The Laws of a Dreamworld

     Humans like to pretend that Dreamworlds, unlike Estellia, are lawless. This couldn't be further from the truth. Since a Dreamworld is only as strong as the belief of those who inhabit it, Laws are essential to keeping them together. Not just laws governing behavior, but laws governing the way things move. 

    What you need to remember when creating a dreamworld is that the physics, whatever they might be, need to make sense on an instinctive level. You can't just write them down on a piece of paper and expect everyone to follow them. If people don't follow you're physics without thinking, or worse, they can't, then your dreamworld won't feel real to them and will subsequently cease to exist. 

    It is also essential that your dreamworld be built to withstand conflict, even if you plan on building a dreamworld that functions without it. Conflict can add depth, but it can also tear a dreamworld apart if both sides don't feel that their viewpoints can be expressed. Always make sure your world feels meaningful to those who live in it, even if you disagree with their views. 

    Finally, make sure that your dreamworld is malleable. If it can't be changed, people aren't going to want to engage with it which means they aren't going to be able to believe in it as easily. So make sure that people can change it, even in small ways, to suit them and their needs. You don't need to create a utopia, you just need to create a world where people can be happy. 

   Above all else, make sure people believe in your dreamworld without being pressured to do so. If you've built your dreamworld well, belief should come so naturally that even criticism won't undermine people's perception of its reality. That is to say that even if people don't find it fun, they'll still feel that it has value. Believing in something and knowing that it's real are not the same thing, after all. 

     I hope that more people with disabilities start talking about their experiences. I think it needs to be a bigger part of public discourse then it currently is. The biggest problem we're facing is that society isn't built to meet the needs of those who live in it, the only way that will ever change is if people start being more vocal about their struggles.

Reality

 Oh, to have the luxury of sanity,
To have the promised extra of 
Knowing you live in reality.

How I wish I knew
That my world would stay real,
That the sun would rise once more. 

     We need to reclaim fun in our society. 

     Much as I love writing for this blog, I find doing weekend posts difficult. I do enjoy writing about my views on life, but I don't want this blog to be all heavy and dramatic. I didn't set out with any particular goal in mind. It's why it's called "Train of thought". I figured that I'd just write whatever was on my mind on any given day. Naturally, I wound up not writing anything at all. People made it seem like a much bigger deal then it needed to be. That's how things work, something that used to be fun and easy becomes high end and crazy because eventually people only care about the crazy things you can theoretically do, not the fun you can have. 

The Dream Tower

    At the center of Estellia, positioned to be at an equal distance from all of the five major cities, is the Dream Tower. It is said to be where every dream, wish, promise, everything that generates power, is gathered to be turned into a dreamworld. Aside from the high nightmares, nobody knows what goes on there. The only people allowed in the city that surrounds it are Nightmares and those who are close to joining them. 

The Meaning of Hope

   I've written about hope a fair amount on this blog. I wrote this post about the importance of not giving up when things looked like they were only going to get worse, and this poem about how hard it is to hold on when it seems like nobody will listen to you. In case you were wondering, I actually wrote that poem after I finished "A Glass House". Fortunately, I feel like the easy kind of hope is a little easier to come by then it was, at least if you hate Donald Trump as much as I and most of America do. 

    When I say, "The easy kind of hope," I'm talking about the kind of hope most Millennials and a lot of Gen Z had when they were kids. It's the kind of hope you have when things are pretty good, but you know they can be a lot better. It's when the economy is good and everyone who has a job wants one, but human rights aren't as far along as you want them to be. It's when you have a path that could lead to great fortune, but you want a path that will bring you personal happiness and you feel that you have a decent chance of success. Those are the kinds of situations where good things happen all the time, and even if you have a run of bad luck there's always something or someone to fall back on, so it's easy to believe that things will get better. 

    We don't live in those times anymore. Now we live in times where at least once a month something awful happens. The economy is doing okay, but everyone thinks a recession is on the horizon. We were making progress in the arena of human rights, but thanks to the Republican party much of our progress is being erased, and nobody decent is happy about that. Success, as we used to define it, is now a long shot, and even if you obtain it, you won't have as much as you might have had in better times. 

      Yet we're still going on. People are leaving jobs that don't bring them joy. People are fighting against the Supreme courts decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. People are fighting back against the companies who don't care that our planet is dying. They aren't doing this because they things will get better anytime soon, but because they don't want to give up on the future they want so badly. 

     That's because when the easy kind of hope starts to fail us, the hard kind of hope kicks in. This is the hope that comes when you know the odds of success are slim, if nonexistent, but you know that you couldn't live with yourself if you didn't at least try. This is when you keep being told the world you want will never exist, but you refuse to stop believing that it will if you just keep trying. It's humanities greatest strength and it's worst weakness, the voice that allows heroes to triumph over evil and villains to win battles nobody thought they would. Hope, like all tools, doesn't care who uses it. 

     That doesn't mean that hope isn't a good thing. I think that hope is one of the things that makes us humans. Most living beings don't hope for a world that's different then what they have, they just try their best to live in the world they were given. Humans are different. From the time we stood up on our own two feet, we've been shaping our world to suit our needs. Now, more then ever, we need to remember that strength isn't defined by victory and what makes a person good isn't knowing that they have all the answers. What makes someone strong is standing by something they value even if they know others disagree. I say this knowing there are many people alive right now who believe things that history will rightfully hate them for. I also know that it wasn't that long ago that most minorities were denied a voice by mainstream society who viewed them as aberrant, who didn't want to have to face the fact that society as they knew it might not be perfect. I don't know if the things I believe are right and good, but I know that I have the right to live in society. I will never get everything I ask for, and that's a good thing, but I have the right to ask for what I want and be told, "If you go down the path everybody else is going, you'll eventually get it." Too often, society won't give that to me or to people like me. Too often, we have to work harder or get luckier because people aren't willing to listen. I don't want to hear any excuses like, "that's just the way life is." Feudalism was once common, but nobody in America right now would be willing to live under it. The world I want is more then possible, and I won't stop fighting until I get it.    

A Lucky Human

      I've been on my own for about two years now. I've learned a lot, but the most important thing I think I've learned is that as far as humans go, I'm incredibly lucky. Not just because I have a necklace that helps me fight Nightmares, or because I have a dreamworld of my own, but because no matter how many crimes I commit, I never get caught. 

   Not that I've committed a lot of crimes. Mostly I just sleep in alleyways or on benches. I must look like a druggie, but I don't get stopped by the watch. I did steal a Journal and a pen from one of the shops, mostly because I missed writing things down like I did in school. I didn't realize it before, but apparently you can keep real objects in a Dreamworld if you focus hard enough. I don’t write much, just what I've noticed going on, which isn't much. 

    I'm also lucky enough to avoid the gods when I enter the dreamworlds attached to the cities they run. I don't think they'd like a human who goes lucid as often as I do. It's not illegal, but it is deeply frowned upon, as it destroys the integrity of the dreamworlds, or something. The thing is, I'm pretty sure everyone, human or otherwise, knows the dreamworlds aren't real, and looks at them as a representation of the skill and craftsmanship of the nightmare who created it and nothing more. I suppose pride is a much a problem for nightmares as it is for people, so they probably like to pretend their worlds are realer than they actually are. 

   My friendship with Alex has also made me grateful for not needing to eat. Sleeping every night is bad enough, but eating would be incredibly inconvenient. She's told me that those who need to eat are given special privileges, because they usually have a lot more power than the rest of the nightmares, but if you ask me it doesn't seem like a great trade off. 

  One thing that does kind of bother me is that when I wish for something, I usually get it. I know I should feel grateful, but the only that distinguishes reality from the Infinite for me is that when I'm in a dreamworld I can make whatever I want happen. I don't always get what I want, but it happens often enough that I'm beginning to feel unsettled. 

A Haiku

 A poem of few words
Written for an audience
Of only a few

The Story of Humanity

 There is a grand epic
Growing in the heart
Of humanity,
A story told
By billions 
Over many 
Generations. 
A story about a person,
Alone,
Frightened,
Sad,
Pushed down a path
They do not want to walk down.
Endlessly walking,
They know they are not wanted,
But they don't dare turn back.

There is a story
Being told 
By thousands,
Growing from the words 
Of the worlds storytellers,
Found in the hearts of creators 
Everywhere.
A story about a person,
Cast out by society
For the one thing they can never fix,
And wouldn't even if they could.
A story about finding yourself
Amongst the stories people tell about you,
And the stories you tell about yourself.
It's a story about online quizzes,
Self-help books,
Blogs you read but tell no one about.

This a story
In which all of us play a part,
A story about a collective desire
To break free of a world that doesn't see us
And wouldn't care even if it did.
This is a story about being brave enough
To walk down a path of your own choosing,
Away from fame,
Fortune,
And all the rest of society's lies,
Towards the world
You know you want,
The world only you are able to live in. 

Short Poems

    All the poems that don't go up on Monday are poems I wrote for twitter for NPR poetry month. That thing I quit close to the end of the month because I didn't want to lose a lot if I had to leave Twitter. I haven't written any of them since April, but I wrote a lot because I couldn't come up with a lot of stuff I thought would be well received. I figure I can write more when I'm close to running out. 

Friday Posts

    Friday is when I get my weekend posts out of the way so I don't have to do anything on Saturday and Sunday. I'm glad that I don't have to worry about writing high quality posts, since I find that the more anxious I am the lower my writing quality gets. It's amazing how freeing it is writing posts for a blog nobody reads. 

     I've been thinking about what I want my goals for this blog to be. I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to be exceedingly famous and extravagantly wealthy, the culturally accepted goal of posting things online. I also don't just want to wile away my days writing posts about nothing in particular. I do enjoy short stories, but it's really hard to write them consistently, though I am getting better at it. 

    I guess I've just reached the point where my brain's going, "Okay, I've gotten the thing I've said that I always wanted. Now what?" And I don't know what I want to do now. 

The Fairylands

    There's no happier place in Estellia then the Fairy Islands. Since it's surrounded by the sea of sadness, I suppose it would have to be the happiest place in Estellia, or else nobody would want to live there. 

   I love going to the Fairylands. Well, more accurately I love going to the dreamworld the people in charge of the Fairylands built for their citizens. Living in the Fairylands requires money, and I don't qualify for a job that pays. Almost no one does. That both my parents did puts me in the top one percent of the human population. Or so my father would say every time I felt queasy because I couldn't sleep for a day or so. Technically it costs money even if you travel to the Dreamworld version of the fairylands, but you can do anything in the dreamworld so I just create the amount of money I want to spend that day and don't worry about it. 

   There's a lot of fun things to do in the Fairylands. You can go on the rides, watch or participate in shows, or play in any number of games. The games are my favorite part, especially those where you're the Dreamer and can fight against the strongest nightmares to ever exist. To be fair, it's probably because I'm really good at them. I also have a soft spot for games that allow you to build your own nightmare world. I suck at those, since you're supposed to make them scary or exhilarating, but I usually just go for building a large house or a temple, something like that. 

   The only think I don't like about the Fairy Lands are the druggies. Apparently working in the Fairylands is nothing short of a waking disaster, at least according to the humans I see sprawled out in the alleyways. They tell me they no longer know joy, it's all just screaming and yelling and fighting and wondering if they'll be able to make rent on the only room they can afford. To make matters worse, they're surrounded by nightmares on all sides, all of whom know they can't fight back so even if they wanted to sleep to try and get a break, they can't do so safely. The only way they can cope is with drugs, the kind that taken in small quantities give you Euphoria but if you take too much of them you pass out. The worst thing is that in drug sleep, you can't move even in the Dreamworld, so you have to hide and hope the Nightmares don't see you and try to trap you in an Illusion. 

   I have to admit, even if seeing them makes me uncomfortable, they make me grateful to live in one of the few cities in Estellia that isn't run by one of the nightmare races. I'm also glad that I have my necklace, which I can use to fight off nightmares if one of them traps me in a illusion. I'm not sure if it'd work on a nightmare who's strong enough to make me forget that all nightmares are humans underneath, but it's worked on everyone I've fought so far. I do wish that I didn't have to sleep, but so far I've been lucky enough not to get caught. I guess, in general, I'm one of the luckiest humans alive.

    Kind of pathetic, honestly. 

The Mall

 People wander by
Looking like they need to be
Somewhere special soon

My Inner Demon

     My mother always hated Cassie. She'd say, "Alex, I don't care if you make friends with a human from the heartland, but I don't trust humans who live outside. They might not know that you shouldn’t steal power." It didn't matter that Cassie wasn't the type of person who stole power. She told me she hated the way power "felt" so while she could control it, she mostly just kept it away from her body. 

    I didn't want to tell my mother the truth, that I was friends with Cassie because she'd seen my inner demon and had managed to fight it back. 

    All Nightmares have Inner demons. Learning to control them is how the strong distinguish themselves from the weak. I can't control mine, no matter how hard I try, and I'm terrified that one day it'll break loose in the middle of town. 

  What scares me the most is the idea that if I lose control, I'll destroy Estellia. Nobody, not even Cassie, knows this, but when I was about eight I saw the Shadow leader walk up to me in an illusion and say, "Be careful, all of Estellia depends on you knowing what reality is, and on you making sure the humans know it as well."

   I don't know what he meant, but I read everything I could find about it in school. My mother wonders why. She says that I'm not a god, so I shouldn't be concerned with the construction of Dreamworlds. 

   But I always worry. My inner demon will never go away. 

Feelings

 Words follow words,
My heart spills across the page.
How do I express myself to others
In a way that they'll understand. 

Something New

 Why must I focus
On what my parents want?

Why must I work
To win over my boss
And his underlings?

Why must I become part
Of the status quo,
When I want to be something new?

I swear to god
I'm trying my best
To be what you want,
To be everything 
You tell me I can be,
So why can't I succeed?

Why is it
That no matter how hard I try
It isn't enough?

The world's ending,
Prosperity won't last much longer,
Yet somehow that's the least of my worries.

All I've ever been
Is a person formed
By the wills of those around me.
All I want to be
Is myself,
The person they told me I had to be
When I was small,
Only to turn around and tell me
That was never an option to begin with.

I swear to god
The past was amazing,
Yet when I try to relive it
It feels like a nightmare.
When will things get better?
When will I know 
The dark times have ended
For me and my friends?

Is the past truly over?
Was everything you told me a lie?
Did you prepare me for a world
You knew I couldn't have
Even if I wanted it in the first place?
Why?
We both know I didn't want it.
I'm not sure what I did want,
But I know it mattered in a way 
My present never will.

So if I truly can't make the past work anymore,
Then why won't you let me be something new? 

     It's been two years since I've been a real member of society. I haven't had a life outside my house since I left college. I thought that when I left college, the world would continue going as it had always gone, but I wouldn't be there to experience it. I never thought that it would just stop. 

    Whenever I leave the house I'm struck by how little things seem to have changed, yet everything seems to be crumbling around me. Businesses leave, nobody takes their place, homeless people show up, places that were once filled with people now feel empty and lifeless. Nothing's changed, but nothing is what it used to be. 

    I miss the world before 2019. I don't want to go back, I think I've made that perfectly clear, but I still miss it. I miss knowing that the world would go around the sun no matter how badly I screwed up. There's a great comfort to knowing that even if things go terribly, you will wake up in the same place you went to sleep in. Now the worlds changing, and I don't know what direction it's going in, and I can't help but feel resentful that we had an excellent opportunity to fix what was broken about the world, and we just squandered it. Was going "back to normal" that important to people? Or was it just an excuse to squeeze more money from the desperate?

   I hate this new world, but I hate the fact that I don't have a world to go back to even more. 

    You know how the astrology part of the newspaper is written so that you have an equal chance of having a good day or a bad day? That is, it's written in such a way that everyone who reads the paper feels noticed and validated? Why doesn't society work like that? After all, both are fundamentally unreal and require belief to live. 

Alone

      Estellia's dying.

     How?

     How did this happen?

     How did it fall?

     It's not a dreamworld. It doesn’t belong to me. Or anyone else. 

     So why is it dying?

     Why is my home collapsing in front of my eyes?

     I thought that as long as there was a dreamer, as long as they had somebody to guide them, they would be alright. But they are falling into war right in front of my eyes. Was I meant to save the world? Why?

    I can't go back. They don't want me. They've made that clear time and time again. All I have is a dream, a story about how amazing life would have been if I'd been as special as Alex, Nina, Emily or John.

   But I'm nobody. I'm no one. I'm a voice doomed to spiral through the Infinite.

   Alone. 

   Can I fix things?

   Will I get a second chance?

   Can I change people's views of who I am and who I was meant to be?

   I don't want to be the hero or the villain. I want to be myself, Cassandra Lumis, a woman who builds dreamworlds for fun. A woman who tells stories to children. A woman who's words have no impact on the world but for the meaning they impart on their listeners.

    Will I ever have a say in who I am?

    I know they won't want me. I'm worthless. It's hopeless. 

   Can I build a better world?

   What about the people in this one?

   What should I even do? 

   What else can I do?

   I can't save Estellia.

   I couldn't even if I wanted to.

   I can't let these people suffer because of the mistakes their ancestors made.

   It's time to let Estellia die.

   It's time for a new world to be born.

On my Identity

   I just want to shout out this article I saw on NPR. As a woman with Autism who's read a fair amount of books by and about disabled people, this is one of the best articles I've seen on the subject. Personally, it made me reflect on all the ways being autistic has affected me both directly and indirectly. 

A Man Made Utopia

      When we first tried to create a Utopia, we ran into a small problem; no two people could agree on what a Utopia would look like. Some people wanted a world where everybody worked. Others wanted a world where nobody worked at all. Some people wanted jobs assigned to everyone when they came of age. Others believed you should be allowed to choose the job you should work at. Then there was the question of what virtues society should embody; beauty, kindness, joy, deference to authority. It was so overwhelming that for many the answers was to simply let people languish in misery in a society they were growing deeply disillusioned with. 

   Over time, two things became apparent. Firstly, life seemed to have been built on the premise that perfection should be unattainable, so that the world would always change. In this way, any society that was to last needed to be built on the idea that change was inevitable and should be as painless as possible. Secondly, all societies were doomed to become stagnant unless measures were taken to keep power in the hands of as many people as possible. Unfortunately, there were a great many things that everybody needed access too, but were best when provided by the fewest people possible. Things like public transit, computer operating system software, internet access, public utilities, delivery service, and many, many other things. How, then, did one go about keeping society from falling into stagnation? 

   In 2083, after a major power struggle in America's government, a solution was proposed. AI had become so advanced and was in so much of our lives that it was basically god, so why not let AI run society? Since it wasn't human, it wouldn't make power grabs, unless programmed into its software, and if it got out of hand then it could be simply shut off without harming anyone. Nearly ten years later, the DEA AI was finished, and it was placed in power instantly. 

   It's not been without issue of course. While it learns the way humans do, it first needed to be programmed by people and is thus not without biases. Having an AI in power also doesn't fix the many problems we were facing before DEA was created. While the human population is less than half of what it was at the beginning of the last century, there simply aren't enough jobs for everyone. Global warming did a number on our food supply, we don’t have a lot of natural resources left, and the economy hasn't grown for more than fifty years now. It's been suggested we could remedy some of our issues by going into space, but that's so risky no one wants to do that. 

    Our biggest issue, something that I don't think anyone expected to be a problem at the turn of the last century, is the fragmentation of the world's religions. Our scholars claim that once our scientific knowledge was high enough, it became clear that most of what was written by the religious was nonsense. In time, even saying that you believed in a god was grounds for massive ridicule. Some of the old gods remain, including, despite increasing ridicule, Christianity. 

    The fall of religion made something apparent, something no one had wanted to be true. Without a common belief system, there was very little holding the people of the world together. 

   Still, despite all our problems, things are finally starting to get better after a century of horror. We know more than we ever have, most of us use renewables to meet our needs, and we have taken charge of our societies. Every day things are getting better, nothing can stop us from reaching the stars. 

The Death of Hope

 Imagine this:

  You've just graduated High School, and are about to head off to college. After some time, you realize that you're dream is to major in something niche, something that is historically almost impossible to get a job in. Your counselor advises against it, your parents say they won't pay for college if you decide to pursue this. The thing is, you're certain that you only want to complete college if you go for this niche major, and you're already two years into debt, and you don't want to leave college without a degree. 

     So you go for it. You take all the classes, study like crazy, and graduate with a degree. But as the years go by, you begin to realize you won't be one of the lucky few in your field who lands a job. Whether it's because you lack talent, passion, or luck you don't know, but after several years with only low paying jobs, you realize you made a mistake. 

    The obvious thing to point out is that in this scenario you should have taken the advice of your counselor and gotten a degree with better odds of landing a job. But while I could counter that with the argument that even a degree in a high demand field doesn't guarantee a job, I'm instead going to ask a question. Why did we build a society where everyone has to go to college in order to get a degree and make them pay for the chance to go to college in the first place if most of the majors you can get at college have next to no chance of landing you a decent paying job out of college? Why did we decide to create a society where people have to go to college in the first place? 

     It's especially troubling when there's a common refrain among people to follow your dreams/passions. True, it's often countered by people pointing out that this is a bad idea, but I have to ask why, given that society punishes those who chose to follow their passions, we keep pushing for people to do this? Is it because of some deep scam buried at the bottom of society? Or does it have more to do with the fact that most of us don't want our lives to just be about doing whatever it takes to make money? Is this messaging built on the fact that most of us want more time to focus on who and what we love, and hate that society often takes that from us? Are we deluding ourselves into thinking society is a good place because without that delusion we'd loose all desire to live in it? 

   Is the problem that we follow our dreams, or that we keep punishing those who do?

   I confess, my opinion on this is colored by the fact that I can't live in society easily, and don't want to live in society as it is now at all. It doesn't help that I grew up being pushed down a very specific set of paths, but the older I got the more it became apparent that none of them were something I wanted to pursue. To put it simply, while I get that society needs to have rules in order to function, I feel like we've made those rules so restrictive that many can't live in society at all and almost none of us are allowed to be happy once we're in society. 

    What bothers me about this situations is that we're killing peoples belief in society. Society is only real so long as enough people believe it's real. You can't create society by just throwing a bunch of rules together and expecting people to follow them, you need to make rules they are willing to follow. If you want society to hold together, you need something people can believe in. Not because it's real, but because they think that it's real. So if you have a society where people are punished for believing, that society won't last long. 

   It's going to take a lot to restore faith in society, I'm very aware of that. But perhaps the best place to start is to find a way to change things so that people aren't punished for believing that things might get better some day.  

I Want the Impossible

 All I want 
Is to save the world,
To solve the tangled mass
Of issues 
Woven by the greedy,
Thoughtless
And cruel. 

All I want 
Is to matter,
To become someone 
People love
No matter what.

All I want 
Is certainty.

All I see
Is a problem much bigger
Then anyone else sees,
Then anyone is able to acknowledge.

All I see
Is a world based on an idea
That stopped working long ago.

I see a world
Built on a massive problem 
That no one can fix.
A world
That dooms us 
To look down
Into the abyss,
To be swallowed by sadness
And grief. 

All I want
Is to be happy.

All I want
Is the impossible. 

Behind the Scenes

     You know what really sucks about living in the United States right now? Ever since I turned eighteen, I've voted in every election we've had. Not because I cared about any of the politicians, but because I'd been told. That post I wrote for yesterday, about how I didn't feel my voice would have mattered even if I had voted, felt more politically important then any vote I've taken part it, especially the one in November of 2020. 

    I know voting is supposed to be important, it's how things are supposed to get done after all. But when you consider how much of my day to day life is online. especially since I don't have a job and am not sure if I can get a drivers license, expressing myself by blogging feels a lot more impactful. 

    Shouldn't it feel like voting is important. I realize that they give you those "I voted" stickers in a lot of cases, but for my day to day life what the politicians do doesn't really matter. I know there are ways to be involved in politics, like going to city council meetings, but they aren't required and usually not encouraged in any way. 

    We see our politicians every day. Why can't we catch a glimpse of what they do behind the scenes? 

The Lack of a Vote

    My mother and I didn't vote in our state's primary. It wasn't an act of rebellion, it was an act of me forgetting what date the primary was and my mother forgetting there was even a primary at all. I was feeling guilty until I looked at who was winning, at which point I remembered something important; we live in a blue state. The democrats win most elections here. Which is fine, since both of us vote democrat, until you realize that means that your vote doesn't really matter in that case. 

    This isn't helped by the fact that I'm an anarchist. Mostly because I don't think society will ever be free from the upper classes unless we build a war where classes can't form. No candidate on that ballot represented my view points anyway.

   My mother keeps saying the problem with our country is that the parties refuse to compromise, but that's not the issue I see. Compromise only works if both sides have an overarching goal they want to work toward. You give up a little of what you want so they can have what they want. It doesn't work if only one side has a goal, or if neither has a goal at all. The issue is that Republicans don't have a goal, they have an image of what congress should look like. The democrats no represent every issue people have with our country, so the party has to compromise with itself so that anything gets done at all. All the republicans have to do to stay in power is to make sure the democrats can't do anything, which is easy when they can't agree on what needs to get done in the first place. 

   Compounding this issue, even though the internet is the center of culture and society these days, our politicians don't talk about it's existence at all. They use it to campaign, but they don't willingly talk about how problems with Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram affect everyone, or how misinformation is hurting trust in everyone. 

    People say the problem is that we keep forming our own information bubbles, cutting off information that doesn't validate our existing viewpoints. I won't say that isn't a problem, but I think it's a little bit more nuanced then that. After all, we had social bubbles before social media, they just usually came in the form of neighborhoods and school/work campuses instead of fandoms. What people don't talk about was that the geography of a town tended to be homogenous, white people and black people lived apart from one another and non-straight people had to hide their lifestyle. Hitler, after all, rose to power prior to the rise of Facebook. Media was more restricted, but that meant that all opinions were filtered through the lens of broadcasters and publishers, who were usually old, white and male. Political parties were closer, but that was because the government didn't acknowledge a lot of peoples issues. The point I'm making is that while we seemed less divided, that didn't mean that things were better. Sometimes your uncle only seems to like children, after all. 

     What keeps dividing us isn't the issues themselves, it's that a lot of people don't want the world they know to disappear. I do understand that, none of us want to admit that the world we see isn't real. But we can't ignore the problems people are facing, and we should never have done so in the first place. Society will only ever be good for us if we build it in a way that everyone is able to believe in it effortlessly. We keep opting for the direct-to-DVD version of society, the kind where we write down a bunch of rules and tell people that they have to follow them regardless of how well the rules actually work for them. That only works for young children, and only because schools can kick people out. The moment a parent complains to the media, you can bet there'll be hell to pay. 

    What happens when our government decides it would be easier to kick the complainers out instead of working build a world we can live in safely and happily? We all know, and I think we can all agree that if we saw it coming we'd do everything to stop it. Well, it's coming. Book banning's, attacks on LGBTQIA+ people, Roe v. Wade being overturned and the direct promise of more from the supreme court. It's only a matter of time before they bring back concentration camps. Our country has a lot of blood on its hands, there were a lot of fascists in the thirties after all. How much more blood must be sacrificed to the alter of patriotism before we decide that enough is enough? 

The Genius Sorcerer

     If you want to master magic, you must understand the science behind it. That's the first thing you learn in school, and it's the guiding law behind every sorcerer's life.

     My father was a Sorcerer, was because he cheated on his wife with his serving maid. For their crime, both of them were banished to the monster lands. For his crime, I had to grow up knowing neither my mother nor my father, and was instead raised by my Aunt. 

   I never doubted the fact that I'd be a sorcerer someday. I knew not to repeat my father's mistake. I always knew I'd become more powerful than the man who'd chased someone he couldn't have thinking he'd never be caught.

   My doubts were what all children not raised by their parents feel. Worry, fear, a sense that maybe they didn't like you for a reason. I knew it was stupid of course. I used it as practice for not letting my emotions get the better of me. 

   I still wish my father cared though. 

   Father, I want you to know; I am a genius. Someday, you and your wife will know that fact, and you will regret ignoring me and my mother for so long. Someday you will see that your daughter, Nina Corvi, is the best sorcerer alive.

Stories of my life

    I don't want to say I started this blog for any grander purpose then "I want a blog." Because I honestly didn't. I'm just one of those people who thinks a lot about whatever is interesting to them at that moment, and I liked the idea of having a captive audience who couldn't run away from me. 

    My larger, if much more nebulous, goal with this blog is to improve my writing skills. My hope is to publish a novel someday. Actually, my ultimate goal is to publish this story I came up with a couple of years ago that I really like but is split up into ten books. I'm not even really sure how large the books are at this stage, I just know that I like the story and I want it to be published. 

    But I figured I'd start with the story I love the most, but think is objectively the worst of the stories I've written. It's the story I've been publishing throughout July. I have no idea if anybody will like it, since I don't really plan on pushing it on anyone, but I love it. Not because it's good, but because it was the first really big story I can remember writing. 

    I do wish I could get feedback on it. I love it, but I don't think there's a lot I can do with it. I figure that if I practice with it, it'll help me learn what I need to know for the bigger plans I have. 

A Homeless Human

    From my time working for Milady Greaves, I know that homelessness isn't an uncommon fate for humans. If the city watch finds you asleep in a doorway, they'll have words for you, but if you're awake and moving they'll leave you alone. 

As you can imagine, not being able to sleep is a problem if, for whatever reason, you need to sleep at least once every three days and would really prefer to sleep at least every other day. 

   I don't know how many humans are homeless, but I've seen a lot of them in the time I've been out on the street. I think the Nightmares assume that since we don't need to sleep to gain power we'll be fine without a roof over our heads. Maybe that's true for a lot of humans, but not for me, and I've seen enough humans curled up in alleyways to think that I'm not alone. 

   I keep hearing rumors about humans forming a resistance movement. I hear it's been going on for a long time. But imagine what would happen if I, Cassandra Lumis, became a hero of the resistance.

   I wish I had a home. I wish I knew how to find another job. I wish I knew anything about how to survive in Estellia. I didn't realize how bad it would be until a kid found me sleeping and asked me, "Are you a Dreamling?"

   I didn't know how to answer him. My mother told me that Dreamlings are humans who are so desperate to live in the dreamworlds they sleep all the time even though the Nightmares keep defeating them. I can't say I've defeated a lot of Nightmares, I just get lucky enough that most of the Nightmares I face don't know how to fight. That and I'm no longer afraid of the Infinite. 

   Over time the Dreamworlds I visit become increasingly disturbing. Not because of the Nightmares, it's the worlds themselves that are giving me trouble. Not that long ago, I could tell the difference between a Dreamworld and Estellia easily. Now, unless I use my necklace, I can't tell the difference anymore. 

    I'm scared that I'm a reverse Nightmare, in that instead of getting stronger and more powerful as I get older, I'm getting weaker. Until I was about five, I could tell the difference between a human and a Nightmare even if I was awake. Now I can't tell the difference even if I'm asleep. I'm told that until a nightmare is about twelve they look human, it's the Nightmare forms that give them away. Unless you're dealing with a Midnight Nightmare of course. I know they're rare, much rarer then the people who seem to be human until they start attacking me. I don't know why I lost the ability to see them, but in that case it was as a tradeoff for being able to see power, which doesn't look like something you'd want to have if you ask me. 

     I'm glad I have the library. Humans aren't supposed to read books about how Dreamworlds are constructed, but I can make a copy of any book I grab and add it to the library to read later. I know that most of Estellia's laws don't apply to humans, but it's worthwhile to try not to make the Nightmares angry, especially if you can't avoid sleeping. 

    Apparently, every city and most towns have an equivalent dreamworld somewhere in the Infinite, and most of them are connected to make a kind of fake Estellia just for Nightmares and humans who are either very ambitious or very stupid. Their designed by special committees of Nightmares who make it look close enough to fool gullible humans, but Nightmares would be able to see through it in an instant. The less power someone has, the closer to real life it is. It's a method of keeping humans from sleeping too often, apparently. According to the books I've been reading, they rarely get all the details right. Pay attention to them, and even a weak nightmare can spot the difference easily.

    The issue is that I've reached the point where if I enter a Dreamworld, no matter how much it doesn't conform with reality, it feels incredibly real to me, and continues to do so until I wake up. Honestly, if it wasn't for the fact that you can't go lucid when you're awake, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between being asleep and being awake anymore. 

Notebooks

 Full of empty pages
An invitation to write
Whatever I want

Line after line, page after page,

A notebook is filled with stories and memories.

Dreams of what was, thoughts of what could be.

Words fill the pages of a book, and the heart of the writer. 

Rebirth

We know the world does not love us.
We know the world does not care.
We know the world will be gone, with nobody left to remember us buy.
In spite of this, we keep going,
Every day of our lives, fighting a battle we know we can't win.
In the simple act of living, we perform an immense feat of bravery;
The act of living a normal life.

Now it's time to leave that behind.
Now it's time to embrace cowardice, 
To fight to change the world, 
To make it the world we want the most.
Now is the time for us to take our fate
Into our hands.

Let us leave the past behind us.
Let us leave the old ways to the ancients who understood them.
Let us embrace this brave new world,
A world that belongs to us all.