South Park – Imaginationland. A great set of episodes, as many were, but this one led to something else in my thought process. A group of three episodes that feature the idea of imagined characters thought up by people all reside somewhere (Imaginationland), and that there is a magical way to get there. There’s much more to it, and if you haven’t watched it then you should, unless you don’t like South Park of course, in which case it may be somewhat of a chore.
On a basic level, I did and have continued to give thought to the idea that what we think, does create something, somewhere, but my theory on that is still taking shape. Although I have speculated on it in Is it the machines we should really fear? And toiled with the idea in one of my short stories called Book Launch, contained in my second collection of short stories ‘A Short Walk and other dark short stories’ (I’ll link the book at the bottom of the post in case anyone is interested).
Stargate Film – there is a cross-over and if you have seen Imaginationland, then you will know why. But for those who don’t, they literally feature Kurt Russell as a character who has to go through the opened portal to Imaginationland, because of his previous experience doing it in Stargate. We actually have talk of a stargate(s) being discovered in historical times, even though shrouded in mystery, so I thought it worthy of attention. Because we all know there are giveaways and clues in ‘entertainment’, but just how relevant those clues are and all that symbolism is remains to be seen.
Avatar – I include this because it was a weird film to me, which seemed to be about a dimensional cross-over of your consciousness, into another body, an ‘Avatar’. The word itself means manifestation, so what exactly is being manifested and where? This probably swings back round to my other piece, The great divide, which explains my theory on this. And ties into the idea of their being external entities being created by your conscious and possibly subconscious thoughts, of that the enerygy from them is at least harvested in some way. The power of thought as they say. And you create your own reality. The general premise of karma would seem to fit here, you get back what you put out there, so maybe it is. But it’s been altered slightly to make people think there is an overseer, decided to dish it out rather than it being a natural consequence of just being a person. And by thinking someone else is in charge of it, you don’t then claim responsibility for it. Easy then to side-step the action of owning it I guess.
But back to the original plot, Imaginationland. The end of it sees a destruction, caused by people in the real world, and there happens to be one boy left, who can imagine it back into existence. Made me think of The Neverending Story, which is also an awesome watch, but has lots of things in there to mull over about reality and imagining things. Again, if you haven’t seen, it’s worth it, I think so anyway.
And while it may be great to imagine things, once you realise they may just be real somewhere else, it should make you give a little more thought to what is going on in mind. And just because you think it, doesn’t mean you need to try and make it part of your actual reality. Know when to separate it and control it. Be mindful of your thoughts…
Never has it been more obvious that we aren’t all taking part in the same reality. I had always thought we had two realities co-existing within each of us anyway, our own personal one, and what I have referred to as a shared reality. The construct of society we all take part in together. But the shared version appears to under quite a bit of pressure and is unsustainable. Split and fractured into multiple ones converging and overlaying. Reality is what you make it they say, what you believe, what you see. But is it?
I have covered this as a chapter in my book Meeting in the Middle of Nowhere, from the angle of being able to imagine in visuals or not. And have previously tried to explain within that to someone who has Aphantasia, how other people are imagining a whole host of things in mind. Causing a separation from what is going on externally. To someone who has no internal monologue, or visual imaginings, it sounded like a very foreign concept.
But right now in society, there is a serious level of separation and divide between what people believe to be reality. And not by accident. It has been encouraged and engineered to be that way. Incorrect data and ever-changing parameters, misinformation on the part of the establishment and press, and people’s own fears used against them. All of that seems to have created a very murky set of ‘facts’ for people to work with. If you weren’t paying attention before this and didn’t instinctually know something was up, surely an alarm has been tripped in your brain by now? Apparently not for many people, or if it has, they are keeping it to themselves.
Many people have lost all perspective of what is a real threat, and how to respond or behave. I personally had someone online tell me it was ‘people like me who killed their loved one’. I corrected them instantly of course, that I had in fact been working from home all the way through and barely gone out, and that they were projecting their perceived fear in the wrong direction. But that is what some people feel the need to say, and made much easier from the comfort of being behind a screen without having to deal with the debate or truth of what they are missing.
But that is their reality i realised, they have formed a belief system around some partial facts. They seem to be awfully disturbed when you might try to introduce some new information or ask them to consider an alternative view. Oddly so. I have decided they either lack the capacity to assimilate new information, or can’t think on their feet to be able to adapt and ‘upgrade’ their thought process. They remain stuck in their version of reality. Which works to a point, until it encounters a different one, or one that would disrupt their own.
Some people now believe that their fellow human is a walking biohazard. That they should be afraid of them, keep them at a distance, to worry about touching them. For no good reason. It’s cruel what they have done to people. Life was hard enough for some and already a struggle without all the relentless fear, doom, pressure and changes being implemented and threatened.
We need a shared reality that works, and some coherent talks about how that can be achieved. But while manipulated fear is leading the way its going to be very difficult to find a clear path. I get the feeling they are not done with their grand deceptions, so it will remain to be seen if we are ‘allowed’ to stabilise and find our feet. Stay sharp and question everything.
To be honest, reality has never been completely normal for me. Once I was aware of the world, time, mortality, people, ideas and so on, I didn’t know how to be ‘normal’ – although I kept trying for quite some time. Everything is constantly changing, there is no stopping, standing still and taking stock of it all. To me it’s like trying to review what it was like being on a rollercoaster while you are still on it.
Reality has been really thrown out of shape this last year and a half for many. When we started to hear whispers of this ‘pandemic’ in January last year, my brain adjusted and adapted without me even trying. You see, for the past two decades, maybe longer, I have been fixated and focused on the idea of a virus. A virus outbreak to be more specific. My interest was actually first piqued in the early 90’s at school when we learnt about HIV/AIDS in PSE (Personal and Social Education – i think), I became quite interested in the science of it all and concerned by the risk fed to me by the media. Then came foot and mouth, and bird flu, and swine flu and the rest of the more recent ‘outbreaks’ which did the rounds, leading to the culling of many animals and overall made very little impact to peoples general day to day lives. But each time, I would be on alert. Watching and monitoring for any evidence or paper that would show it has crossed over, it had mutated, the risk has increased. But it never happened. No evidence ever did materialize and I did not see what I had decided were the next stages of a real outbreak with a viable threat to humans.
Along the way, I also happened to get into Zombie films. They used to freak me out, and played on what I decided was a natural fear of unseen disease, but in zombie films they made it seen, and it looked like you and me, it was the grotesque exaggeration of it all really impacted me (I think having Hyperphantasia did not help here at all!). But eventually it made me question the reality of their scenarios and setting for it. Picking it apart so I could understand it and know when to have appropriate fear. It can easily be misplaced and does not usually go well when it is present but not necessary. Fear really can control you.
Around 2018 I got quite into a game on my phone, I believe it was called Pandemic, so no guesses needed what it was about. The player is to start the virus in their preferred country and then gather ‘points’ as you infect more and more people, adapting the virus and working out how to make it supreme and deadly. It seemed just like a biological weapon skill game, how to fuck up as many people as you could and kill the world. While you are doing this, the world fights back by trying to find a cure, and if you aren’t good enough with your mutations and variants, then they cure it and the world recovers. Now in this, other things occur – even though it is just one screen of the world with flashing blobs to pop, and seeing small blue planes fly around to sort out the cure. After a number of attempts, I won. I created the one that took out the world. And it didn’t feel like a win, in any way. In fact, something else happened. I ran through all the data in my mind, all the scenarios and variants being played out in a ‘simulated’ setting, but I realised all that data goes somewhere. Yes, it could be paranoia, I considered that and thought you know what, whether it is or isn’t, I’m not playing anymore. It felt uncomfortable and I am only usually faced with that kind of discomfort when my spidey senses activate. I stopped playing it a year before the wheels were set in motion with Event201 in Oct 2019. Once that started, it was inevitable what was going to follow.
So, last January 2020, whispers from abroad started to happen. A co-ordinated effort to get the patchy information out and start reacting – they did a good job at first. It was substantial enough to take notice, more than just an article here and there, top medical people were discussing it. But there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on that didn’t add up. All the stories and pictures seemed very set up, not natural at all. They were so specific with giving us a ‘heads up’ on everything and doing things so illogically, it gave it away to me. And the fact that all the governments (mostly) gave a co-ordinated response – that does not happen and I don’t believe we are that organised to do it if we were indeed ‘taken by surprise’ by a virus out of the blue. But where it was heading didn’t look good to me, real virus or not. I decided to start ordering a few more packets of things for the cupboard and organised to use some of our savings to send my husband on his dream trip, to Egypt to see the pyramids. I had a feeling the way they were telling it, travel would not be something we should be planning too far ahead for. I worried he wouldn’t be able to go, so we booked it and he went, in the first week of March and was back before lockdown. By this time however, my view of it all had changed. Not on him going away, I still think that was the right thing to do and the right time. The overview of my personal thought had changed.
In all my wondering and thinking of viruses and pandemics, something occurred I did not foresee. All the makings of an outbreak but without there being a virus. With this new scenario playing out, so came a new state of thought, I call it Schrödinger’s virus. I now simultaneously live in a world where the virus both exists and doesn’t exist. Part of me is ready to accept that there could be a virus that has the ability to cause untold mortality as they say, but with no evidence to back that up, that idea is put into my theory category. And in day to day life and from what I see it doesn’t exist. Death rates and figures, funeral directors and all parties who should be able to make it obvious but they are saying the opposite, so believe both, or neither, or one? We are also being pummelled by high level propaganda every day from every media outlet and social media side, it’s difficult to not be consumed by it. I wrote a fictional book a few years ago about a virus outbreak, not a zombie one surprisingly, just one that changes humanity. I worried though that there may be too many plot holes or that it didn’t quite hold up – having seen what was rolled out and used to convince the masses to be under the spell of pushers peddling their wares, I really shouldn’t have worried. I feel like I am now living a badly scripted, badly acted plot hole. It has taken a twist though with recent increases in infection, but not unexpected. I have been theorizing on all this since last March/April time and following the articles as best I can, which only a few months ago predicted that the roll out of the miracle cure, is in fact causing unintended (as far as we know) consequences. Only time and data can tell on that one – I want to be wrong. I really do hope I am.
It’s been a strange road learning about Hyperphantasia. How imagination, memory and thought processes can all work together – or against each other. What always used to just be called an overactive or hyper imagination, really isn’t. It is sometimes a struggle to focus on external stimuli and take it all in, as there is so much going on internally. But this does not equate to ‘not being in reality’ as seen from an Aphantasic point of view. It took me a while to explain to my Aphantasic husband that everyone has their own version of reality anyway. He finds that a weird concept. He said you are either in reality or not. I disagreed and continue to try and explain this very strange thing. From a combination of interpretation, personal ideals, identity and environment we have to build our own realities around us within the parameters of what I guess is defined as a shared reality. And when this comes into disagreement or conflict with other peoples realities, it can be a confusing thing and doesn’t always work out.
He really doesn’t understand what it is like to have a constant murmur and a factory processing everything all the time in my head. Any more than I understand what it is like to see and hear nothing in mind, and when there is nothing happening, there really is nothing happening. I learn to manage the barrage of images and memories. Understand all the triggers and tendencies that I have to ‘keep’ things in mind. I guess almost like a hoarder of thoughts, but not by choice. Within that I realised though, that to a point I do have a choice, because I can choose (mostly) what goes in. Every article, book, film, conversation, theory, experience, idea and thought is jumbling around in mind, waiting to pounce anytime, anywhere for whatever reason. A lifetime of input increasing all the time and since the internet happened, ever growing. It has definitely changed my view on what I watch, read or give my time to.
But it is still a learning process, wondering how and why you are the way you are. Is it natural, was it environment? The old nature vs nurture argument which has been of interest to me for some time…
(c) K Wicks
Here is my book about discovering we had Hyperphantasia and Aphantasia and how I feel it affects certain aspects of life.
MKW Publishing 