Shyfted Dreaming Trilogy:

Update 08.04.23: The Shyfted Dreaming Post-structuralist Editions have been complete for over a year now. Satisfying hard-backed copies have been sitting on my shelf this whole while, and I reference them from time to time. I’m very happy with the outcome, but don’t know what to do with them now. I’m happy to produce hard copies and share digital files upon request, but markets are so saturated now that throwing them back up on Amazon seems pointless without a beefy marketing campaign. I have very little interest in advertising, and don’t even know what the self-publishing world looks like now, aside from–as I said–very, very saturated, with low-brow hustlers. But I HAD to do these rewrites and they’re done, and that will always be more important than advertising reach.

Update 12.22.20: I grew up and realized this trilogy had a sick-ass backbone and loads of potential but looots of bad takes and cringe. The Post-structuralist Editions are nearing completion, and the Amazon pages are temporarily down. Please don’t read any of the original versions, if you happen upon them.

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The magnum opus, I suppose, despite being my first finished work of fiction. Shyfted Dreaming laid the foundation for my fictional Universe, inspired a decent amount of my music, became a permanent home for all of the friends and horrors of my old dreams, and taught me a thing or two about my self. I call it ‘fantastical, psychological, character-driven, action science fiction oozing with philosophy in an extensive, fully functional Universe. One could view this trilogy like one of those heavily embellished autobiographies written by eccentric literaries: a lot of my real development as a person is tucked away in there. I could go on and on about this story and how much I love it forever, but by then anyone reading this could have read all three books. From the 2.1.22 foreword to Shyfted Dreaming: Red Guise PSE:

 

It has been twelve years since the last edition of Red Guise was completed. Twelve years is long enough to forget where you came from. It was time for me to take a trip home, stay a while… redecorate.

When I finished the last editions of this trilogy I wasn’t capable of thinking of the world in terms of structures, or people as parts of a whole, and I was happy to be duped in to believing that I existed on the out side of history. I saw conformity to absurd beliefs every where, and assumed the solution to this was more individualism. This ‘gifted’ kid had plateaued in a bad spot, with a pretty embarrassing idea of how ancient super beings might think.

My teenaged subconscious wasn’t really wired with ecofascism or Libertarianism. At least, it didn’t reproduce these things in my dreams. Social conservativism and arrogance in general weren’t strong themes in my dreams, nor disgust, and figures that commanded authority were often the villains. There was plenty of space for compassion, empathy, and mutual production of the (un)real, but I filled it up with individualism in stead. Super ego shackles the id, embarrassed by those desires and freedoms made unacceptable by Christian and Enlightenment morals… Typical. As much as this poststructuralist edition is a work produced by great efforts of expanded consciousness, much of the revisions could be seen as a return to the subconscious innocence of dreaming, enhancing the psychedelic aesthetic of the thing.

Alizia and August and The Harpist and the rest are as much other as they are me. Per haps this is why I was able to fall for agential realism, see the superficiality of the boundaries between people, between things. Alizia is both object of desire and a desiring machine, both a symbol to follow and a utopian impulse. After their All Is Permissible Era the burnt users began to choose their boundaries, consciously make their cuts in the fabric of meaning, sharing and differing at will, in stead of being guided by the hand of some violent, hungry economics of power. Now that I know, there is no reason to continue to allow this fact to be blurred out by my old, conservative lens.

This is a story that mixes fact with fiction to build a literal/symbolic picture of my own human development. Since it is also injected with much of the spoils of what I’ve learned, and it taught me a few things that were reinjected in to it, it is much more than an embellished autobiography. Its back bone is a series of dreams that I experienced when I was in high school, dreams with recurring themes and characters that held a lot of power for me. As I got to writing, I needed more characters. Some of these came out of moments of sudden inspiration; others came to be via design, but most wound up in the dreams sooner or later, where they were soaked in emotional depth, and origination became meaningless to me. As your typical aspects of a grand adventure story sneaked in to the narrative, Shyfted Dreaming evolved from a small, experimental project in to being the basis for every thing else that I will ever write. Spiral outward, reflect, refract, round and round. It is the only way an individual can actually shape a history.

Shyfted Dreaming is one of those stream-of-consciousness, existential stories. Yeah, it takes liberties with formatting and yeah, you have to read a lot of embarrassing teenaged shower thoughts. So much of our conception of ‘good’ art is based on our respect for repression. We like tight, restrained, controlled art (don’t worry; this has been edited). Poetry by rule. Things that reflect our ‘better judgment’, or else meticulously manufactured ‘spontaneity’. Fuck all that. Here, we face the unconscious. We face the unconscious, and we like it. Unreliable-ness. Good takes immediately followed by shit takes. Constantly elevating and descending level of intellectual difficulty. Splitting and joining and mess. Enjoying learning how to enjoy. It’s a dialectical journey of right and wrong (and super wrong), with lots of spoon-fed philosophy but also no certain conclusions in the end: the dialectic doesn’t conclude here.

As having some sort of cultural identity becomes more and more complicated, it becomes more and more obvious how often fictional characters lack context. What are their interests? Where did their mannerisms come from? Why haven’t any uncommon words stuck in their vocabulary? It amuses me to think that, in a world where our communication and sense of the world is shaped by infinite digital media, watered-down, barely or non-on line characters that would never express their selves with Schwarzenegger one-liners might be the one thing training us away from communicating entirely in Internet memes. I suppose our obsession with pre-television times has some thing to do with it too. Or may be the fact that we all (at least in secret) want to entirely escape a world of media plays in to the matter, and that’s why we’d never complain about a movie that references no brands or celebrities or genres of any thing at all. In any case, you’ll notice this story centers on a nerd that has consumed a lot of media, thinking in song lyrics and understanding events as analogous to scenes from films. Here I apologize- in the old-fashioned sense: I’m not sorry. If you couldn’t tell, this is a story meant to be rich with wonder and the alien, and all those dorky little references are meant to either please your desperate yearning for familiarity… or get you curious. Curious! No book is self-contained, and those that claim to be are doing us a disservice. Pick up an unfamiliar thread! Follow it! You can get stuck in the middle of the web of a thing, convinced the center is all there is, or you can traverse the meandering path ways away from that center, and truly see the thing come to life.

Fantasy to provoke wonder to loosen up those rigid boundaries we place in our minds, that we project upon the world, that we make all of our decisions based on, for better or for worse. It’s a shame so many of our heaviest boundaries are dropped right in to our fantasies, as if the stories we tell our selves would have no bones without them. The people in power are benevolent now, but they’re still a privileged minority hoarding wealth (the greatest fantasy of these stories of course is that contradiction). The gods aren’t tools of oppression any more, but they still hoard power and knowledge. Patriarchal monogamy is still certainly essential and permanent in human nature, but every one lives happily ever after. Or they don’t, and love is pain, and we just have to accept that. Fantasy is an escape, sure, but wouldn’t it be a better escape, if we could take some thing back with us (other than consumer identities and parasocial relationships)? Don’t we play games to escape and be challenged simultaneously (unless we’re playing them to make a living now)? I’m not trying to invent some thing here; I’m trying to contribute to and make explicit the tradition of art as education, aesthetic as liberation, and wonder as sparks of revolution. All art is propaganda, but only most of it serves the oppressors. At the very least we can make weapons to fight the apathy and nihilism.

This story isn’t about challenging those beliefs we fight about with each other every day; it’s about challenging the ones we don’t. It’s about turning inward and seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes, and shining light on the hidden machines down there, and opening them up, and understanding why we believe, both consciously and subconsciously. You read some where that human needs are biological? But what does it mean to need? Go deeper. Some guru told you life is an illusion? We already live in a representationalist culture. Go deeper. If our new beliefs easily stack up on top of our old beliefs, we’re still allowed to take things for granted and we aren’t really learning. Most of us who are able to turn our heads and see the puppeteers working behind us still believe in the shadows they produce. This story is about overcoming the odds and making the right choice and finding one’s place in the world and pushing on when every thing has been turned up side down, but it’s also about being vulnerable and relearning how to enjoy things and finding freedom through interdependence. I once thought I’d just write some thing trippy and badass and clever, and I suppose how superficial it was served the dream-like atmosphere, but now it has history and allegory and consequences and… teeth. I wrote a story that can hurt you.

The first push to rewrite this was a growing frustration with how much I’d failed August the first time around. I couldn’t even remember specifics. I just knew that I’d written her badly, knew I’d written her to throw my stupid ideas a few bones while she scolded me, and knew I needed to let her become her true self. But of course the gods were only ghosts of who they ought to be, and Alizia was too idealized, and the Antimagic Assembly we originally got was the C.I.A. propaganda version. So the revisions snow-balled, and what was planned to be a four-month process wound up taking almost two years. Now even the nihilistic VizilV and the one-dimensional Feind actually add much to the discourse, leaving even my self wondering. It’s glorious now, and reminds me more honestly of where I came from, and reminds us more passionately of who we could become, if we only dreamed bigger.

We take our Home with us, and must grow it and inject it in to every living machine we can join with, until all there is is Home, and the repression drives have no more fear to breathe.