July, 2022
The American dreamscape. A strange topology beneath the moon that our oddly faceless icons walked on, then abandoned, an issue suddenly as dead as the dust under their nasa boots. We Americans inhabit stories and myths, not reality. We’re fictional characters who believe ourselves to be real, but disbelieve the real world. We’re wraiths wandering the in-between purgatory that’s not entirely fiction and yet not real.
We’re a danger, which most of us deny and the rest can’t quantify. Are we a danger just to the people inhabiting the real world? Certainly that. Are we a danger beyond that, to the world itself? Most probably. And beyond even that? What is the scope of the danger we represent? To our fellows, to our world, yes, but to our reality itself? We don’t know. If anyone does, we would not listen to them.
The darkness at the edge and center, twisted thorny black stems wrapped around the skull of a false god, and acolytes, so many acolytes upon acolytes, dissolving into the acid swamp but still hooting, the hot steam of hate whistling out of what’s left of them. They’re devolving into slabs and chunks of rotting flesh but they can still shoot, and there are so, so many of them. They can do serious damage before they’re just an oily scum on the surface of the stinking sewage.
On the scattered dry hassocks of grass and mud poking out of the caustic waters we can find zombie groups focused on the particular idols of their clans and tribes. The worshipped idols are cold metal, oiled and precisely machined killing machines. The acolytes deny that they reside in death cults, denials that confirm it. Their idols, being entirely represented in the physical realm, are never quite fulfilling enough. Their answer is to amass more and more in the vain hope that they will eventually, somehow, fill the emptiness.
Beyond the stinking swamps lie vast plains of grass and mythical creatures; this is the realm of the lean, weathered riders. They are men of few words, taciturn models of inner strength and outward commonness. They have little variation, since all are the recapitulations of just a handful of self-similar models, nearly all of whom are long dead in reality but live on in blue-tinged light late into the disappointingly pedestrian night full of driveways and curtained windows and stick-built walls that only somewhat exist in the American dreamscape. Turn your head one direction and they are solid and endless; look the other way and they instantly fade, leaving the arroyos and canyons and corrals that are always there underneath, in the wish-world of the Americans.
There are cities here; cities that are ugly, dark, and dangerous when you enter by one path, but the selfsame city is a bright, shining beacon of society and aspiration and hope when entered by another path. The very same structures change and shift depending on your path through the dreamscape. The paths themselves change, for those able to find more than one. Rustic dirt for some, seamless, flawless pavement of other stone for others, and elevated, lofty skyways for still more dream travelers. And yet the cities, somehow, are the same beneath those shifting perceptions; neither heaven nor hell but something much more ordinary and alive.
Life in the dreamscape is constrained. The fabric of the dream is shallow and simple and unable to support the complex life of reality. Life that can thrive there is simple and emblematic. Geometric, inorganic. Flat rather than solid. Adorned by a few primary colors, not the full palette.
Living things in the dreamscape are just sketches of real plants and animals. Most have no internal dimensions at all, and thus no way to feel, to experience, to process. You cannot find a cat or a cow or a bird here that is more than a simple attempt to draw those things, and the drawings don’t attempt to partake of the true nature of the creatures, but only their appearance. Farms and forests in the dreamscape are inhabited only by children’s attempts to depict what lives there — and the sketches will always seem to have been created without any samples to try to copy. They are just the idea of what a cat or cow or bird must be, by someone who does not (or cannot) really care.
The American dreamscape is mesmerizing; maybe overly so. You can get lost in it. You’d have a lot of company.
