Chapter 6: My inner pyromaniac

  I always thought of myself as a relatively sane person. I was not particularly obsessed with anything in particular, or ever felt any form of superiority or inferiority toward others. Furthermore, I had many hobbies like reading books, drawing, watching animation, eating and many others, yet in the weeks preceding my death, they were just fleeting thoughts among a myriad of others.

  Don’t get me wrong, I do miss them. But it is mostly because, in my circumstance, any forms of stimulation, even self-harm, would be relieving. It didn’t really matter in which forms the stimulation presents itself; I would have loved them anyway.

  That's why I was enjoying it when I was hallucinating. For me, it was a thing like others. As long as it fills a part with my boring days, I was ready to fully appreciate it.

  Yet no matter how stressful or terrifying the hallucinations were, no matter how personal they were manifesting, once they lost their aspect of novelty, they quickly got down to the rank of cool entertainment, becoming more and more plain the more repetitive they were. You see, minds are more limited than one may think; they are barely able to generate three dreams per night, and even then they recycle previous dreams and experiences and still make annoying or boring dreams sometimes. Likewise, even for hallucinations and the like, once you see a pattern, it becomes less terrifying.

  Because of that, after getting bored with hallucinating, I sought a way to make it more entertaining. I started by trying to put suggestions in my head, trying to hypnotize myself into thinking about something else, and it worked in a way, but the differences were minimal.

  Then, I tried to repeat movie scripts in my head in a loop again and again, but all it did was change the character and eloquence of the beings I was hallucinating about and to tell the truth. Trying that was sickening. The problem was not the amount of “brain power” I needed to make it work, but the disgusting part of going through every scene of a movie again and again in my head. Dissecting every detail of a piece of art into a mess of words and images, forsaking its beauty.

  After others failed experiments, I thought, “Why the fuck am I doing this anyway? No one can control their dreams; even a lucid dream has randomness in it. Why don’t I just let my imagination run wild?”

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  Yet I kept trying anyway. Why?. Because imagining something and feeling it are totally different things. Even if both imagination and hallucination are both fake, there is something in the latter that the other cannot replicate, and that is the feeling that comes with it.

  You can feel hallucinations. I don't know how to explain it, but they are almost real. You can hear them, you can see them, and you can even touch or taste them. And for the stimulation deprived me, they were as addictive as drugs. So I kept on trying.

  After failing again and again and doing minimal changes to one of my only sources of entertainment, I just did something very simple. I imagined a point. A zero-dimension geometrical figure. It may be difficult to explain, but I imagined it very “Hard?” for lack of a better word. And then it happened. A point manifested before me, and it felt real. Way more real than anything I had felt since my death.

  At that point, I felt like I was so deep in the madness that I started to blur reality and fiction. The thing is that I was okay with that. For me, all that mattered was that I made something; I could feel anything else was secondary.

  From that point I made points; from the points I made lines, then forms, then shapes. From a two-dimensional canvas, I made a three-dimensional one. It was like learning how to draw again. It was difficult at the beginning, but I got better, reaching the level of animating my imaginary drawing with simple moves that also improved little by little. At some point, I started to call it “light show” or “hallucinatory performance.”

  Soon after, I discover the dots that we now know are living beings. They became the first audience of my show, or victims in some cases because I kept on doing my show very close to them and was even entertained by their attempt to flee from my creations. They sometimes get caught anyway and disappear. At that time, I didn’t really pay attention to that, but now I know that there is a very high chance that I killed them.

  Then one day, some bold mosquitoes dived right onto me, and I discovered my true form. A god-damn green fireball. And soon I discovered something about my “light show,” which was that they were the same color as me and probably as hot, which would explain why the bugs were running away from it and why they died.

  So if we piece that together, that means that the bugs were victims of a mini green sun spewing fire and launching death rays at them for fun. And you want to know the not so funny part of that? It is that I feel no guilt about it; I even find it kind of amusing. It feels like being some kind of sun god toying with mortals and all.

  Anyway, though I find it amusing, I would be more mindful about it from now on. I don't want to be some kind of DND pyromaniac player. At the same time, I should experiment more with my fire. I have nothing better to do anyway.