Our World

 Who decided we should live together,
Sharing a planet 
Filled with creatures that defy description?
Who decided we could share a world
Without destroying it?

Who was the person who said we could be happy
If we only put our differences aside?
Was he aware of those who used that philosophy
To punish those who couldn't look past evil
In this world?

Who said we should put faith in our systems,
Even as our leaders fail us time and time again?
Who was the one who promised us
That all we had to do was follow the rules
And greatness would follow us?

Who was the one who told us
That life would never be fair?
Who told us that we should accept
That life would sometimes be unbearable?
Why do we accept that?
What good comes from assuming the world
Is destined to be a cruel, hostile place,
Devoid of joy,
Love,
Hope?

Do we not live in a world of our own making?
Can we not decide to change the world for the better?
Should we not live in defiance of those who say the world
Will always be what it is now?
Should we not tell those who say it should stay the same
That we suffer because it is what is now? 

Why should our goal be to save our world
When we could make it a better place? 

     It's hard to write about the world when everyone agrees things are going to get much worse before long. I'm trying not to lose hope, but I'm faltering fast. I've reached the point where all I'm doing is waiting for the bad things to happen, so I know what I have to deal with. 

    Well, Elon Musk now officially owns Twitter. I don't think he's very happy about that, given his behavior over the past few months. I won't pretend that I have high hopes for Twitter's future, but with any luck the site will fall apart so badly so quickly he'll have no choice but to sell it on to somebody else. 

   My personal plans are to stay until it looks like it isn't safe anymore, then bail. 

A Break in Reality

    "What do you mean there's a break in reality?!" I yell. 

   My assistant shrinks back. "That's what the report says." She tells me. 

   "Get me the Sorcerer, Now." I bark.

   "She's too young." Comes the reply.

   "Between her innocence and Estellia's safety, I choose Estellia. Bring her to me now." I say.

   She scurries off. But she comes back an hour later without the Sorcerer. "She's… busy." is all I can get out of her. I keep pushing, all the way until the end of the week, but I can't get any sense from her. 

 

   "What is your problem James?" Emily asks me late one afternoon. We're at Dream tower for a meeting regarding the rumors swirling about. Right now, that's the last thing on my mind.

    "The problem is that there's a break in reality and I can't get it fixed." I scream. I wish I wasn't required to be restrained, else I'd bang the desk I'm sitting at. It's an old desk, a relic from the days when this tower was first built. Emily looks over at me from a different desk. It's smaller than mine, but much newer, painted with little figures of sprites. A fitting desk for a Fairy princess. 

    "Have you inspected it?" 

    "Of course I did. Do you honestly think I'd be so incompetent as to not have it inspected as soon as possible? Protocol dictates that I make sure it can't spread."

  "Then why can't you fix it?" she asks, sounding annoyed. 

  "Because protocol also dictates that I can't fix it without the Sorcerers help."

  "There are thousands of Sorcerers. Pick one and fill out the paperwork so that this won't be a problem anymore."

  I turn to her. How can you be so stupid, I think. "I can't pick any sorcerer I want to Emily. It needs to be the God of the Sorcerer's realm."

  "The one that died a little over Fifteen years ago? The one that's too young to help you, according to the laws? The one that the Sorcerers have to keep secret until their twenty-first birthday?"

   "This is an emergency." I scream, "I have to get this fixed now."

   "It seems to me that you either have to ask a lesser Nightmare for help or wait another six years. Unless you just want to rip the world apart now and get it over with."

   "I'm not allowed to ask a lesser Nightmare for help, not unless the Humans think that there's a major threat to them."

    "Well why didn't you say so in the first place? Am I not one of the race of Illusionists? I'll whip up a proper emergency and then you'll have what you need to fix this by sundown tomorrow."

   "How?" I ask.

   "If I told you, you'd have to stop me. Just wait until the panic starts, then you can handle the rest."

    Something tells me it won't be as simple as she says it is. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try. I look down at my stack of papers for the next agenda item. It's about the human. Of course it's about the human. Things have been so quiet for so long that a human who can hurt us is terrifying. There used to be a lot of them, or at least that's what I've been told. 

   "When are we going to get rid of this human once and for all?" I ask, thinking about my run in with her.

   "In due time. It's not like she's capable of destroying Estellia, after all." Emily says. 

   I wouldn't call this anything close to a professional blog, but it still feels weird to dedicate my life to writing the way that I have. 

The Helper

    I must be the least popular person in the Heartland, human or Nightmare. People like me well enough, but mostly because they respect my mother. A woman who runs the local temple because she stayed when her sisters left, even though she went to University. She praises our town in public, but in private wishes she could have a do-over so she could move to the Monster Capital. Instead she got our family estate, began her own hair salon, and had three children with a man who got her pregnant by accident when she was still going to University. 

    To this day she still isn't married, even though she had me and Dad move in with her when Grandma moved to the city to stay close to my Aunt Abigail. 

   Considering the fact that I'm a bastard, you'd think that I'd find it easy to be evil. I don't. I hate like pranking people, don't like making people angry, and I have a lot of power to use for making charms and spells for people. I don't want to spend my life as a fairy or, gods forbid, a sorcerer, but I wonder if I'll have any say in the matter. I guess I should be grateful I have a demon. 

    

    I spend every afternoon after school working for my mother or one of her colleagues. Since the Heartland is in Monsterland, we naturally have an evil cult that's supposed to be a secret. So of course everyone in town, and a lot of the people outside town, know about it. They don't worship anything, just gather for tea every Sunday and discuss the next human sacrifice they're planning. We're monsters, of course we sacrifice infants. I don't see why humans think it's disturbing for the most evil people in Estellia to kill infants, especially when they don't give them the time of day either. After all, all the infants my mother sacrifices are ethically sourced from our local foster care system. 

   I'm not involved in any of the sacrifices. I don't have any ethical qualms, I just can't stand the sight of blood. I just help with the cleanup and the set up. The rest of the time I'm helping people set up spells, clean their homes, and settle disputes between us and rival cults. Before you ask, no we don’t compete for sacrificial infants. There's way more than enough for everyone. There was a very memorable incident where no one could find any office chairs though. I don't think I'll forget the battle that ensued, no matter how long I'm alive. 

   The cult members think I'm trying to win over my mother so she'll let me keep more of my power. I let them think that, because it's the only way anyone will ever think I'm capable of doing anything evil. The truth is I'm terrible at making friends and no one wants to hang out with me. I know I could just go home and do homework, but then I'd be bored so I help out instead. When the cult doesn't need me, I help the mayor out. When the mayor runs out of things to do, I look for businesses to help out. I'm always helping other people, so that I'll never need anyone to help me. 

  

    My brother and sister are much better at this then I am. They're much better at channeling power, tormenting others, and holding the crowds attention. My sister even did a skit for the crowd at our temple once. We do that a lot, since the humans have been spreading rumors that our God was reborn in the valley. 

   My mother says they're right. Andrew, my brother, and Jennifer, my sister, both hope that it's true. I know it isn't. I haven't told her, but all of the incidents line up to moments I lost control of my demon. I try to stop them from placating the God, who I know isn't paying attention to us, when I know it's all my fault. I don't seem to be able to win though. 

   "Why do you want us to suffer?" Jenny keeps asking me.

   I don't know what to tell her. I, the eldest daughter, the one who should be powerful enough to inherit the valley when my mother dies or moves away. Instead I'm too weak to control my worst impulses, and I run away from home so much that, as my mother reminds me constantly, I'm doom to awaken our God for real and cause them to rampage and destroy our home. 

   I want to be the one our family can rely on, who can protect our home from anything, but I can't be that person. With each passing day I feel less and less like a person who anyone can depend on at all.

   I need help. 

A Learning Experience

    Every day I spend working on this blog is a learning experience. Yesterday, for example, I ran into a weird glitch where Google flagged my blog as dangerous. I couldn't find anything that could be the issue, but luckily it resolved on its own. The most important thing I learned from this experience is that I really need to brush up on website building, even though I don't feel like the main point of this blog will be to advertise my web design skills. I really need to learn more about what goes on in the back end, so that in case anything does go wrong I know how to fix it.  For now, I'm just grateful that I didn't need to fix anything. 

I Want the Impossible (do-over)

 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. 

All I want
Is to be free,
Free of a world that
Demands too much
But never gives you anything.

All I want 
Is to be a force
For good so strong
Nobody can stop me 

from getting what I want.

All I want 
Is for people to see
What I really am.
Something that strikes
Fear into everyone's hearts,
Changing who they are forever.

All I want
Is to be unstoppable,
For the ones who claim
That everything exists to serve them
To crumble 
The moment they hear my name. 

All I want
Is to be followed
By those who know me,
Respect me,
Fear me. 

All I want
Is to have more power than
Anyone else has ever had
In the history of our planet.

All I want 
Is to be more powerful
Then the world itself.

All I want 
Is to be heard.
All I want 
Is the impossible.  

    I'm releasing a poem I already released tomorrow. I came up with a bunch of stuff that I wanted to add to it, so I did and then reposted it. It's times like these I'm grateful for not being a professional blogger. 

Our Life's Story

     I've heard it said, time and time again, that someday you'll realize you were only ever meant to be a bit character in someone else's life. As a writer, I have to disagree with that sentiment. You're the protagonist of your story, the one deciding who you were meant to be and what you were meant to do. The issue is that everyone else is also trying to tell their own stories, and the plotlines do always line up. I want to be a famous author, but someone else may not like the future that results. If I buy something at the store, it means that someone else, who may have wanted it even more than I did, won't have it. All of us are shaping, and being shaped by, our world. It's the reason we can't always get what we want.

    But I don't think there's a reason we couldn't all be happy. 

Undoing Mistakes

    They're looking for the lost officers. The ones that were in the van when they tried to take me. The van that rolled over. They're dead, but nobody seems to know that. I can't stand seeing their faces everywhere I go, on building walls and in windows. Their dead, but I wish they weren't. 

   I wonder, if Estellia is connected to the Dreamworld, does that mean that I could undo their deaths? Could I go lucid when I'm awake? I've never tried, no one says it's possible, but then Nightmares want us to think that Lucidity is impossible in general. 

   I focus. In my mind I picture the city just like it is now, but without posters. Their faces aren't anywhere. Because they're not dead.

   I consider removing my face, but then I realize that in order for that to work I would have had to not defeat the Shadow God. That would mean the law against homelessness would still be in effect. I don't want that, and if things get too dicey I can flee to the temple. So I let my face stay. 

   Satisfied with what I see, I open my eyes. To my surprise I see one of the lost officers I killed approaching me. He doesn't seem to recognize me.

  "Move along." He says. 

The Power of Art

     I'm biased, but I think we undervalue storytelling. I don't just mean the kind of storytelling you find in books and movies, I also mean the kind you find in paintings and symphonies. Just because it doesn't have a clear plot or characters doesn't mean it lacks a story. 

     What I mean is that I don't think we, as a society, see the value in just letting people tell stupid, awful stories. Not only are such stories powerful learning tools for the writers who will go on to write great works, they also serve as a base for society much better then so called "great" works do. Shakespeare wasn't writing for upper class snobs, after all, he was writing for everyday people. It's why his works still hold up today. I think society would benefit from letting people make horrible things that won't sell, without pressuring them to improve. If we don't learn how to make stuff poorly, how can we learn what makes things good? 

The Humans of Fairyland

     I don't understand why James is insisting on putting wanted posters everywhere. I know, it hurts when your defeated by a human that's stronger then you were expecting, but that's part of life in Fairyland. I don't see why he thinks it's such a big deal. 

   Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken him until now to be defeated by a human. I'm a child of business people who spared no expense making sure I knew how to defend myself and I've been taken out by humans more than a few times. They don't have power on their own, but instinct can be much stronger then you'd expect it to be. Even humans that don't sleep a lot can be a threat. 

   But because of a Shadow's wounded pride, I have to fend off people demanding to know why wanted posters for a random human are everywhere. He keeps saying he has to get her for the greater good, but I don't think that he realizes the greater good doesn't trump economic needs, and Fairyland's economy relies on humans feeling safe enough to throw all their money away and then work themselves to death to get more. The wanted posters are doing a great job of reminding them that no matter what we tell them in public, in private we'll always despise them. So now they're fleeing back to human cities or to Monsterland. It's slow, but if this continues on, it'll get much worse.

   I'm grateful that I've never had to deal with a human. The closest I've come to it was meeting some of my mother's Midnight Nightmare friends. None of them have ever had to deal with humans, but they've all told me that they thought they might have to live among humans because of how much they hated the way power felt (not that power feels like anything, but that's beside the point). They've told me that humans think they have it all, because their immune from the effects of weakness, so it's up to us to remind them just how helpless they really are. My father always said the humans he saw in his arcades looked helpless and scared enough to him. My mother said what humans do is none of our business, since the ones who want to end us are smart enough to live in the Human Lands. James told me there's a human who Nightmares now fear, which I thought was complete nonsense, but now I'm hearing more and more about a human who attacks Nightmares on sight, with a form a lucidity that only the strongest of Midnight Nightmares normally use. 

   I wonder when the humans will hear that and decide to leave their place. I'm not sure what the world is coming to.

    Someday things will get better. 

The Old World

 I try not to break down crying
When I think of the world I knew.
It was world based on numbers and patterns
Where everything that was said was true.

I remember a world that was simple
A world where everything mattered.
A world where you knew what was rude
And what things should make you feel flattered.

I remember a world that was cruel
Where nothing seemed to make sense.
I was told it was only me,
The problem was that I was too dense.

As time went by, something changed.
Nothing was as it had seemed.
I look out of my window now,
And wonder if it was a dream.

The sky overhead is still blue,
The roads and stores are the same,
But I now realize that our world
Isn't as simple as they had claimed.

Our world isn't based on patterns,
It's based on the stories we tell.
The pictures we paint, the songs we sing,
The worlds in which we all dwell. 

The only things that matter to me
Are the things I know that I feel,
How can I speak the truth
When I no longer know what's real?

The post for October sixteenth

   I don't know how I keep missing when I haven't posted. I feel like if I don't post a farther out, I'll forget, but if I post too far out I'll miss too many days. 

    I wonder if my stories will someday inspire another little girl to become the writer she's always wanted to be. More than anything else, I hope that winds up being my legacy, especially if they're inspired to surpass me.  

A Quick Break

   I have to say, after fighting Gods, running from the servants of Gods, and discovering I have the ability to travel the Infinite while awake, normal life feels really boring. It always did feel boring, but now that I know it doesn't have to be boring it feels unbearable.

    I used to think I'd spend all day at the temple if I got the chance, but I can't. I get bored too easily. People never told me the reason you work so hard is life is unbearable if you don't. 

    I've tried my trick of daytime dreaming to find work, and I'm learning that it works way more often than I thought it would. I'm even starting to meet other people who dislike Nightmares as much as I do. They think I'm weird for sleeping every night, of course, but they seem to like me. I just wish they'd stop telling me to go home rather than try and live in the city all by myself. After all, why would my parents have sent me here if they didn't want me gone. "I'm sure they're worried about you," they keep telling me. I'm sure they wouldn't say that if they heard my parents yelling at me ever morning when I got up. 

   Whatever they say, I'm not going back. The more I think about it, the more I prefer life in the city to life in the country anyways. Nobody notices me, so there's no one to yell at me for not being able to do things every other human can do easily.

   I wish there were people like me, though. I don't care if they hate me, I'm just tired of needing to explain, over and over again, that I can't be a regular human even though I try. Since that's impossible, I'm settling for going out into the Infinite, night after night, to search for the Dreamer so I never have to sleep another night. 

    There are times when I wish I had a fanbase. This is one of those times. I really wish I knew what people would think about Estellia, especially Cassie. I've been writing this story my entire life, it's one of my favorites, and I want to believe it's a good idea, even though I can't do it justice at all. I keep rewriting it constantly. I honestly don't want to publish it because I want to keep writing it. It is on the Blog, but most of my stories here are first drafts or finished stories that I don't want to put a lot of effort into. I do plan on completely reworking The Big Book of Enchantments someday, after all. 

     Even if I don't publish my Estellia stories, I still want it to be a good story in it's own right. It's not my best story, but Cassie's one of my favorite characters. As you've probably gathered. Some writers are lucky enough to be able to separate themselves from their characters, but I was never one of them. 

     Anyway, if your reading this in the future where I did find a fanbase, tell me what you think. Even if it's finished by then. 

Mathematics

    "How would you alter this world to accommodate humans?"

    Why would you even ask that question? It may not be totally true that humans never sleep, but it is true that you don't need to design a Dreamworld around them. When it comes to humans, they either change around your rules or you change around theirs. You don't need to keep them in mind. 

   It's the last question on this test though, and it's an essay question too. I guess that's what you get when you sign up for a first year mathematics course at college. So few people want to take it that the entry exams focus on weeding out the hopelessly stupid instead of isolating the truly great. At least, that's what I've been told.

   Hedging my bets, I write down "Humans rarely enter shadow cities, and I suspect the Avatar of the Shadow god will have put in a request for there to be as few humans as possible, so I'll be building my city to keep humans from being able to enter, and if they do enter they won't want to stay."

   That's what I'll tell my aunt. I make it last a few paragraphs, just to be safe. 

   I'm not even sure why I agreed to try math. I'm good at it, but that's because I'm smarter than almost everyone else. I'm not exaggerating, that's what the IQ test I took when I was five said. My aunt spent my entire life pushing me not to waste my intelligence doing the things all my friends wanted to do. I was meant to study, to aim high, to do more than everybody else just because I could do more than everybody else. I confess, I think she's being stupid. Most of my teachers don't put any stock into IQ tests, and the only reason I keep making it to the top of my class is because I know she'll be angry if I don't manage it. It sounds ridiculous, but I wish I were genuinely stupid sometimes.

    My father also studied math. He was, I'm told, considered incredibly intelligent when he was my age. But then he fell in love with my mother, got her pregnant, didn't marry her, and they both got banished to live with monsters. I don't know what happened to either of them, my Aunt won't tell me. Since I turn sixteen next week, I'm going to find out, especially if she tells me I shouldn't. She's been wrong about everything else in my life, after all. 

   I'm almost home. I should tell her I don't want to do Mathematics. It's important, since it's the foundation of every Dreamworld, but it just isn't what I want to do. I don't have a backup plan, though. All I do, when she isn't watching, is draw and paint things. She doesn't see a future in that, especially not for the daughter of the man who was once the most powerful Sorcerer in Estellia. 

   So my future is being plotted out on a line. I can see where it's going, and it isn't where I want to end up. How do people live like this, knowing they can't have something they want just because someone else told them no?

   Humans live like this, and they do all right. I'm a sorcerer, I'll be fine. 

    I've said before that I want a world where growth is limited. What I want, at the moment, is a world with more stationary stores. I love collecting pens and notebooks, and they're not easy to find where I live. With how much things are changing, maybe I'll get lucky.

A Promise

 I hate society.
I hate the way it traps us
In a web of lies,
Waiting for the day
It can feast on our corpses.

I hate our leaders.
They're the ones holding
This tower of pain
And misery up,
Not out of malice
But out of fear.

I can't express my hatred
For a world
Bound by a promise 
That can't be kept. 
A promise of greatness,
So long as you obey the rules.

I can't explain why I feel lost,
That the path I'm following 
Didn't lead to where I was told it would go.
I can't tell anyone why
I don't feel any joy
When I'm with people any more.

Is our world changing
Or am I simply pretending that it is? 

   There's been so much going on for so long, I'm concerned that when things wind down again it'll feel boring. 

A Search for Meaning in a Meaningless world

    Like everyone else, I'm stuck in an endless search for meaning. I'm a writer, I can make a world for myself if the rest of the world crumbles away. When I look around, I see so many who are not so lucky. 

    It will never not bother me that we don't make creative writing mandatory for every student. I will argue until my dying day that people need to learn how to write fiction even more then writing non-fiction, not because they need to use it but because they need to be able to use it. 

    I look around and I see so many people trapped in dying worlds. Earth, society, major religion. All are falling, and nobody knows what to do. 

   The problem is that we've trained each other, and ourselves, to not want power. We've told each other that the best thing a person can be is somewhere in the middle, enough power to change things, not enough to have full responsibility. Then we made a world where no one has "just enough" power. Either you own everything, or you have nothing, there's no in between. That's why all our worlds are dying. In order for a world to survive, it needs to be able to change. So long as we delegate our destinies to those who don't even know our names, we'll never be able to do that. 

     We have to let go of the world we used to know, a world where everyone had a place and who you are was dictated by what you did. Our Universe was built to be a place where everyone could shape it however they pleased, and we've taken that from each other. We have to build a world where everyone can be who they want to be, and expect that most people don't want to be leaders. I don't think most people even want success, they just want to be able live without fear or stress. Why is that a bad thing? 

    We need to break free from society. It's the only way we'll survive. 

The Human Race

     So many humans live in the lands of Estellia. They go about their lives in complete ignorance of what's really going on around them. As a god it's my job to keep it that way, since that way they'll fall for our tricks. So many humans, yet so little power can be spared for lesser Nightmares.

   Most humans, eager and greedy for power, leap at the chance to become a Nightmare. What they don't know is that the amount of power you can have is dependent on how lucid you're able to go. You could, in theory, get better at going lucid with practice. The problem is that in order to become a true Nightmare, you must give up your ability to go lucid, for good. Unless you lose power, you can never go lucid again. While it's true that most humans can go lucid, most of them never learn how. It's much easier to go lucid when you're asleep then when you're awake, and humans are trained, by us, to never sleep at all. 

   There are, of course, those who sleep regardless. Weakness isn't limited to High Nightmare's after all. We're always on the lookout, lest they get so good at going lucid power no longer sticks to them. After that, there's not much we can do. 

   What worried me is that I've heard more and more about a human who's able to take out Nightmares by herself. I didn't put much stock into it at first, since most of these accounts claim she was using a plastic star shaped necklace to do it. Yes, I know there is such a thing as a Rubber Ducky of Doom, but I feel that any human nowadays would just turn a rock into an Artefact. At least then, it would be dignified. 

    Then I ran into her myself, after I made a declaration that I realize now I didn't think through. I don't know how I was supposed to know a human with the capability of fighting off a god just so happened to homeless, but apparently I was, because she took me out instantly. It shouldn't have, I know how to block, but I wasn't expected a human wearing a white shirt and dark pants to end me with a glance. 

   To be fair, I don't know many humans personally. Fairies and Monsters let humans live as themselves in their domains, but Sorcerers and Shadows don't. Ours is a land of laws, and laws only matter if people are able to follow them perfectly. It's impossible to create laws that encapsulate humans, since most of them don't sleep or eat. 

   So much the better. It's hard enough building a Dreamworld for those who matter. If we had to include humans in our Dreamworlds, they would never get made at all. 

    I almost miss the days where I had to write about having nothing to write about. Now I have so much to say that I'm not sure what to talk about anymore. 

Midnight Nightmares

    Trying to be a God while also working to become a princess is, for lack of a better term, trying. I have to work hard, and there's never any rest. Not that I'm complaining, I come from a long line of hard workers and my parents always told me to wear my job with pride. My father always said he was an Arcade manager before he said he was a father, and my mother never mentioned me without also mentioning that I modeled for her magazine (something I hated doing because it got in the way of my homework). What separates us from humanity, they always said, is that we work.

    I genuine love both of my jobs, but my favorite part is getting to meet so many people. Lords and Ladies from all over the realms, dressed in their best, with Nightmare forms that shock and horrify if they're evil and calm and soothe if they aren't. Most of them don't wear their Nightmare forms around me of course, it would be crass and horrible to try and manipulate a lady into giving them power, but if you ask them they'd show it to you instantly. Nightmares, no matter what kind or how strong they are, are proud of our power and prestige.

   Most of us, anyway.

   There are, others, who aren't proud to be Nightmares. Children, from every class, who don't want power. They cry and run if it ever touches them. Among the human born, they even go so far as to call it "miasma" and say it'll kill you if you let it near you too often. Even if they become Nightmares, and despite our best efforts there are always a few who slip through our fingers, they almost never gain Nightmare forms. 

   They're the ones who become Midnight Nightmares, ones with the power to shape the world. 

    Avatars can't shape the world, not directly at least. I've never even gone lucid before, and I don't know anybody who has. But they do. All the time. The Infinite is full of the worlds they've made, and we have to warn everyone not to go outside the approved Dreamworlds without permits and a guide, because most of these rules don't follow our laws. It's against the law to make such a rule, but not even James would think of trying to enforce a law against a Midnight Nightmare. They don't even die, not like the rest of us do. They die of their volition, when they've decided they've done enough. 

   There's a story told about Midnight Nightmares among human kind, a story that goes that once, long ago, all of Estellia was brought to life by a Dreamer. A human. One of immense power. Some say that Dreamer is still alive, and if you find them they will grant you anything your heart desires.

   They also talk about Dreamlings, those who sleep every night to give the Nightmares power.

    I wish they knew they were talking about the same thing. Then the children born to human parents would come to us, asking for power as is tradition, and be bound by our laws. Then we wouldn't have to worry about them destroying the world before they realize they were meant to save it. 

    I've heard it said that even children who aren't potential Midnight Nightmares don't want to become Nightmares. That's just ridiculous. Why would you turn down power just so that you don't have to work? It's pure laziness, nothing else. 

   Look at the Midnight Nightmares. None of them are lazy, but some of them don't know what they are.  

A World Without Limits

    I think it's fair to say that most people think their society is broken, at least in the 2020's. I, being an overachiever, think the very concept of society itself is broken. It should be enabling us to be better then we could be by ourselves, but I think at this point it's only making us worse off, mentally at least. 

    Society isn't just about bringing goods and services to those who need/want them, it's about protecting us from the Infinite. We all know our lives aren't inherently meaningful, and all of us are working as hard as we can to make sure that isn't true, and to that end we built society. It's a large Dreamworld that's built by an enormous number of people, so that makes it easier to believe in than a Dreamworld we build for ourselves. 

   I have some problems with it.

   First, it isn't real. Society isn't bound by physics, rules that are held in place by the wills of atoms and planets. It's bound by our minds, what we decide is right and wrong. Yet people hold society to be just as unchangeable as the laws of motion. 

   The laws of physics are static because the beings that follow them are, mostly, non-living. Whether they're conscious or not is, at the current moment, debatable, but they can't have their existence erased by bad laws. They aren't alive, so they can't die, they just change. Society isn't like that. It's built by humans, creatures who are, at the moment, not immortal. Importantly, most people don't want to be immortal. This means that those living under society are always changing, so the rules they live under have to change to accommodate them.

   Second, society isn't built with limitations in mind. We assume that, since most people can do most things, everyone is capable of being anything in society, so we should push people to be whatever society needs the most of at any given moment. We assume that, since we can make more stuff with earth's resources then we used to, we'll always be able to do more with earth's resources, so we shouldn't plan for the moment things run out. I don't think I should need to explain why this is a bad idea. 

    This is just my opinion, but I think that most of our pain is caused by living in a world without limits. Remember how I said that we're all working to make our lives meaningful? I think that all of us know, somewhere inside us, that our Universe isn't objectively real. It's just a place we build in our minds out of what we see in our minds eye, constructed out of what we see and hear. It's a world based on facts and opinions, but also based on what we believe, even if we know it isn't true or real. 

    The important thing to understand is that the Infinite has no limits. Anything can be created, anything can be destroyed, anything that can happen has already happened and is happening all at once. Lack of limitation is why the Infinite is meaningless, because without limits nothing ever changes. Infinity is always infinity, even if it seems like the numbers should go up. 

    I don't think we should limit each other, but we need to limit how large society gets and how much money a person can have. If society is to survive, it needs to be a place where everyone has a voice, everyone's actions matter, and everyone has the opportunity to shape it as they see fit. The way it's done now, a very small number of people are in charge of everything and the rest of us just have to hold on and hope they make the right choices. Not only is it grossly unfair, it's deeply unsustainable. We the people are used to limitations, some of us have a lot more then others but I truly think removing all of them would just lead to unhappiness. Now we have to make sure our leaders are limited, so they never forget just who lets them keep power and respect. Society can't exist without us, the ones responsible for deciding where the world goes. It's time that we remember that. 

Dissent

 I've spent my whole life
Hiding
The truth from my friends.

I've spent my whole life silent,
Tacitly
Saying I agree with everyone.
The truth is,
I feel differently.

I agree with some people about some things,
But I agree with others about most,
Which group should I pick?

Should I not be fussy?
Should I just go with what makes me happy?
What happens when I hear them agree
With a point of view I don't hold?

What if I suspect their right and I'm wrong
But it doesn’t' change my mind?

Should I feel sympathy for lucifer
For saying his peace 
And being cast out for it?

I don't want everyone to agree with me,
But I don't like the feeling that something's
Wrong with me.

I've spent my whole life
Pretending
I don't care what other people think.

But in the end,
All I want is acceptance. 

Heroes of the world

    I know I'm supposed to resent living in a world based on shallow materialism, but I kind of miss it. When I was old enough to be paying attention, the internet was already a big part of life, so living in a world where most people didn't care about the things I was passionate about wasn't that big a deal. Now it feels like all anyone can focus on is the stuff I've been wondering about for years. 

   I guess I should be happy. I've got a lot to say about all this after all. But when you spend you're whole life feeling like some unloved weirdo, being the most knowledgeable person in the room feels jarring. 

   I hope I'm just being delusional, but I can't seem to shut up the voice that screaming, "Why aren't you being louder? You know people need to hear what you have to say. You know you can see what's going on better then most. Why don't you get up and say that?" 

   I never thought I'd be important, and I don't like the feeling that I suddenly am. 

   Maybe someone will point out how stupid I am. It's not like other's aren't looking at the world to. There are lot's of heroes out in the world right now, we just haven't met most of them yet. 

We Have No Backup Plan

 Note: There are no facts in this post. There is nothing here that's objectively true. This is just me stating something I believe to be true. 

  The Infinite isn't something anyone wants to believe in. No one wants to remember that nothing they do will matter. We've gone to great lengths to find something, anything, to believe in. Temples, towers, technology, all of them were made so that we might leave a legacy, so that someone would want to listen to what we had to say. 

    Most of us aren't meant for greatness, so we join those we think are great, those who stand on the shoulders of giants. We beg for them to notice us, for them to speak our names, for our use to be recognized. 

     But they never will, because they'll never care. 

     Our world, built on the dreams of our ancestors, is dying. Though our leaders deny it, we all know it to be true. We see it happening every time we leave the house, or go online. Our leaders don't care if we think the world's ending, they just want to be spared from the pain and suffering they inflict on us. They may know we aren't happy, but nothing we can do will make them care. 

   Strange though it may seem, that's not what worries me. Our world's collapsed multiple times. No society was meant to last forever. 

   The problem is that we don't have anything to fall back on.

    The entirety of planet earth has been stitched together into a single society. We now depend on countries most of us will never see for almost everything. This isn't just an economic problem, the greater world now lives in an illusion where America is the greatest and always will be the greatest. What happens when they learn that isn't true?

    We never really prepared for societal collapse. We prepared for the moment food would be scarce, people turned wild, and our leaders fled to walled estates. We didn't prepare for the moment the reality we lived in vanished, leaving us with nothing to believe in but The Infinite. We were told we wouldn't need to, that our leaders would come through at the last second. When they didn't we felt lost. 

     So many people claim that things are fine. They can't imagine a world where this won't fix itself, but it won't this time. Our world wasn't meant to be this complex, or this focused on reality. It was built on the idea that our internal and external worlds would be aligned, not on having to prize our external worlds over our internal worlds. Is it any wonder so many are so lonely? 

    I keep hoping I'm wrong, that we'll be okay, that our world will be able to keep us safe. But we need a backup plan, one that's not based in politics. We need a world based on the things that everyone believes in, even if they know they aren't true. Without something to believe in, we have nothing at all.