They aren’t mine, but I’ve included within this narrative several of them that have visited my thoughts (invaded is more like it) during the course of putting this stuff together. And I feel guilty about using them. Jacobean Kings turned post-modern kings in 1980’s bowling alleys; pterodactyls and gunshots; human waves tumbling down hills of sand; this isn’t me.

They aren’t mine.

I feel guilty about using them. I mean, they play out like movies on my eyelids, disturbed only by a random flash of blood vessel here or there, but I just lie there and watch. I am not doing anything. I am not creating anything.

They are not mine.

Yet, I splash them all over this manuscript like some fucking pawn. Maybe you’ll think they’re interesting, maybe you’ll think they’re brilliant, maybe you’re Freud and you’ll say they provide some sort of window into my soul. But that’s bullshit. I didn’t come up with this stuff.

They aren’t mine.

These aren’t conscious conjurations. These are the result of forces that are beyond my control, forces that nobody, NOBODY, understands. So how can you learn anything about me from them.

They aren’t mine.

It’s like me judging you to be a bad person because lightning struck some watchtower in Zurich. They are that random.

Creating is something physical, it’s squeezing your head and pushing a few extra neurons into places unexplored This is just static. It does the work for you. You are helpless.

But until I can grab hold of that power, I guess I’ll continue to rape my subconscious of its most elaborate creations, capture those inner wars and embellish them for you, as if my petty exaggerations really matter in comparison. I’ll try to do justice to them with ink, even though the flowing blackness of my pen hardly compares to the spectrum of refracting lights, the canvass of unimaginable colors, the mimetic epiphanies, soundless sounds, placeless places and thoughtless thoughts that comprise them.

They really are beautiful, but they aren’t mine, and they aren’t yours. They belong to that which cannot be understood. Perhaps, it is that dreams belong to that which should not be understood