What’s the Real World like? I wondered sadly, ‘is it good and pleasant, or is it harsh and unforgiving? Am I missing out on something very wonderful?’ I often think thoughts like this as I go around the place, getting on with the business of the day. These would be very typical thoughts of mine. That’s the stuff the kind of stuff I tend to have going around in my head, you see.
‘Is the Real World a truly great place and – if so – is it bad that I’m missing out on it? Is this a black mark against me? A black mark that others will see and hold against me. They will see it and know that I am bad. Thinking about the Real World, wondering what it might be like. Not getting anywhere with my thoughts. Floundering around, engaging in meaningless mental manoeuvres in the darkness of my unconscious mind, ‘What was that meaningless mental manoeuvre I just engaged in?’ I ask myself. ‘What did I just do there?’
‘Am I really missing out?’ I ask myself again, after a pause, ‘or am I only imagining it?’ You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool the Lord of Death when the appointed time comes, isn’t that what they say? You can’t fool the Lord of Death because he’s heard it all. What happens when you miss out on life and end up a loser, what do you do then? How can you submit to being a loser when deep-down you know that it wasn’t supposed to be this way? ‘Was there ever a pill as bitter as this to swallow?’ I ask myself glumly. This is the cruellest blow of all.
As is well known, I finished my Magnum Opus, which I entitled Ruminations on the Real World, in the autumn of 22. The critics slated it of course. They said that it was all lies. They said that I was dissimulating. They said that my extensive ruminations on the nature of Being were nonsense. I expected nothing more from them of course, crowd of entrail-eaters that they are. With their scruffy necks and beady eyes. It’s a harsh world we live in, as you know. Honest folks have their backs against the wall whilst those who have taken the Red King’s shilling live in palaces and feast all day long. For them, the party has only just begun…
Everywhere I go in this sad world of ours I am assailed by the filthy stench of sleep – sleep clings to everything like a deadly cloying mist. It envelops the world like the fog we see in movies set in Victorian London. It’s miasmic – it contaminates everything it touches. It creeps into my house through the crack beneath the front door and probes the interior spaces with its cold, cold fingers. And if you look very closely you can see innumerable ghostly worlds concealed like droplets of water within this cold and clammy mist. You can see myriad miniature worlds suspended in the smoke, slowly rotating. ‘What sort of lives do the people on these worlds lead?’ we might wonder. ‘Are they happy in their Dream Worlds or do they suffer greatly?’ Worlds within worlds within worlds, and all of them drenched in sleep…
