My Fantasy Landscapes
From the psychoanalytic viewpoint mental stability is reliant more upon gauzy fantasy than any hard reality (Or is “hard” reality the real fantasy? 🤔). The structure of your psyche is nothing more than the dynamic structure of a fantasy established as a defense, and to know yourself, is to intuit the imaginative scene, that grounds your desire, distributed throughout time and space (especially in the future).
Like, for example, when my fantasy is in high function I get these waves of gooey feeling that appear as foreign scenes, qualities of light matching the light-quality of the present and that, like the huff of VOCs coming off a can of paint, are druggy feelings of euphoric well-being, appearing (to me) in the form of a landscape where the peculiar angle of incidence of light from our star falls across a hidden garden, or cool jungle river overhung with green light, or a doorway open on the Maasai Mara on an afternoon long ago; but that is not so much a memory as an hallucination—for I can’t remember it ever happening to me, but that is nevertheless very familiar and has the feeling of recall, a déjà vu lite—the shape of some nameless cope from childhood—and I am intrigued by the fact that minor seizures can happen in the form of a mesmeric all-consuming flashback to a non-existent memory; so that what appears to me as the unconscious curtains of fantasy becoming for a moment conscious and visible, would, for the epileptic, be the apparition of an unbearable fantasy that rises to tidal waves of blackout tongue-biting convulsion.
Likewise I am reminded of the old saw that it is just when you are ensconced deepest in well-being and worldly coherence that you are most invested in ideology—but which is not to suggest that revolutionaries are depressed, only that the flip side of my own particular well-being may just be bourgeoise complacency, as I am not currently being evicted or bombed. If fantasy shrouds our waking life at all moments, then perhaps a revery is where the fabric of fantasy becomes foldable; where you can kind of tug on the scrim, direct the passage of light—not that I’m conscious of actually doing anything; and when depressed presumably my fantasy is malfunctioning for I see no visions?
While I would like to recommend getting high on the radiant field of your own projected dreamscape, I do not, in fact, know how it is done. More day dreaming maybe?
Barry Lyndon, 1975
