We’re all dabblers in unreality. Each in our own way, each in our own particular fashion. Each to their own, each to their own. Everyone needs to have  a hobby, after all. Do you dabble? I dabble a bit myself. I dabble a lot actually – I’m always dabbling. I’m hooked on dabbling. I’ve always got my finger in that old pie. The pie of unreality, that is…

Now I know it’s not going to make me very popular saying stuff like this, saying this old kind of stuff. No one wants to hear that they’re dabbling in unreality. It doesn’t sound good, it doesn’t sound positive. There’s no kudos in that; there’s no kudos in being a dabbler in unreality. Kudos comes from doing cool stuff as everyone knows, not from playing stupid never-ending games with unreality. That’s just lame! That’s just kind of sad.

Normality is a hallucination. There’s no such thing as it and we only think that there is because we’re hallucinating. We’re hallucinating that there’s such a thing as normality. When we come across something strange, something weird, something that doesn’t fit with what we think is real then we routinely accuse that strangeness of being a hallucination. We write it off as a mental aberration. We look in our textbooks of pathology and find it listed there under some fancy name. We can then reach for the appropriate medication for it. But the point is that we’ve got it the wrong way around – it’s our so-called ‘normality’ that’s the hallucination. It’s our pernicious normality that’s unreal! We’re deliberately misrepresenting the whole thing. We’ve turned everything on its head. We’re living in Topsy-Turvy Land and everything we know is a lie…

That’s why we need so many antidepressants. The reason we need so many antidepressants is because the hallucination of normality is a fake. It’s a fake and there’s nothing in it. It’s a like a cake make of cardboard that you can’t really eat – you can only look at it. You can try to eat it alright but you’ll be chewing away forever at rotten old sodden cardboard. Chewing away like a good ‘un. Having a good chomp. You’ll have to spit it out in the end. There’s no vitamins in the old hallucination of normality and that’s a fact! You’ll get scurvy for sure and then the doctor will have to be giving you the antidepressants. Big buckets of them. Lorry-loads of them. You’ll be on Effexor for Evermore and I’m not joking you. Or if it is a joke then it’s not one that you will be laughing at…

The lie backfires on us, you see. It turns on us just when we think we can trust it. Just when we think we have it eating out of our hand it takes our whole arm off! How do you like that behaviour? That’s not nice. And that’s just for starters – it’ll have the rest of us later on. Such a clever idea, isn’t it – to turn things around so that the hallucination gets to be the real thing and the real thing gets to be the hallucination. It’s downright ingenious. Just one little problem that we overlooked – you can’t live in a hallucination! Or maybe you could – just change your name to Halucinathan or Halucinda and rent yourself a nice flat. Move into a condominium.

The perennial fascination of the hallucination. That’s the thing, isn’t it? We just can’t get enough of it. Yet why do we find it so fascinating? Isn’t it because we think that there’s something in it that isn’t in it? Isn’t it because we’re looking for something there that is actually somewhere else? We’re looking for reality. We’re looking for reality in a hallucination and we’re sure we’ll find it if we keep on looking long enough. Don’t give up hope, right? Stay positive….

We each have our little projects to keep us busy. Dabbling away in the old unreality, hoping to pull something out of it. Hoping to pull out the plum. Keeping the faith. There’s something in that old normality somewhere boys don’t you worry. I’m telling you. Plenty of good stuff there and you have my personal guarantee on that. Why – I liked it so much that I bought the company! We’re all dabbling away, dabbling away, playing our little games. We’re dabblers, we’re gabblers, we’re big-headed babblers. We’re drifters and we’re grifters. We’re waiting for the big score. We’re shifters and we’re sifters. We’re sifting away. Sifting away, sifting away, sifting away. Sifting away in the Great Desert, hoping to find that old good stuff…