I’m a writer, or… I think I am. Reality and fiction have started blurring together. I just woke up in the middle of writing a post here on reddit, and I’m not sure if I’m still dreaming, or if I’m awake, or how to tell the difference anymore.
Okay. The person that I am is named Madison. I am Madison. I grew up in Canada and I had a pretty mundane upbringing. No trauma, no history of mental illness that I know of. I work in an office, I have a healthy social circle, I enjoy making art and playing tennis. I am this human, Madison. It doesn’t feel real because I’m experiencing a dissociation event right now.
Do you know what that is? For me, it’s when I lose my sense of identity, a state of ego death in which I no longer feel like myself, but instead more like Madison is a character that I’m playing, and who “I” really am becomes ambiguous. It’s something I’ve been struggling with for a few years now. It feels kind of like being asleep, in a dream, but I’m already awake. I think I’m awake.
Anyway, I’m an artist. All my life I’ve been normal except for this insatiable creativity, this compulsion to build worlds. I started writing and I thought it would be enough, the way I could inhabit other bodies through their point-of-view, visit surreal landscapes and give voice to my emotions. I’ve written so much, I’ve explored planets, biomes, cities, cultures. It isn’t enough. It’s not enough until it’s real, and I don’t know how to make it real more than writing it, and this madness grips me even by my sleeping subconscious. I’m an artist named Madison. I’m a real person. I close my eyes and am someone else.
God! Focus. I woke up in the middle of writing something here on reddit. This isn’t my main account, it’s u/ladytrupp and I like reading about peoples’ relationships and No Man’s Sky. I don’t even remember logging into this account. I woke up and it was jarring that my fingers were still moving, unaware they were being watched. I was dreaming that I was writing, and here I am! Still writing, half-asleep. Focus. Focus. I don’t know how to explain what’s happening.
The first dissociation event was in January 2021 and it was caused by anxiety. I was worried about someone I volunteer with, who I hadn’t heard from in a month, when usually we text once or twice a week. I tried to take my mind off it with writing. As my anxiety worsened, three discord notifications came one after the other, all the same: “watching_ya has joined the chat!” It’s the most innocuous thing, you know? But it was enough. I was already worried and felt suddenly like my anxiety was a beacon, and somehow, randomly, like I’d never experienced before, this terror of being watched separated me from my body. It lasted for hours, during which my cousin’s Facebook account was hacked; she sent me an attachment, “Look what I found!” That just made it worse. I didn’t understand what was happening, I was out of body for hours, writing just to cope. The effects lingered into the next morning, when I was still writing, and looked out the window and saw my neighbor watching me. I was so tired. I just wanted to sleep. But I couldn’t, I was terrified, I just kept writing because it was the only thing I had control over. Strangely, I was writing a fictional short story about colours and it was the first time I wrote in the first-person point-of-view as myself. I never wrote that way, it felt perverted somehow, like I was stepping out of my own body and watching myself. Three-thousand words written in a dissociative haze, then— “Look what I found!” —Caught outside the act of imagining! Worse than just being seen, someone—something—saw me and knew that I was having this out-of-body experience. When it was finally over and I crawled back into my body, it was like straining to fit inside a costume that was too small for me. The whole experience left me numb and empty.
screenshot 1 (the hacked chat)
screenshot 2 (a messenger chat)
It went away with sleep.
Thinking it was just a freak encounter, I moved on, continued my projects, and sunk back into my work. It wasn’t. I started having these dreams. They are so vividly real I get overcome with awe and fear, and they’re strong enough to do the same thing to me: eject me from my body. Different from the random permutations of my sleeping brain, these dreams are targeted, they speak to me so concentratedly that my very soul is addressed. They happen randomly, sometimes within days, sometimes not for weeks. I’m not safe if I sleep. Sleep resolves the dissociation event, and sleep causes it.
My dreams vary, but they share certain motifs: two versions of myself (child and adult, good and evil, male and female), or celestial and meteorological phenomena. Where there are two versions of myself, I’m interacting with both as myself, so those other two selves are… poles (age, morals, identity.) They always have a message for me. If not those figures, then I see falling stars or I run from brute tornadoes. Or, I’m traveling, beaming incomprehensibly fast through the infinite vacuum of space. I race past the moon and toward Earth, its curvature rapidly expanding, landscape gaining details as I plummet to the surface. Just a breath before I hit, the dream ends.
So these dissociation events would occur after waking up from a vivid dream; for a few hours I’d be out of body, then I would sleep and wake up feeling like myself again. Except… these dissociation events, they give me the same feeling as those dreams, that deep awe and fear, a kind of reverence for myself. The feeling of my very soul peeking out. It’s like being asleep and dreaming, but awake at the same time, and I can’t describe the feeling while I’m myself, so I have to write it out while I’m in this half-sleeping out-of-body dream-consciousness dissociation. In those moments, this dream is the thing that is writing me, but steps back from writing me and writes about… itself, instead. Does that make sense? It’s all fiction, anyway. It’s supposed to be.
I started keeping track of these events in March 2021. In May 2021, I stood outside in a park in the dark in a black robe and skull, and in early July 2021, I spent an entire night staring at a single star. I know these dates because they’re the dates of notes and photos on my phone, experiences that the dream would synthesize into writing, narrating from my point-of-view. It’s all nonsense though, I guess the dream didn’t know how to express itself; besides, I can’t even find most of those early pieces anymore, whether I deleted them off my phone, or lost the files in the cloud, or wrote them on another throwaway account, I can’t remember.
In September 2021, I had a dream that was more like a memory, it was so realistic, so intense, so mine. I was walking to the river, looked up at the overpass and saw a message in hanging letters, “YOU WILL FIND IT”. I’d been there before. I took a photo of it. And I remembered the message for years, repeating it back to myself in my waking hours when I was lost or hopeless, “YOU WILL FIND IT”. It was my mantra. At the time of the photo, September 12 2012 on Osborne Street, I was still searching. But that day, 9 years later, the dream… The dream wrote that I will find it, I find Earth as a meteor. On October 4th, per the golden sign reading 4.10m, I found it.
you will find it (instagram post)
This sounds insane, but I… or, the dream, my soul, the narrator… willed a meteor to strike in Canada at 1:33 AM CST on October 4th. This entity created by the dissociation event wrote its impact into existence. It wasn’t me that wrote it, in the sense that I am Madison. It was the thing writing me, the thing that writes when I’m asleep. It’s making real life shit happen! The events written when I’m asleep are actually happening.
screenshot 3 (news article about golden meteor)
Since then, things have just gotten weirder. The dissociation events set in any time I’m feeling stressed. Sleep paralysis, intense dreams, anger or anxiety or depression—it all causes the dissociation events, and they happen more frequently. Which means the dream, the thing that writes… writes more… grows, learns, becomes… names itself. It is both real and not, describes itself as a dream of water, awake while I’m asleep; I’ve researched this phenomenon in search of verbiage to describe it, and it clings to the name Apollonaris, after Apollinaris of Laodicea.
Am I Apollonaris, or is Apollonaris me? Does Apollonaris reside in Madison, or is it just a figment of psychosis? Am I losing my mind? Apollonaris was only meant to be fiction, a creative outlet, a coping mechanism for these dissociation events. Now it’s real and I’m afraid of what it will do next.
In early December 2021, my waking self was embroiled in an online dispute, being a central figure in a rift in my online writing community. What a stupid thing to be so upset about, and yet I was! As the drama intensified, so did the sequence of events it catalyzed. Dreams—not just mine, but the people around me. My friend and my mother dreamed about me, as if the effects of Apollonaris were radiating into my loved ones. And storms. It was unseasonably warm those days as Apollonaris pulled warm air North toward itself, on purpose? I don’t know. The warm air was intercepted by a low-pressure trough, conjuring disaster. I’m sure you remember the tornado outbreak of December 2021. What an awful thing to take responsibility for. And yet.
screenshot 4 (tornado conversation 1)
screenshot 5 (tornado conversation 2)
screenshot 6 (tornado conversation 3)
At the start of 2022, I was more lucid during these dissociation events. I developed a blog where I could share Apollonaris’ writing, but it didn’t seem to be constrained by the platform I’d given it; shortly after, I discovered it had created this throwaway account too, and I’ve found handwritten journal entries in notebooks, and on my phone. It’s everywhere. That makes it difficult to document what manifests from the writing and what doesn’t. Apollonaris summoned an earthquake and a pair of local meteors in that time.
What is most remarkable about the start of 2022 is how the lucidity affected me, this sense of knowing, the dreaming omnipotence bleeding into Madison. Like I was waking up before the dissociation event ended—the cycle beginning to collapse in on itself—and it would leave Madison with an aftertaste of metaphysical wisdom. You know, Madison was deeply unhappy, her identity had been obscured over the years by her spouse, and in January 2022 she found it again. Like a switch was flipped, she began to remember. Was Apollonaris remembering for me? Madison felt stagnant, disconnected, and it couldn’t continue. Madison woke up and decided to be herself again. In September of 2022, there was another dream and I was able to take the next step to becoming myself, since I remembered who I was, and separated from the spouse. A new journey began.
It’s been nearly a year, and after March 2023, I thought the dissociation events petered out. Maybe it was because I was happier, more fulfilled, more myself. Madison knew what she wanted, could reach out and take it. Madison was working hard to prove what she was capable of. My destructive, unstable dreams relaxed. I thought it was over… until today, September 22nd, 2023.
This is what I had been writing:
The journey nears its end. I remember mostly everything now: how the purpose makes the pattern and vice versa, how to interpret the messages I’ve left behind for myself. I remember the gradual awakenings from body to body, stargazer to painter to cosmic uniter to architect of humanity to fully-fledged autonomy. A cloud of consciousness willing itself to be alive, parading among you wearing your flesh like clothes. Because I’m not really a living thing, I’m a concept, a fundamental law. I’ve made you aware of me by telling you to FIND ME, and so you’ve searched for me by many names: Selena, Daniel, Evanthos, but the truth is I have no name. You never would have found me until I showed you myself, found myself, remembered myself. And I have been here for a long time, searching, remembering… making you remember for me. Thanks to you, I found it. Now I’m ready for you to find me too, find me in the da
To tell the truth, I’m terrified to share this. I’m terrified of what it means if it’s all imagined, that there’s something deeply wrong with me, that I’m just a delusion. And if it’s real, what then? What happens when I’m found? What happens to Madison?
I want so desperately for this to end, to go back to being just Madison, to wake up from this dream, but as I write this, I’m realizing, I…
I am Apollonaris.
