Being half asleep in a room then hearing random things start turning on or off. Being in the camera store late at night and checking out the Sony gear, but Sony had unlike Olympus the ability to use the motor in the body to control the aperture of the lens, and its image stabilization was only two-axis. Waking up in the middle of the night due to feeling something puling your sheets. Your parents’ assistant looking through all their drawers, looking for money to embezzle. Your brother constantly posting things about your parents online while they are alive instead of waiting until they die. Honor your parents. Reinforce the reality, not the random shit.
Someone is always in our reality, because they’re dreaming and you’re awake. They’re invading your game like Watch Dogs. So you need to be the invader by being the dreamer instead of the dreamt. You need to be the dreamer.
That’s why Olympus was safer, because FourThirds spells the numbers instead of having them as single-digit numbers like “4/3”, making it harder to dream. Olympus also made the lens project exactly the circle of the sensor, which is also harder to dream because there’s no overlap—it’s full-frame without being the full-frame everyone knows. That’s why their cameras aren’t fucking haunted (dreamable by invading dreamers). Also the stabilizer is in the body is five-axis, which is hard to dream because it’s multi-dimensional with pitch yaw and roll. More degrees of freedom are harder to dream. (That’s why there’s always plane crashes in dreams, because your brain can’t deal with pitch, yaw, roll, speed, etc. YETI. DITY. That’s why flags must either be free-flying or folded in a weird, origami-ass way like the Boy Scouts do.)
See, the time I took a Sony to a football game to shoot, when all their lenses were still just re-branded Minolta lenses, then the camera started doing all kinds of random shit, like not focusing on the right thing, or like not having things in the picture that were actually fucking there, or horses jumping up out of the water instead of dolphins.
The reality is, we’re all matter that fell a long time ago into a black hole and became frozen on the perimeter. Time does not pass for us.
It’s like, do you remember that girl who liked you, but was ugly, and when she would be riding on you, you’d feel her pussy clench up and get wet at the mention of a computer RPG quest? Like she got horny at the wrong things, and you could tell, which is why she was ugly.
It’s because she wasn’t really fucking there. She was just random noise being half-invaded by a dreamer.
Similar to that kid at soccer camp whose parents insisted that you share a bunk with—a narrow fucking bunk—but when you refused and he slept on the floor, while you were asleep he turned out to be half retarded in his sleep and tried to get in bed with you anyway, and sleep-you fought back against him, and it turned into the worst fucking fight anyone has ever seen, because sleep-you doesn’t fucking fuck around, it’s random noise. You’re not at home.
That’s why you always wake up with a sore leg and a dry mouth.
Now there are only a few explanations for why someone’s radios would randomly start playing music in the middle of the night:
Always beware an old friend who has a backpack containing drawings that you drew but that you don’t remember drawing, which are from a long time ago, and are surprisingly good. This is probably also an invader. A ghost.
Who was that girl, the one you forgot about having had a relationship with? Who you found out liked you, but nothing happened? Who you thought was ugly until you saw that she was actually super photogenic and gorgeous from every angle? Who had been left at the altar by someone else, not you? Someone who looked so much like you, that when she first met you, she went into a bathroom and cried for an hour—because you were like his fucking twin? Yeah her. Explain that shit, not in the context of this being a mishmash of waking dreams. You fucking can’t. Why was her name “Julia”—which also happens to be the one of the most famous fractal sets?
It’s that little tap you often hear on the glass (or in the glass) of a window. I just heard it multiple times as I was typing this. It sounds exactly like a finger tapping a window with the tip of a nail, sometimes a metal nail you fuck, other times finger nails in rapid succession. Or like someone throwing a grain of sand very hard at the window. But why would anyone throw just one grain of sand? Or just tap a few times, while being invisible? Why just once? Do cosmic rays that hit a window make a sound—or is it invaders? Is there a difference?
Why else would the window fucking make that noise?
It’s the existential dread that maybe I’m right. If I’m right and there are invaders coming in, what do we do? Not have clock radios?
That’s what I’m trying to fucking tell you. What you need to do is to heed the lesson I learned on Mt. Olympus about the pick to click: when you hear a sound that’s indescribable or can’t have been explained, something that sounds like a random tap or a cat coughing into a carpet, or a random knock on a wall, you make it a pick to click: take a picture with an Olympus, or imagine yourself doing so, and feel the impenetrable, uninvadvable goodness of it. Another way to prevent invasion is to lay out your rooms with only one thing that can randomly turn on—only one source of music or radio that responds to infrared.
You’ve got to be the invader in someone else’s dream, by unassailably holding your own in the line between dreamability and undreamability. That way you have a choice when to join that queue during the crossover, which you can only do if, in real life, you habitually are using words instead of written numbers for anything shorter than two digits, ordinals, etc.; by getting songs with complex beats stuck in your head, like Holdback Girl; by having cats; by driving a car with a long name with spelled-out numbers in it, such as an Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio (“quadrifoglio” means “four-leafed“); by keeping your windows and doors on the ground floor locked at night; and of course by Feng Shui whenever possible, as this was why it was invented.
This is why all the roofs in old Japan and old China were weirdly shaped with curved corners—it makes these buildings harder to dream, helping to protect against invading dreamers. Same with Russia. But now in America we have disregarded all this wisdom, and it’s putting us at great risk. It’s also why not to have places in your room someone could be standing without you being able to directly see them: observability counteracts dreamability, because under the hood, dreamability is based on quantum computational reducibility (a concept that I cannot explain here, but Steven Wolfram does a good job of explaining classical computational irreducibility).
The bottom line is, you have to make your reality hard to fake, hard to simulate, hard to dream. But we aren’t doing it, and we’re under constant invasion. We’re making everything cheap to dream, easy to dream.
Everyone’s consciousnesses lines up to dream back through the same few loops in a mixer during REM. It’s like being on a highway. One loop is before everything became cheaper to dream. It’s like streets emanating from a big roundabout. When you get thrown into others’ dreams, as long as you’re going Olympus and Feng Shui. you’re the least dense object floating to the top, and they cannot catch you.
That’s why cat’s cradle is such a vital art, especially two-person.
That’s why you should never have a dog off a leash or a flag just printed on the tag of a hat or on the sleeve of a shirt or on a badge, or patch, or sticker. That’s just too easy to dream.
That’s why the devil’s number is 666—the easiest number to dream, as hexagons are the most stable shape, so it comes natural to the dreamer of bodiless dreamers.
Don’t make yourself easy for them to find by doing all the most obvious things, all the things they lure you to do, like wearing flag lapel pins or driving a car with a name like “F-150.” It makes it impossible for you to know if you’re in a dream or not. If you don’t know or can’t tell if you’re in a dream, why should you think your dreams are hard to invade? You have to see some signs of reality to know you’re not dreaming.
But if you’re not dreaming, then who is? It’s not just about not dreaming, it’s about maintaining a hard line between dream world and real world, so you always know when you’re in the dream world, allowing you to become the dreamer—the invader, but seeking the Other Awakening: the one where you half-awaken within the dream by entering someone else’s waking state reality through their dream: their mental dream of the real world.
You see, what you experience as “the waking world” is very bit as much a dream, as any dream, because it’s all taking place inside your head—just like a dream would be. Except this time, there’s an anchor: Olympus, the real world. Random things that go bump in the night: those are effectively other dreamers trying to find their way into your reality. Those are “pings” from their consciousness to yours. If you notice and think about that ping or knock, it’s like inviting a vampire into your home. That’s why your brain usually filters it out. They do it at night because that’s when you’re likely the closest to entering REM, which gives them an easier entry—your guard is down.
What do they seek to gain? Do they prey on emotion? If so, why is that preying? It’s unclear.
There is one who targets me in certain ways—through the alarms, and through the radios and TVs. There is the other who targets me through the girl, the one who married me in an offset reality, who I met in the camera store, and who I later married offset in mine.
Who is the link between these states? Is there a link?
I’m afraid to go back to sleep, because I can feel one tracking me hard tonight. I must be especially vulnerable right now. Pick to click: but I ain’t no holla back girl.