I’ve been using ‘the Idea’ as a kind of comfort zone recently. I’ve been using a rather a lot. ‘The Idea’ being the idea that the universe isn’t actually a real thing but that it’s just a kind of fiction. I don’t like to talk about ‘the Idea’ very much – that’s why I usually just refer to it in such vague terms. When things get tough, too tough to handle, then I just think “Well sure, the universe isn’t a real thing anyway” and then I feel better. That’s my coping strategy and everyone has to have a coping strategy – or preferably a few of them. I’ve only the one but it’s a good one! When things get tough then I edge my way into my comfort zone and then I start to feel better. Start to feel better, start to feel better. When things get tough. When things get too tough to handle then I. Reality is only a kind of plausible fiction anyway – a made-up thing. Fake news, etc, etc. I was in the comfort zone one day – the same as I usually was – when all of a sudden a voice spoke in my head. It was my own voice but it was also the Alien’s voice. It was my Inner Alien. The voice told me to make myself comfortable in my comfort zone and to strap myself into the nearest recliner and prepare myself for a journey into infinite space. My comfort zone then began to transform into the cockpit of some kind of high-tech spaceship and straightaway it started to vibrate. The recliner was vibrating, the instrument panels all around me were vibrating, the walls were vibrating, the roof was vibrating – my very teeth were vibrating. My fillings were starting to come loose. The reverberation gradually intensified until it was as if I was seeing everything six times instead of just what usual one time. It was actually hurting my head to try to focus on things. Was this normal, I wondered, or had something gone wrong? After a while it dawned on me that this was a ridiculously stupid question to be asking myself – what was normal about having your comfort zone suddenly transformed into the nose cone of a rocket that is about to launch off into the infinite depths of space? This was hardly what you’d call an everyday occurrence! The shaking continued to increase until after another ten minutes of it I began to fear for my very life. All light at this stage had been refracted into abstract geometrical shapes, prismatic patterns of primary colours that seemed to float around in the interior space of the cabin, slowly slowly cycling through various complex permutations, feeding information directly into my unconscious mind as they did so. My whole environment had been turned into information – I now existed within the information universe where matter or materiality was no more than a particular style of coding, just another way for presenting information and nothing more. Nothing more than that, nothing more than that. How very much hangs on those few words? How very much… The weird thing about all this is that when I started out on this process I was human, I was a human being and I had a life to lead. A sort of a life anyway. Some sort of a life. Some people might say it wasn’t much of a life but it was mine, it was my life and what more can anyone say than that? Now I was simply information existing in the Information Stream. Information in the Information Stream – nothing more and nothing less. I was in the Flux and I was the Flux. Information isn’t what we think it is; everyone thinks that information is about things but no – things are made up of information and information isn’t ‘about’ anything. It is the other way around, you see. Things are made of information and so there is no such thing as things. They are just ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Ordinary people, ordinary lives, but no. They were just ordinary people leading ordinary lives only nothing was ordinary – not really…