether this sentience is part of me or not does not matter. What matters is that it lead me from one idea to the next, and made the whole world sing with relevance. It was like being on a path that I couldn't get off - even when I left my room, the songs that I played to myself between sessions followed me. Odd songs that I havn't heard in years in shops and pubs that have a pop-clinetel.
The world seemed to speak to me, and here's the thing that interests me: I've just had the biggest rush of my life and I kept it together. This calls for a fourth "truck point".
I've read only one book on writing this month: Alan Moore's Writing for Comics. Tis a very small book, but it said something I've been wanting to hear for the last four months: Have a very good and established idea of what you're talking about before putting pen to paper. I love that. That's what turns me on, baby. A bloody good idea.
The meditation has been my launch pad - through it I've uncovered the ideas that are most relevant to me. I've gone back through those two formative visions and utilised the symbolism from them, the most important element being WATER. Only THEN did I do any research on the relationship between dream and water, discovering things like the "water gate"/"star gate" mythology in media, in conspiracy theory (I don't believe in conspiracy - for the sake of the work, I believe everyone has forgotten what's going on and who runs what, even those people that run things have no idea who runs things), going back into my classical roots to research things like the river of LETHE, and also have a peak at the Atlantis myth for its WATER symbolism.
The LABYRINTH myth is also a prime component of my dream mechanic and geography; it is a place where dreams are born, and in my mindscape it is also part of the waking-world. People who still value the phrases "it's only imagination" and "it's just a dream" will not get what I'm talking about.
These ideas rushed me like a flood gate had been opened, and I suspect that is exactly what happened. Six months of stripping away layers opened up a wellspring of imagination, and THIS TIME I remained in the drivers seat. This is why I've been so happy.
If drugs, violence and reality get my goat, these dreams are what have my heart, and they are welcome to it. I love them - that kind of love that at times will cause me to shed a tear.
In conclusion, the piece is shrinking. I'm no where near 1500 words, but the words I do have become richer and richer. I'm taking all the time of a poet over each line, and forsaking the accredited expectations of the institute, but I have a dream.....
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