Prologue - (I am most assuredly Mad)

Sets up the premise of the book

 

I’m going most assuredly mad.

This nagging feeling is so pervasive these past few weeks. Hell, these past few years. I have this connection with my dreams. I wake up once or twice during the night after each episodic dream, and I know each one is where I am supposed to be.

Not that they are vignettes of a mighty warrior or lover or such, but, rather, they are continuations of time lines that I thwarted by making one simple decision. And not necessarily a better life.

Why me, and why this continual nightmare?

For example, I have a dream that has me in the midst of a working day, and the dream is a compression of several hours of work (or so it feels). A job that I once had, with some of the people still in place, as if I never left. Another is a continuation of a relationship that was broken off, and another is my life having graduated from college. Another is my life without some or all of the series of physical accidents I have had in my life. There’s the one with me still involved with any of a group of people I partied with, ingesting things I no longer choose to partake of.

I had these since childhood, but back then I didn’t recognize them for what they were. After all, a child generally does not mull over the ephemeral embodiment of alternate realities (for the most part).

My other thought is perhaps they are all options in an amusement park, albeit a dry one, perhaps for the already deceased. This would explain how I seem to have been born with an unnatural knowledge of things TO A POINT, and then suddenly am clueless. I’m not precocious, or wasn’t, I was merely able to instantly imprint (or re-imprint) on my mind all that people, places and things I had been exposed to in each previous "ride", but retain no overall knowledge that the ride is in motion. Kind of a semi-amnesiac state that begins as I buckle up for the latest journey.

I am starting this journal as a way of chronicling my attempts at understanding this.

I will start by jotting down each dream I remember, and see if I can make the eventual leap into some semblance of control in these dreams.

My goal in this is simple. To find out if (a) they are merely dreams or wish-fulfillment or whatever drivel a shrink would label it or (b) My conscious life now is indeed the only real one or ©) at the very least by controlling the dreams I show this particular reality is the predominant one or (d) and the one I hope for-at least a little, that they are all options and through force of will I can live out my remaining days in the most pleasing alternative.

Here then begins the testament of my journey.