Friday 22 September 2006

Pic of the day: At first you don't realize that everyone else is different from you, that they are not quite in the same reality.

Single-user realities

Yesterday I described an idea for a short novel, in which one of the characters experiences something that no one else can see. In this case, it is a cat that transforms into a human and back randomly, but never when there are strangers present. The moment he tells someone about it, they will reasonably assume that he is not quite sane.

This is not the first time I use such a plot device. Last year I tried to write about a young man who had an invisible girlfriend. But this was just one in a long row of stories where people had such secrets. A boy has the gift to have one wish fulfilled each day ... but only if and as long as nobody ever gets to know it. Another boy has recurring dreams that are as real as life to him, in which he is some kind of Very Important Person.

And before that, for several years I wrote stories based on one and the same concept, what I inelegantly named the "fantasputer": An electronic device where a helmet picks up your mental images and feed them back to the sensory processing parts of the brain, creating a virtual reality similar to lucid dreaming, but while fully awake. In each of my stories the same thing happened: The test subject would start to lucid dream in their sleep, in the same fantasy world. And then it would start taking over their waking hour, until neither the main character nor the reader would be sure any longer which reality was really real.

***

I think maybe the inspiration for this came from my brother's psychology textbooks, which I read when I was a teenager. I was fascinated and creeped out at the same time by reading about teenagers with schizophrenia, some of which were gradually changing inside while keeping up a normal front toward the world. They often described it as "dying inside", which freaked me out because I felt a bit like that too. Then again, I have been dying inside for more than a generation after that and I'm still not dead inside. Clearly this is something else.

Anyway, those teens often started to experience unusual things, things that were not part of the commonly agreed reality. They would hear voices that no one else heard, perhaps see weird auras, meet mythological beings. And all the while they would keep up the facade, keep up the normal life on the outside, often thinking that everyone else was also just playing their role while knowing better. And then one day something would happen that would make them stop playing along and reveal that they were in on the secret... and it turned out that no one else were.

Some of them took a slightly different turn. They disappeared into themselves. Completely unmoving for weeks, rigid, seemingly locked inside their own minds, utterly lost to the world. In the past, some might never return, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to even preserve their life in this mundane world.

***

Is this really so different from the staple of fantasy stories, in which the hero (more often than not a young male as well) is mysteriously transported to a different world filled with magic, adventure and a fight between good and evil of cosmic proportions?

But for normal people, it is easy to tell apart the novel, or the role playing game, from real life. There is no doubt about which is more true. There is no doubt as to which is more important. But, I thought, if the imagined world was lifelike enough... Perhaps we can tell dream from reality only because the dreams vary randomly, and reality does not. If one of these two things changed, would we be able to tell them apart?

And yet in my latest stories, it is not evident that the main character is mad for experiencing something unusual. Nor should it be. The genius and the madman both live in a world somewhat different from consensus reality. Being one of them, at least to some small degree, I am well aware of that. I am happy to live not in a world of trolls and wizards, nor transforming cats or invisible girlfriends. (Although you may say that I have an invisible friend too. If religions did not already exist, that alone might be enough to have me committed.)

But in my case, the things I experience differently seems to make more sense, make me better able to function under the circumstances I have, than the consensus reality would. Without my invisible friend I would probably have been desperately lonely, with all those years alone. Without seeing everything as a vast dome of continuous knowledge, I would perhaps have been confused and scared by the world I live in. To see things differently is not necessarily a bad thing.

Although when cats become human or the other way around...