The captain wasn’t real, the spaceship wasn’t real and the crew of the spaceship wasn’t real. The crash-landing on earth wasn’t real. None of it was real. I’d learned that none of it was real as a result of my six month stay in St Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton. It was all a myth – something invented by my brain for some reason best known to itself, to help it stay sane. To protect itself against a reality it didn’t like, a reality it couldn’t handle. The usual tired old reasons. Escaping reality. I’d spent years looking for my fellow crew members – even sometimes convincing myself that I had found them. That was my mission. And so now I was a man without a mission…

The Integesic Universe wasn’t real. My brain made it up. That was something else I had had to unlearn in the hospital. The term didn’t mean anything to me anymore. It hadn’t actually meant anything to me for a long, long time, as I could now see. It had just been something that I had been hanging onto. Hanging onto real tight. Not willing to admit that I no longer knew what it was, no longer knew what it meant. It had been a phrase that I had been repeating to myself like some kind of a magic talisman. But there was no more magic left in it. The magic had long since ebbed away. I had been grasping at straws but the straws weren’t real. To keep on thinking about the Integesic Universe wasn’t any good for me. It wasn’t any good for my recovery…

I had to move on. No more looking for answers through telepathy. Telepathy wasn’t good for my recovery either. What I had to do was focus on this world – not the invisible one. Not the one no one believed in. How had I ever managed to believe in an invisible world? Not much evidence for it, was there? The invisible world wasn’t real and it wasn’t going to save me. Telepathy wasn’t real and it wasn’t going to save me either. The flat where I lived was real. The economy was real. The recession was real. The queue outside the unemployment office was real. The Job Centre was real. The post office where I cashed my giro was real. Sainsbury’s was real. The Burger King was real. Poundworld was real. All that kind of stuff was real. All that crappy kind of stuff. Only the rubbish world is real and sanity consists in recognizing this fact… Isn’t that what the therapists are always telling us in the group sessions? Only the Type-1 Garbage Universe is real – the entropy world that we have to pretend to like.

Who am I, I wondered, suddenly full of despair. What’s it all about. What I am trying to be? Do I even believe in what I’m trying to be – the person I am trying to invent and then successfully impersonate? The person I am trying to become so everyone will tell me that I am doing well. Was it really worth the effort? Deep down I knew I didn’t want to be that person even if I could pull it off. Which I seriously doubted that I could do anyway, when I actually gave it any serious consideration. There was no point to any of this…

All of a sudden nothing made any sense to me. None of the stuff that was supposed to make sense made sense. Something else made sense to me though. Something that I was supposed to have forgotten. The hospital had been full of fluid, I realized. It was the fluid of forgetfulness and it had gotten into my brain. The fluid of forgetfulness was a psychic gas and that gas was everywhere. It was thickest in the hospital because they pumped it in there but it was everywhere. It was in the atmosphere. It was in the streets. In the shopping centre. In Burger King. In the housing estate where I lived. In my flat, especially…. It was in all the places where people worked, in all the places where people gathered. I had a split-second flash of understanding then of just how overwhelming it was, just how overpowering it was. It could blank you out in a second and you’d never even know. It could keep you under for years. For your whole life. It would be as if there had never been anything else, as if there never could be anything else. It would be as if nothing else ever could exist.

And only when or if the fog of forgetfulness would disperse for a moment or two, for whatever reason, only then would you remember. Only then would you realize what was going on. Only then would you understand how utterly helpless you were against the power of the mind fog when it comes down over you. How it could wipe you out in an instant and you would never know what happened to you.

This understanding was like a paralyzing dread that took the strength out of my limbs. It didn’t help me at all. I could see the enemy and the enemy was far more terrible than anything I could ever have envisaged. I couldn’t stand up against that enemy. Nobody could. The struggle I faced wasn’t the struggle towards this thing everyone called ‘recovery’ – it was the struggle to stay one step again of the fog of forgetfulness. It was the struggle to outwit the grim power of the nullifiers. The struggle I faced was the struggle to remember that everything everyone said was lies! Lies upon lies. Endless lies. Lie after lie after lie. A quote came into my head, a quote that I once saw on the internet – “Behind a garden of smiles sits an ocean full of lies.” That quote made sense to me now as never before. I was standing alone against an ocean of terribly persuasive lies, frighteningly persuasive lies – lies which I know I don’t have the power to resist…