Water rocks
through the substance of our dreams in rolling waves, rippling through grey
matter in fluid streams of blood and plasma that scrape it flat, layer by
layer, first a distortion, and then a memory.
I sit on
the shore. It always begins with me clawing at the sand, shaping it into
eddies. A single finger can plow a line through the sand. Several can turn a
field. A wrist can morph dunes into canyons. A heavy palm can lend swift,
unnatural erasure.
Once
comfortable with the tool, and with the material, we begin to build. The
imagination follows on naturally from a validity of structure, and then
expresses it as a metaphor.
How are castles built?
Castles are
built by huddled masses, for lonely gods who need a seat from which to rule.
The masses
need roads. A source of water. Walls to keep others out, and to keep them in.
Aesthetics, and adornment.
Why is the castle?
To focus
them. To give them a purpose for existing, in a world of sand and water. Only
in a world of sand and water.
There are
only worlds of sand and water.
Endlessly
working, until the inevitable comes, and the shapes you strove to make are
rendered obscure by the restless tide, and you exist no more. This is the life
of those on the shoreline.
I’ve been
thinking a lot recently about imagination, and hallucination. I’d be quick to
say there was a time when the two were practically inseparable in my mind. But,
as years get on, there is a clear pattern in that hallucination seems more
common, and imagination seeps to its nadir. The two are similar in this way:
Both hallucination and imagination are perceptions independent of
external stimuli.
A hallucination
appears to have the qualities of Physicality, while not undergoing a chain of
physical causality that would lend it true existence. An image is conjured up from the mind and transplanted
upon Physicality, existing as a picture drawn on clingwrap and held up
over the physical world. Imagination implies an
awareness of falsehood. Hallucination
implies a misidentification as truth.
The hallucination and the image are said to diverge at a point we label
control. The image is something controlled, because we can
consciously direct it. We can banish it if it displeases us, and we are
aware of its transitory nature. It is said than thinking of the past and
thinking of the future inspire very similar thought patterns, as both are a
means of perceiving something that exists outside of stimulus.
By rote, the hallucination is an uncontrolled manifestation of the
subconscious, uncontrolled by the opposite qualities to those we provided
to the image: it cannot be banished at whim, it cannot
be adapted by thought, and the thinker is unaware of its nature as a hallucination.
Yet there
are places where the imagination borders dangerously close to hallucination,
especially in youth. Is a young child at all capable of banishing the notion that
the slightest bump in the night or passing shadow is a monstrous visitor?
Much like the builder of the sandcastle, doesn’t
the builder need to prescribe to certain basic laws of logic in order for their
image to hold integrity (can a sandcastle be a castle if it had no walls
or form, but pure embellishments of stray seaweed and shells on a flat shore?),
and because of this, is there not a core ideal of
an image beyond their ability to shape?
We can rest
on the most sturdy case, being that a hallucination
is something we are unaware of; while an
image is something we are at least uncertain of at any point in its existence.
It’s a thin line – an important one, but a clear and determinate brink.
Is
hallucination any more real than imagination? No: both
are varieties of the unreal, and therefore just as unreal as one another.
Yet, while both are unreal, we tend to declare that hallucinations feel more real than images –
their reality has a higher probability.
Why should
probability play such a big role?
This is due
to the misdiagnosis of reality as a certainty. We automatically train ourselves to
recognize the empirical as truth, and the formally presented as canon. We
are indoctrinated to function in this way to such an extent that when exercising
metaphysical uncertainty; we consider ourselves to imagine that our senses are
wrong (thinking, “What if this
isn’t real?”), rather than sense that our environment is imaginary (“What would indicate this is real?”).
Reality is never certain. Even the seemingly most solid
component of it – our scientific understanding of physicality – shifts from
decade to decade to incorporate the addition of information. There is no canon
outside of the rational: only theory, so that we know that our established
reality can be overturned should evidence which disproves it come to light.
*
Thus
established, castle-building becomes a much clearer practice. If image and
hallucination were placed on a spectrum, ‘uncertainty’ would sit between them
as a measure of how easily they are misrepresented as real.
*
I sit on
the shore, watching my tireless work liquidate before my eyes as the sun sets
deep purple. The archways fall, the grand chapel is swept until only a molten
core remains. The joke is, it’s the physical things that disappear. All that’s
left of the sandcastle on its lonely shore is my own memories of how it rose
and fell, its arcane and elemental history that spread across the sand. All
that’s left is the firm image of something that may have mattered, and my own
stronger sense of how to make such images appear more real, every time I trace
my hand though the sands.
