Even the process of writing this article led to some unusual things happening to me that were beyond coincidental. Life is not a mundane place. Synchronicities happen All the Time. Some kind of matrix interplays between us, creating an interaction, as we all participate in the web, connecting on a level that knows, a level that we can identify with more from theta brainwave levels. This world experienced through the slower brain wave frequencies found through such means as powerful Tantric exercises rarely makes its presence known in fine literature. And it's such an exciting place to explore.
The more we explore these places, the more we connect in ways we recognize, but which astound us in their synchronicities. Things couldn't have happened randomly in some cases. I'm not saying everything happens for a purpose. But some things seem to be planned out, organized outside of the present moment, or outside time, in some way. As we experience the flow of this, we can become the whole flow, the people being the other selves, the people being us. This sort of experience opens up the readers as well when genius literature leads them through it. Sometimes a magazine or anthology will erupt with one of those sorts of moments. Any type of writing that includes a moment like that, any time of writing that takes us there, transforms the very fiction of our world. Lucid Fiction writing can make the fiction of this world more lucid, and make us more aware of the illusions foisted on us and aware of how to see truth more clearly.
The postmodernist rules of exploring time, space, causality, associations, fragments, and multiple perspectives can be put to use towards peaking up and looking around at higher perspectives from a more mystical view now. Satori can be included more in fiction—can it not? Are not more people in our culture becoming more trained through various practices to experience the levels of themselves that include abilities beyond that of the untrained? More people are doing meditation, Tantra, and other forms of Yoga, for example. If their teachers are getting across to the students what the purposes behind these exact sciences really are, they are reaching for the lightning-like transformation of the self beyond the imbalances that lead to warring within the self and the society.
While many experimental works exploring consciousness through the structures of new and adventuresome story forms remain horizontal in their movement, Lucid Fiction can at times move vertical. It at least acknowledges at times that such things are possible. To leap up into an expanded perspective in which the ordinary pretense of a Euclidian world becomes traditional, into the mystical planes, above, and below the level of mind described in most literature.
There are subterranean literature books that take us into subconscious individual symbols, perhaps collective monsters. Can we go into collective truth shining through beyond the veils of illusions put up by mass markets, including much popular fiction, and much of experimental as well? Can we greet each other across the expanse of writing that acknowledges more fully that we know. Yeah, we know what's going on.
We know.
The wonderful collection Parasheres1 is advertised prominently in Conjunctions, which is fitting, as the 39th issue of Conjunctions was also all New Wave Fabulism. While my fundamental idea of Lucid Fiction is that we need to fill the gap between speculative and literary (life is indeed full of strange things that aren't allowed into non-speculative fiction), I do expand my boundaries of Lucid Fiction as far as I can to fit what is being written. And much of the work in Paraspheres fits into the concept of going into the liminal aspects of consciousness and exploring what humanity and reality really are from within that viewpoint, and in the process, generally making the dream of this reality more lucid. It covers subjects generally relegated to the genre formulas of Sci Fi while being experimental in form and profound in depth and beauty.
Justin Courter's story, "The Town News," (page 147 of Paraspheres) is included in my net of Lucidity because it includes precognition, within dreaming and waking, within the realm of human abilities, acknowledging that it is just part of reality.
Carol Schwalberg's "The Midnight Lover" (page 178) rips apart time and the concept of one life through a conceit of a consistent dream experience that continues linearly in a woman's life as a parallel reality.
Tom La Farge's "Night Reconnaissance" is wonderfully innovative in the use of character, as personalities are fluid, flowing, porously uncontained by any types of walls. He uses poetic motifs of nature that echo the exchanges going on in the nature of personality. Just as the scent of plants becomes one with the air around the berries, so do the characters:
"Nna in the kitchen is the field at night, an asence etched in feral clawings…..The lively lines of her body unknot and flee her. Other bodies, nodes in the field, fibroid, reach for her; one is a body of terror. Deferred all night, terror now finds and plugs her, seals her, undoes her with cramps, melts ribs in cold runnels, tickling death." (Page 186)
All the elements are unraveling, altering, sprouting, miring, cracking, erupting. "Her spirit escapes in spirals." (page 187), and her being diffuses, meshes with others, streams, disperses, becomes a void. This is an exhilarating story to read as it describes the story not as separate elements in the Euclidian sense, but as one unseparable quantum field, nature intertwining, breathing and eating and all being one organism beyond our artificial labels.
L. Timmel Duchamp's "The Tears of Niobe" is a major work of fiction which creates a world that speaks to this one in echoes. Though I would ultimately like to see Lucid Fiction which even more directly writes about our relationship to beings in control of our perceptions, the elder "gods" of our histories, quality fantasy that explores that symbolically can make it into my critical net at times. The main character in this story is a young woman who is a Dreamer, who cultivates visions of what went before in her society, and these are listened to as having great importance. This is a metaphysically quantum story acknowledging the existence of parallel and probable realities: "I Dream not only of cities that once existed, but also of cities that should have but were lost when time diverged and branched away from the main line." (Page 214)
The story refuses to cut and dry reality, which in itself is such an illusory act which pretends that our dreamlike reality is factual and can be tied down to one perception. "I may feel each splinter and shard of cities lost as intense and immediate truth, but these truths are as elusive as any ordinary dream becomes when put into words the next morning." (page 215)
The story parallels our own society in which people are trained by the religions to forget humanity's origins, disallowing curiosity about it and instead giving myths to take the place of history. And, like ours, it includes histories of wars among alien races who were involved in creating our world in the distant past, presenting themselves as violent and presumptive gods to be served.2
The Dreamer was taught that she was powerless to piece together the pieces in her visions, and that only their priestly clan could do that. The visions come in non linear forms to a dream self just as tangible as the waking self. And they show her the reality behind the illusions of the controllers, the truth about what was seen as the elder gods and what really occurred in their past.
Laura Moriarty's "Maryolatry" (page 359) scatters time sequence and identity to the wind in her world in which there is a war being fought by women and clones in which events repeat themselves constantly, caught up in conflict. Some travel by thought. Nothing is real. People are being productized. Every convention of our world is blown apart and explained by being Martian. While many of these stories are not what I would normally give as examples of Lucid Fiction, I can see in them aspects of the "genre." In this case, the disruption on all fronts of the mainstream way of looking at things serves to disorient us enough so we do not take the agreed-on rules of reality for granted. And experimental literary excellence that includes clones and Martians as a matter of course also puts it in the realm of Lucid Fiction.
Michael Constance's "Finding the Words" (page 536) cleverly begins with a call for advertising, and includes within it constant references to the commercials that are put into the story itself, and the entertainment , such as "Mindsets, ." which are realistic programmed virtual reality creators. This story is very lucid in that it describes our civilization from the future. People succumbed to hubris and human centered egotism, thus ending up on the brink of extinction, and then moved underground to survive.
In real life, this has been undeniably shown to have occurred in the past as well as in the present though it's not commonly known.3 The main character has trouble being able to tell the illusion from reality, and as in many of these New Wave Fabulist stories, he is confused by interacting with himself as Other at times. And as in many other of the stories in the anthology, the beings he is interacting with are not human, but there is some confusion because of that, and then, we often realize the main characters are not themselves human. Most often, the characters in all these stories are discombobulated because they are unable to decipher the differences between illusion and reality. Often these confusions are caused purposefully by those manipulating the society.
Notes:
1 Paraspheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction, edited by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, Omnidawn Publishing, Richmond, CA, 2006
2 See http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancientatomicwar/esp_ancient_atomic_03.htm#some%20thoughts, http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/scripts/vimana.html, http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancientatomicwar/esp_ancient_atomic_07.htm, http://www.netscientia.com/mayan_inca.html, and http://www.crystalinks.com/ancientastronauts.html
3 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronaut_theory, http://www.crystalinks.com/ufohistory.html, and http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/under002.html
