Minty and fresh – that’s what I think reality tastes like. I don’t know, but that’s what I think it would be like. Very very minty and very very fresh. That’s what I imagine reality would taste like but I’ll never know. I’ll never know because I have no place in all that minty freshness. I am neither minty or fresh, you see. Nothing minty or fresh about me. Only minty freshness is real, everything else is a false and deceiving semblance of a wrongly-supposed appearance that could never be true…

So that’s why I always have to fantasize about what it would be like to be in reality or what the actual flavour of reality would be like if it were possible to actually taste it. It’s better that way. It is better to stick to fantasies. Oddly enough, you always know you where you are in a fantasy! I know some people wouldn’t agree with that because they’re far too prosaic in their thinking. They are dullards. Oh, they think, fantasies are so far-fetched and fantastical. Who knows what might happen in a fantasy, they say. It could be dangerous, they say. All nonsense of course. Fantasies never depart from the fantasizer, not by one iota. We fantasise about ourselves, that’s all – we’ve got nothing else to go on!

So anyway, in the Type-I Universe only minty freshness is real. All other contaminating impurities are not real. And this of course means that these impurities aren’t actually impure at all – they’re not actually impure because are not real. They’re not anything. I screamed and I cried, I screamed and I cried. I became an ego, I became a self. I wept many tears. So anyway in the Type-1 Universe there’s nothing but pure minty freshness. It’s very very minty and very very fresh. That’s how I think about it anyway.

I can think of it anyway I want to, I suppose – no one is going to stop me, that’s for sure! Why would they bother? What’s it to them, anyway? It doesn’t matter what I think about reality – nobody cares! I was going to say ‘nobody cares that but me’ but even I don’t care really. I don’t care because I don’t know anything about it. Whatever I think reality to be is just what it is as far as I’m concerned and I don’t think any more about it than that. I have no curiosity about it. Whatever I think reality to be it just is so I don’t worry about it one way or the other, if you know what I mean. I’m sure you do know what I mean – it’s just me that’s getting confused.

You might think that this was some wonderful form of freedom or something – reality being whatever you think it is, I mean. It isn’t of course. I think of reality as being sophisticated, elegantly dressed woman smoking a mentholated cigarette. That’s what reality is to me – exactly that, exactly that. Far away, in distant spectral tones, I hear my own voice crying out ‘I became an ego, I became a self’. It’s a lament. The lament is taken up by the breeze and gets carried away on it. Such a sad and mournful voice, but now very hard to hear anymore because it’s so far away. So very far away. So very far away. I wonder what reality is like when you get close enough to actually rub shoulders with it, I wonder? I’ll never know, though. Perhaps it’s better that way…