Introducing my new project - Blue Skunk's Dream Shack

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read some of my previous posts or fiction, that I have been fascinated by the malleable nature of reality and perception for some time. What we see, what we experience is so individual. To the exasperation of at least one of my (more) rational writer friends, I believe strongly in the power of subjective realities and inner worlds.

Apparently time and place seem to be the two things that keep humans confined to a matrix like physical reality, that only allows movement in certain directions, in certain ways. But how would our minds behave and react to the sudden removal of such restrictions. What if time is not linear but random... what if we lived an existence where we are continuously and concurrently aware of other versions of ourselves and our worlds and could shift back and forth between those worlds in the same way as we shift from three o'clock to four o'clock, from Monday to Tuesday.

Time locks us to cycles of beginnings and endings, births and deaths. We think of heaven and infinity as something that happens AFTER life, but what if it is merely our addiction to logic, to timelines that forces us to observe a cycle that can only end in one possible way, with our demise. There are various philosophers who allege that the universe is born within the moment of now. That both past and future are a figment of our imaginations. That we can change our lives by changing our memories. Blue Skunk's Dream Shack is my attempt to play with that. To break the attachment to one world, and release as many probable worlds as I can imagine. Above all, the idea is to teach me (and any possible readers) how to stop thinking in lines and to start thinking in all the colors and shades of feelings instead. To create a life that navigates a dreamlike path from one moment to the next, without necessarily adhering to the co ordinates of past or present.

Therefore, Blue Skunk's Dream Shack poses the question: What if you were continuously and concurrently aware of more than one reality, more than one version of yourself. What if you don't know where the next moment will find you. The first instalment, was uploaded earlier today and can be found at this link. It is meant to loosely follow the format of a #tuesdayserial, although I'm not sure what the #tuesdayserial people will make of it.

Not quite #fridayflash fiction - Alice in Sepia

She's an uncaptioned portrait in sepia. Wild eyes. Beautiful wild hair. The type of woman you could imagine riding stags in fairy tale forests. A forgotten scandal. Except, she left the boy, who was me. A secret so well hushed up, a tale so often rewritten that nothing true clings to it anymore.

Who was Alice? In a dream, she gave me a key. Upon waking, I found the missing lock, but here is the riddle. How do I open what is in this realm, with something left behind in that realm.

"I am both sides of the door," said Alice.

"I know," I replied. "That is why I cannot see you at all."

I am an uncaptioned portrait in sepia. I have my mother's wild eyes and hair. Alice separates the film from the page to look down at me, but I cannot make myself smile or talk.

"I cannot eat your fire, I can only eat your flesh"

This is an encounter that takes place in the realm of the subjective. My imaginary friend (IF) and I were visited by a large brown bear. It was very amiable, but when the bear licked my face, I flinched, thinking This is a wild creature, it could eat my flesh. The bear was surprised by my reaction and IF pointed out that this should not be a problem in a supernatural realm. We experimented. I let the bear eat my hand and grew a new one. But I discovered that it was harder to let it eat my face. I seem to indentify stronger with the brain and the face as "me" than with the hand. We tested this, by giving the bear my brain as a meal. IF said that, if the astral body left the physical body, I would still be intact and the bear would have a meal. The real me, it seems, is the energy of the astral body. At this point, the bear said. "I cannot eat your fire, I can only eat your flesh." Those were his exact words.

The above incident "took place" about a month and a half ago and I am writing it pretty much as I experienced it, but I've been paging through old journal entries of lake and discovered something equally dark. This was something IF said early in the year, "If the mouse connects to the snake, it's never a happy ending." He was reminding me that there is a darker side to the universe.

One such story can be found at this link.

Interestingly, though, the universe did kick up one exception to the rule.



The video clip is about seven years old and the best I could track about what happened afterwards it seems that the snake and the hamster were later separated and the facility where they were housed later went out of business.