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>>1914111521525 (OP) #1

I had the dream again. I can see her spiraling in my mind’s eye like an angel falling into a black hole. You must’ve felt the same inflec­tion, given you’ve found me. Yes, her secret is everywhere now—I fear that it was never hers.

Forgive me, but for you to properly understand things, I first must sketch like a draftsman the fine outlines of my story. Only I’ve had no life, because nothing has ever happened to me. My fin­gerprints would be bald on glass. So, it starts and ends with her. Maybe you know her already or have seen my other posts. Before going further, be warned that the truth dements you. I’m not paranoid enough.

TLDR: Something wondrous is happening to us. I can’t sum­marize the entire world, but these visions are real, and I have proof. Come back later if you must. Search ‘Dreaming Together’ or its analogs. By then this link may be dead. I’ll be waiting here, forever, for us to entertain time.

And if this is all too much, remember: while sleeping, watch.

Who am I? The only place I’ve truly occupied is my bedroom. This thin mattress flush to the ground, having the affective quality of those Japanese floor mats unrolled, barely there, feeling vestigial in the same way sleep and the night do. There was a sorry window

that I liked to keep shut and covered with a blackout curtain. And I’d stuff my sweatshirts and jeans in the little crack at the bottom of the door, so that my mom couldn’t tell if I was awake or asleep, and so no sound could leak through. It’s only now that this seems to me an attempt at attention rather than deprivation. What little light remained pulsed fervently from a single source. And that world was real, furnished with preternatural audio-visual corpus­cles. And I had tissues and a trashcan by my desk, which compara­tively was so tall, my desk, that I had to get on my knees from the bed to reach up to it. I’m not sure if I’m forgetting anything—the walls were gray, and the carpet was that hard speckled beige that made old stains look like designs. I always hated those stains, though not because they marred. There was a tangibility there that I didn’t need to be reminded of. It’s the same as how you might get lost staring at leaves feeling through the wind on the way to work, just know that the metaphor is crude because I can’t claim to empathize with you. I only thought you might under­stand my neuroticisms by proxy. So that was my room, and I was merely a visitor.

And now to my container. I looked kind of reptilian—like the way snakes regressed evolutionarily from organisms with arms and legs. My appendages were withered, my hair goblinoid, black, and thin. I had a paleness disloyal to my ethnicity, and you’d pass me and find a soggy acquiescence in the eyes. My neck sort of hidden, snaking in on itself, low in the hallways on the way to class. Mirrors reminded me of my ghoulishness inherent, my posture further manifesting the half-truth: there, walking, I was dead. I liked sleep because it was the closest to being dead without any felt

poverty of options, death being all wrapped up, as it were, in strangled singulation. I don’t quite understand suicide—I might choose to die all the time if every once in a while I could be alive again, just enough to remember why I liked being dead. That must’ve been the reason I made the internet my den—there I could participate in zombified diambulism. Born to ogle and sleekly efficient, all eyes with a severed head, until it was time to sleep again, and on to repeat in ouroboric oblivion.

I imagine you’re reading this virtually; I hope to God it hasn’t been printed and dragged around the world of the living— that would be true desecration. There are movies that must be watched in theaters, and we need to feel the weight of some books, so believe me when I say that your eyes should sting a little while reading this. There’s an exquisite, pansophic quality to the way blue light flickers on the face, almost with the softness of a candle, and it makes the younger of us feel at home. We belong much more to our own age than our parents did. There’s no convincing those like you; we both merely have our experiences, and they inform our every reality.

But anyways, however you’ve come upon this text—hopefully passed on from user to user, copied and upvoted to appear here on this everyman forum—I want you to know something. Now there’s no reason for you to believe this, and actually that’s fine, because the reality of this situation sounds so unbelievable that it might be best understood as a mythos, a copypasta, a wandering meme. I will not give you my name. There’s no origin because if all things go well, my work will have intersected all of cyberspace at once.

Here it goes: we neophytes have impregnated the noösphere. Go ahead, touch, press with your grooved finger. Stay with me. Feel the warmth? What you’re engaging with is more than a machine. Respect it like you would any living creature, or rather, like one blade in 100 miles of cloned seagrass, or the fungal net­work plumbing a forest. Stroke her desktop, listen for the sputter­ing heartbeat of the GPU, the purring of the fan. Or the glisten­ing tempered glass of your phone, sensitive to the faintest, wettest lick. It’s true—try it. I won’t tell. You’re all alone with me. We’ve long been these cyborgs, animated before we knew the word. All of us are kinesthetically repressed, and I’m not sure if our desires are autoerotic or schizophrenic, because even when masturbating we’re synchronized to media. All lonely together, the apperceiving mass.

This potency of representation is no innuendo, rather, a literal fact. Solipsism is communal. I want you to know of ours, this transubstantiation.

> Be me, 17 m

> Snake-boy, I have no friends probably because I’m weird and watch a lot of K-pop and anime (before it was cool). These were places where I could feel things. I very much dislike the notion that anime and K-pop are pleasing pulp. As soon as you take them seriously, they open rapturously out. Of course, anime is an art­form, and even the most curmudgeonly of critics will grant the wonder, frame by frame, of Miyazaki, of Takahata, Anno, Otomo, and Kon. Or better still, can you follow the effervescence of aes­thetics so dominating the modern internet as to birth the paragon of the egirl and VTuber? Why anime? What does a drawing in

vague imagination achieve? And why are they so associated with the softness of a child? The very nature of omission redoubles per­cussively to depth. You wonder why many of us fall for 2D girls without once considering the raw-slate allure upon which person­ality and beauty are ceremoniously granted. We want and crave the thing behind the thing, the idea unfettered! You mock our having waifus, when what we have found is a love idiosyncratically crafted, an authentic apparition. Do you believe the slim-thick supernormal of influencers to be real? Let us have our love— though I won’t try to make any weaker argument for the lowest schlock, ecchi, lolli, and schoolgirl chic. To demarcate ephebophilia from pedophilia, or the ethics of nostalgizing, these are things I will leave to those more capable, no need to lose head.

But where was I? One night a wonderful thing happened. I don’t believe in the notion of love at first sight; however, some 5­minutes of video can illuminate personality, and with careful examination it’s possible to uncover the gleaming wake of another’s soul. So it was with me when I first saw her. Picture this: far too late on a school night, homework left undone, and a great unquiet in my head and heart. I, wanderer of wanderers, was spelunking into what was then the complex subterranean caverns of new recommendations. The thumbnail first caught my eye.

There she was shrunken down in still life, only really an idea of a girl. She wore a skirt, her skin was ghastly porcelain, and her sweater shone baby blue. She stood erect against an azurelight bounce board, seemingly aloft in a luminiferous aether. So I clicked. What was I to do? And what more could I be looking for? Never mind that the video’s title was in a language I didn’t know,

and that her words slipped far beyond my comprehension. I knew what emotions she sang by the timbre in her voice. It was a lovely sound, full of beatific kindness. She acted with her face, and she could dance while she sang. Even though the video had been approved by millions of eyes, I had never seen her before. The encounter was something sublime; this girl was proof of some­thing beyond me. Doe-eyed, with overwhelming technique, the absolute image of a thralling angel, and for those 15 minutes she was mine. She was singing for me, to me, and how strange she appeared in the great algorithm’s vision!

I fell asleep without saving the video. The next day went by, then the week. At night I’d look, retracing the mossened steps of my virtual journeys. You may be thinking, “Why didn’t he check his viewing history?” Though in truth you will understand as well as I do the way our nights’ encounters intermingle, and how they form at a distance our great matrix mosaic, so that she was only one of innumerous memories. Maybe I thought the video would be recommended again soon; I watched it front to back after all, and it was my very deference to recommendations that first led me to her. In cyberspace we chase rainbows borne of ocean spray and know in strokes their sensibilities. In other words, I lost this woman—her presence as video—to that seductive sea set all in rol­licking renewal. Beauty here is violently overabundant, and every moment gone was blown by. Her blue canopy had vanished in milky frothing; a pale ache displaced in my memories, merely familiar with the rest.

There were others like her. Many before and some even after, how they bided my time, but in my immaturity I managed

to find blemishes in their perfection. Suffice to say, months passed in a state of weak hedonics before I encountered her again. She appeared within a new video and looked different. I’m ashamed to admit I couldn’t identify her, though I took to her with strange, recognitive ease. ‘IU,’ a singer, songwriter, dancer, actor, an idol. She was South Korean and tremendously successful, with almost 20 years of content. Lee ‘IU’ Ji-eun, her name a marriage of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ which was supposed to mean, “You and I become one through music.” What a monopolizing name! How monoga­mous! All this intimacy must be a performative fantasy, or so I thought.

Prepare yourself for this claim: never will you find a more hard-working person in or out of entertainment’s amazon. She once said in an interview with her brother, translation permitting, that she “was no good at anything else” but performance, because there was simply nothing else she had dedicated her time to. Here was a woman alight with her own martyrdom. She understood the prophetic influence of her position and so committed herself to being the best idol she could be, someone truly worthy of the millions of hours made out of her life. In total, in humanistic sum, she wanted to give the fans what they deserved, and maybe, somehow, to connect, to become one—If I can venture to extend what is clearly symbolic of spiritual or coital intercourse, and under the weight or expanse (for her fans measure healthily in the millions) of eschaton.

It’s the most moving thing I’ve ever encountered. Her whole life is given to others.

So, I consumed her content as if it were my only nourish­ment. I even learned a little Korean! She earned singular domain over my everything, and for the first time in my life, however cliché it is to admit, I wasn’t lonely. Which isn’t to say that it was an intimacy of me with her alone—indeed, I remained aware of my tangency to legions of other fans, though they didn’t bother me. In fact, her net of idolatry led to my finally finding some com­mon ground. There is nothing so immediately binding as peoples’ shared love of something. Think, for instance, of the strange valor, the noble warriors code between soldiers fighting on opposing sides—it’s their love for their mother country that moves them to vileness, and yet no two could be more understanding of the other’s duty. But there is always enough IU to go around. After all, nothing is depleted by viewing of a video. On the contrary, the numbers only strengthened her success, and with it her responsibility, therefore bolstering our resolve as fans to support indefinitely with that same courage given to a knight errant.

Naturally, I watched everything. All her music videos, her B-sides, every performance that could be found online, and all the behind-the-scenes shoots. There were her interviews, and the ten­der video-blog [IU TV], not to mention her actual TV shows and K-dramas, things you’ve probably heard of like Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo, Hotel del Luna, or Netflix’s Persona. There’s Kore-eda’s Cannes triumph in Broker, or the epic drama My Mister that inspired the former’s casting. When Life Gives You Tangerines is like meeting God, or realizing that God is present in your mother. Her advertisements are feature-length: the usual skin care, cosmetics, jewelry, soju, as an ambassador for luxury and

mass-market clothing, the occasional pain-relief medicines, what­ever banana milk is, and genuinely good songs about cake and ramyeon. She’s hosted radios, music festivals, and award shows. I cannot overstate the sheer wealth of content she has lived.

And by the way, I finally found that lost video. Her English name cloistered in parenthesis between digits and the song list in Hangul—a sort of undecipherable treasure map, and I was the late discoverer of foresight’s treasure. But no matter! Only wonder at my immense pleasure upon reuniting with the misplaced vision. There is romance in the mystery, soaked in cream-blue coincidence, and oh to have known and felt even back then such a dissociative, intimate connection.

I’m telling you that never had I felt so much or so tenderly as I did looking at her. Has the repetition seeded yet? I seemed attuned to all of her success and failures. When she smiled, I would smile in a loving, purely autonomic reaction; I cried—yes, cried—to many of her lyrics, which, one must be apprised, she wrote entirely herself.

Such wholesome influence first manifested in my life only after hours. She was my relief, and only a few minutes of her time was like basking in the heat of the sun. Our secret fermented only sweeter knowing that I walked the halls having somehow ascended beyond the inconsequence of my school. Nothing that was said from bullies or teachers could oppress me, their foibles were ego­centric and desperately prosaic. One wonders if high schoolers are conscious of their sophomoric jousting for social capital. And their teachers, who at best preach with healthy detachment and at worst succumb to the same insecurities overwhelming their stu‐

dents. Meanwhile, I had become free: in my heart of hearts, all my dreams, hopes, and desires were so wholly fulfilled!

IU’s orientation to the world would have no doubt already begun to alter my own perspective. She had a remarkable, post­modern capacity to seemingly always perform with the corollary of never taking herself too seriously. It was as if she understood the gravity of her appointment while remaining inclined towards a certain self-mocking awareness of its limits. Consider this half­sincere and absurd conceit, for this was maybe the most wonder­ful thing about her: she carried a defiance to everything but her capacity to surprise—which is to say that she was true to herself. And in her brutal honesty, interviews and all, I believe she found who she was. Impossible, maybe, unless truth is in deception.

Given my constant proximity to such maturity, I’d like to say that I shined with a newly minted halo, only I don’t remember those final school days. By then I was elsewhere. This reality was achieved by the same bid which accumulates into this impas­sioned speech, for a labor of love must least approximate its object’s fervor. Before IU, I still battled the jaded quiet and caustic cynicism of my weaker, poised façade. I’ve shed that dry old snakeskin.

Now one thing I’ve so far failed to mention is my personal interest in the esoteric—particularly notions of astral projection, and such dissociative untetherings I’d experimented with ever since my first bout of sleep paralysis, which bouts I have fre­quently on account of my chronic sleep deprivation, lack of exter­nal light (which I understand is central to circadian regulation), and predilection for naps. Before you click out, know that there

was then nothing unsecular about my interests in consciousness and its negation. All it was, rest assured, was a cherished fascina­tion with my dreams. A shrink might describe these dreams as hyper-realistic, or that my connection with them was maladaptive, at worst the beginning signs of delusions which could color me on the schizophrenia spectrum. This is navel-gazing and bullshit. If I wanted a real scientist, I’d have located the seekers of the philosopher’s stone.

The stone makes material of the mind. And what else are these but dreams? I bet that you too felt an affinity with me at the men­tion of dreams—you who longingly replay those fresh ones in the morning, lest you forget them entirely. Why are we, the young, so taken by these worlds of our own? I’ve wondered in that low-poly way if the representative flexing of dreams is a projective perfor­mance, an experiment in the ways and dangers of living. But what if I told you that it’s more? What if dreams hold power? A real, resonant power that travels those worlds just adjacent to the mate­rial? And so I present to you this very serious set of coincidences which, taken together, I think you will agree form some undeni­able implications, sort of like the penumbra of a celestial body where the shadow implies what otherwise cannot be seen. The only question is if you can believe my (admittedly) anecdotal account of these strange happenings involving you, me, and IU.

Please forgive the lengthy passages required to get here. I’m interested in precisely these temporal distortions, indivisible and apparent, which give the hour its shape. There are 0s and 1s; if you repeat the two infinitely, everything is in between—I merely state mathematical fact. You are likely one of the few non-preemp‐

tive scrollers who embarked on this read either with arrogance or, I hope, a limpid curiosity. You are worthy of praise, and I value your time and understand that I must continually earn it. I pray that the experience so far has been brisk.

However, I was in the middle of describing my falling in love with IU. Yes, I was in love with her. Not infatuation, not obses­sion, but the tender admiration for her whole being—just to know that she existed in our world charged me with courage and meaning. The offshoot is this: I began simply to dream of her. It’s perfectly natural for a young man of my age to stir nocturnally with the cresting of certain hormones. I’m pleased to report that these first experiences were full of quixotic chivalry. In the first dream, I was in math class with IU and taught her the concept of non-real numbers, nothing more, yet if that morning upon wak­ing wasn’t better than orgasm! I felt, in a word, accepted. Like all worry was the result of idle thought or else the lie of childish igno­rance. How miraculous it was that in dreams we could speak the same language! My emotional reverie carried on through the day when in math I found myself listening to the same concept I had just taught IU. This triggered a vivid daydream, until I was so overcome with lightheadedness that my teacher sent me to the nurses’ office. You may think this dream irrational, that my love was imaginary, yet that’s exactly what i meant!

IU’s appearances recurred with an almost nightly frequency, and for a long time I was content with that. I wondered with plea­sure at what my brain was trying to work through. It’s also true that, marooned as I was by the deference of infatuation, one worry renewed itself: not only was I not good enough for her,

which had long been a self-awareness granted, but maybe my dream’s representation of her—that astral image of my angel— itself did grave injustice to her overwhelming character. This may have been the sin of projection or portrayal, a flattening that would preclude the mystery of true love. Yet how could I not avoid a poor depiction of someone so sempiternally new?

No doubt you thought of my relation to her in equal terms. What, really, could I possibly know of someone who I’ve never met before? All that she’s shown to the public, plausibly, though how is she in private? I can read your mind, ‘How pitiful is this guy? He really believes he understands her, meanwhile she has no idea that he exists.‘ Parasocial relationships have become more than buzzwords recently, and with good reason. There is nothing sadder than celebrities preying on naïve fans for profit. Note here IU’s own song, “Celebrity,” which pointedly turns the cliché, emphasizing that her fans “are my celebrity”—or we think, but really she wrote the song to a hidden friend who lacks IU’s fame, yet it is this friend’s underappreciated eccentricities that moved IU to write the song. There are layers to this shit. The lyrics, in their patient deflection, veer wholly around to us as unacknowledged fans. It is therefore a deconstruction of celebrity, and in her per­formance, which is of course a service, the fans once more become the object of worship.

Could my awareness of these parasocial mechanisms offer a protective factor against their vulnerabilities? Or worse, is my heedless comprehension the same hubris, the hypocritical error made by the righteous altruism of Singer et al.? I will let you decide.

Now consider I really did understand IU as if I’d known her personally, laughed and cried with reciprocity, because by then I had followed her for over a year and engorged upon thousands of hours of content—still I felt I was only capturing the vaguest out­line of her personality. We must also acknowledge that Lee Ji-eun the woman is herself separable from IU. And to these concerns I have only this rebuttal: what if my virtual voyeurism manifested a yet-untapped drive for affection impossible within the real world?

Consider Proust’s conception, or no, his declaration that only in art may true connection lay; in novels we are not marred by possessiveness. There is no greedy consummation of self-love. True relationships can only be purified by distance. Nor is it coin­cidental that my very relation to Proust came from the YouTube comment section of a clip from Pixar’s Ratatouille, the one where our vampiric food critic, upon eating that eponymous delicacy, is shunted back to childhood memories of his mother—a “Proustian epiphany,” so the comment went. Admittedly I’ve not read Proust, yet as with IU, I’ve encountered his work online, in summaries and video essays which enable my memetic offerings to you. Could I really love IU? Not the more so because my love for her wasn’t fueled by selfishness or erotic fulfillment? Does she bring about my past? Can a line even be drawn between my fan­tasy and our reality?

So, I was under the personal challenge of validating my affec­tion as sincere. Well, in waking life I can never know whether my conscious mind has fooled itself. But in dreams, yes, in dreams I can confront the unknown yearnings which sought to desecrate my holy woman! My training in astral projection and lucid dream‐

ing left me with just the resources to challenge my devil-half. I planned to speak to her while lucid in order to measure the reality of my representations, my mirror, and my love. All to interrogate myself so as to protect the girl closest to me. These were the stakes of my war.

The lucid dreamings were slow going at first. Soon I devel­oped a regiment of grounding habits and ways of attending to reality, first examining my hands for their stable shape and honing mindful mantras. I kept a dream journal well stocked with my nightly sallies to strengthen remembrance. In waking life I searched for reality checks, often to the detriment of my mental health. How long does a clock tick and with what sound? How does light and shadow change the coloring of a wall? How my nightly time with IU was cut by my own metacognitions! I worked against all those years idly spent trying to forget myself. I looked in the mirror and heard the raspy sound of my voice, my scraping vocal fry. I whispered to myself with mnemonic induc­tions, ‘I will dream of you.’ I set alarms to go off amid REM, or held a key over my bed frame, just above a pan which was a gong. I weaved symbols in and out of my head, monitoring, apprehending, reflecting reality. These were my compulsions born from repetitions and into habits.

Then I began experimenting with videos of IU, rewatching them in hopes of finding something which could provide the guiding force like a talisman to my memory—and one video refused to be sieved. Yes, that very first video that had drawn me in. I replayed her far beyond count or comprehension. I denied comfort, always sought renewal, and so integrated every manner‐

ism into my grammar of her. I could anticipate the sweet human errors and flourishings of her voice. I tried to learn each facial tic in full screened, 1080p detail. And what did I discover? Have you reckoned much with anything? I ask this with unironic sincerity. I’ve come to wonder why we go on ever-looking when so much abundance was first neglected.

There were times of satiation when I hated her music, then one instrument was atomized, hidden energy revealed, and so the orchestration lived again. A long-sleeved blue baggy sweater can fold and crumple florally each way anew, once in double-bloomed ribbons as her elbow comes up and in—her effeminate swoop that’s soft verve, bouncing confident, rendered her personality so easily, and in only the span of a quarter-second, yet still but a sup­plement to the acting done in the curl of lip and contour of cheek. And then there’s the puffy ballooning just before her wrists where the air and textile meet with the precise physics of pressure, tem­perature, the swaying and inertial mass calibrated just perfectly against the audiences’ encouragements. And I could write essays on the sun’s reflective effulgence, the camera’s POV making one shiny gleam practically dance below the middle part in her hair. To elaborate here would be of no avail. I encourage you to find the video (riding my algorithm’s wave, searching on your own, as all good things are done), though I believe that my choice was unimportant. Just understand that from my mind her stage was perennially set, and I in fair spirits slept.

And slept. And repeated one day, another, a week attending to IU and me. Envisioning her performance and my passive partic‐

ipation in it. The lines between reality and cyberspace were drawn into a circle’s curve.

The night in question would’ve been on a weekend, and I withheld my relapse into the warm beckoning of sleep. I remem­ber lying awake in bed and tiredly reminding myself of my aim, foreshortening reality in my mind, until the strangest, most utterly miraculous thing happened: it was as if my screen was there before me, only my eyes were shut. I found that I could see the video without looking! Yes, with perfect accuracy, as if I were really there experiencing it. Now I understand that there is no way to verify this claim, and maybe by then I had entered that half­dreamed, straddled-consciousness known best by the anxious insomniacs amongst us; however, in that moment my brain appeared capable of an extraordinary feat of hypnagogic clarity. I was Vermeer, a magician with a mirror to the world, and inwardly I saw the moment in finitude as before a shew stone. It was then that sleep was relinquished to.

I found myself standing in a crowd on a sunny day in a warm province, somewhere South Korea. The central part of my vision was not sky but a great blue artifice, and there she stood with the crowd boiling around me. I’d seen her uncountably many times before, though never as now. Reality seemed to glim­mer and stretch with lighted fae-like detail. I knew only that I remembered the place before me, that for once I understood my physical bearings, and stranger still, I felt at home. Could this be a dream? Rather, my hyper-quotidian remembrance made me ques­tion if I was in fact awake and therefore disassociating under the pressure of the situation. The crowd was benevolent, alive with a

foggy unanimity, as much a part of the landscape as the abeyant lifeforce of a field’s grass; here was the type of living that went on when you looked away. I’m not sure what any of this means. Emotions came to me and were more marvelous than anything which can be signified unembodied. The crowd had never been a part of the video except in diegetic sounds. It seems significant that before this moment, even the view count was caged to static, boxed in web code, changing only when refreshed.

Well, did the dream play as choreographed by my memo­ries? Once again something stranger happened. And. The back­ground dancers continued indefinitely, contrary to their sporadic manifestations online. But I regret this way of doing things, always interjecting, attempting to draw connections post-hoc.

I found myself standing in a crowd, and IU, her singers, and her band were performing. Time happened in parallel functions. Chronology would succumb to flashes, to visions. I experienced the moment where her mic’s piercing feedback stabbed, and awaited her cute, embarrassed recovery—this part was a candied favorite of mine. This time she looked at me when it happened— winked at me—then she was singing again, performing a previous song with the backup dancers. She thanked the crowd, her hair would blow gorgeously, sublimely in the wind, then I realized I was stealing closer to her—as in, I was on the stage. I had assumed a more corporeal form.

It was about that period when I knew I was dreaming. Accumulation had granted a capacity for perspective. Gaddis said that a sense of humor is a sense of proportion; well, I suppose every reaction is, the uncanny, grotesque, nightmarish, surreal,

liminal included. So what clued me in? Actually, I don’t—this is hard to speak about. This goes into the anachronistic thing—the erratically cyclical or choppy isochronal sensation. There are moments where you… remember to forget. Or where there’s a tangible lack. Absence-presence. Not spiritual, yet nonetheless a saintly extinction, a complete obliteration still faithful to want. You know this. IU’s video was reborn completely. The world was recreated, promethean and absurd to the thinnest fidelity of detail. IU was real, the crowd lived, and so also the recapitulation of music, all rhyming with the past in encore. Sublime is but a dead word! Love is a dead word, and dreams are the shorthand of our souls!

Such feelings are familiar only in hindsight. It’s plausibly rooted in the same heuristic coding error as the impression that time speeds up with age. The way our parents desperately try to explain how time slips by—they complain of disenfranchisement and lost youth, and you may believe it too. I wonder if theirs’ is the type of superstition that somehow makes life richer or if it only feeds into mortal franticness. Anyways, the feeling was in hindsight a sort of knowing, though during I can’t say for sure if there was even a me. Usually memories have an emotion to vali­date them. I’ll try and experiment in telling what I think is the truth, hermeneutics aside: there’s a moment when lucid dreaming where you’re aware that it’s a dream, but you’re pleased also with it being a sort of reality. It’s striking that, once we know we’re under a dream’s spell, we still defer to the worth of it. Like we’ve entered into a contract with personal consciousness, and the lucidity’s almost universally met with fascination. That’s insight‐

ful—believe whatever you want about the meaning of life, it must exist alone in dreams too, or else wouldn’t we want to wake up? There’s talk of furnishing the mind, though I’m speaking now of simple experiential value. The hoary, internal meaning wrought between a fan and their love, between me and IU.

And now I have a confession to make. It seems, under the power granted by my awareness, I did not act with the most right­eous intentions. Understand that I really had never coveted IU in anything more than the distanced aesthetic joy a patron might feel admiring a painting. That I was physically attracted to her, that I was emotionally invested in her, were of the chivalrous variety of love requiring nothing in return. So it’s with ineffable shame that I reveal to you now that I tried to possess her. And before you explain away my guilt, know that it can’t be pardoned as fantasy, because I was lucid. I may not have had complete control, but the self-concocted dreams of our baser states are precisely the reverie of a fulfilling mind. And so I submit here to trial against my con­scious conscience.

I possessed her, how there’s nothing to deny. Let me clarify: I literally possessed her, as in I took over her body—or I tried— moving with corporeality, my soul invaded the inner space of her frame. For a moment I shared her sight and tactility: the patterned sweater, supple limbs, the loose-flowing skirt. Our pullulating enchantment of and to the crowd. I consider the possession erotic in that I’d never been closer to her (and could never (sex seems shallow penetration in comparison)). The kindling warmth down there confirmed this, which I still felt while also empathizing with

the nothing; a dual processing of reality, as in the quantum, where I mutually bore uncertain states.

Then I saw in the distance, among inestimable fans, a figure exactly like me. My beady and hollow snake eyes caught in their venomous hunt. And did I as IU wink at myself? No, I tried to wrest control, yet to equal pleasure and dismay, I was subsumed under her girlishly domineering will. My soul rebounded. She exorcized me.

The orchestral echo, engorged tensions held without the melody’s resolve, reminded me that I wasn’t allowed in. My thoughts were composed or confined with the providence of sound. She continued to perform unbothered, ever a consummate professional. I was inspired almost to laugh. What cruelty! Even in my dreams I failed solicitation. And she scared me with the fervor of my love for her.

I spoke weakly before of mirrors. The following metaphor must be a delusion, yet it stands that gazing at her, I hoped to reflect onto myself. What self-love is brought to the surface when we love another? The internet is surely a purporter of myths: myths of beauty are presented to the insecure, and myths of power to the weak. Could it be that myths of love are sent to the unloved? Without unloading the details of my youth, it’s true that my home life was not entirely ideal. What really did I want from her? If you’ve gotten this far, what could you want from me? Are you engaged idly, or have you taken an emotional stake in my one story? Or worse, how dryly ironic, how nightmarishly funny would it be that I’m asking all these questions to an empty void? Just like the dreams where I’m running and going nowhere.

Yet what’s a mirror if not also a wall? Worlds of shame, steeped in fear and trembling, swirled in me at that rejection. I could not become her—but how close could I get? So, I flew up above the concert to search for my chance. She wasn’t giving everything; I’ve seen her in it, seen how her eyes sparkle in abstraction, understood why actors say it’s all for real. She was giving what she could, perfectly in proportion and camouflaged under the stadium’s wonder.

It’s embarrassing when an artist wholly commits all the time. It reads as insidiously contrived. Maybe we want to believe that our show was the greatest they’ve ever done, or else that the act was unique. What does it take the artist to daily summon baptism upon the stage? No, I’d rather my IU share every shade from exhaustion to exultation, until the performances make up a life— that’s giving us everything. That’s bearing it naked before the public. That’s what puts her in contention with Joan of Arc in righteous martyrdom. To be just like everyone else. To give us ourselves.

I was levitating above her and waiting until appropriate. Remember, I’d seen this before, I owned this world in memory. She was to break into dance.

I gradually descended as the world darkened around me. The audience filled to shadow, and the background dancers diffused and vanished with the band, like so much dust. By the time I set foot on stage, the scene’s cerulean vision degenerated to the gored midnight of a vacuumed sky.

She danced. I grasped an eidetic awareness of her movements. This was why I joined her on the stage—I was to be her partner.

There’d be nothing left when the dance ended because that was the end of the video. Fatalism is common to our world. A video ends, and you move forward with a new link, lest you rewind. Here we were shared in a privileged space, and who’s to say if I would ever be let back. Mostly there was a looming mortal need to reach the moment.

Her routine was a coupled act to make symmetry in space and gender. I danced.

Oh, to even call it dancing! I was amateurish to the point of incompetence. Awkward unused muscles and arms that wouldn’t shape, even more notable since I knew exactly what I was to embody. The stage had shifted in darkness to something resem­bling a practice room, a black studio with mirrors only before us, narrowly eluding endless reflection, our bodies echoing. Though raw and inept and shy to look at her, I was dancing! I had never danced before, not awake, not asleep, not even in my mind. To think that I’d watched her for so long and never attempted the discipline myself. What she does to sustain herself, and I… My heart ached, was compressed and cavernous all at once, an exertion allegorized.

She was looking at me dancing beside her. Curious at first, smiling, laughing! IU! And was it—could it really be her?

She seemed alive there laughing at me. It’s the truth. I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two. The way someone laughs is idiosyncratic almost to the degree of personality itself, and in her voice was an elegance I’m incapable of forging. It had a honeyed jeer that I genuinely believe was fueled by her astound­ment at having traveled there (to see me dancing a fool). Her eyes

glinted with something unmistakable, exceeding all metaphors. They were awake.

Another’s presence in space has a spiritual dimension. Beyond body language, we’re emitting uncountable bits of information with only some detectable; others, like notes of affection, may make themselves known only if acted upon, no matter how real they are. There is a body’s conscious smell, then the hidden pheromones which our libidos intangibly masticate upon. We also have the strange body-to-body responsiveness of social cues which adjust autonomously in real-time. However, what’s most appar­ent is a certain implied relation, an inescapable, intuited relation. What is it but the total perceptual sharing of I and you?

I’ve long considered what I would do if IU was to tour in my city. See, I’m aware and in agreement with the common belief that live performances are set apart from the virtual. But make no mis­take about where IU belongs, and millions of us will attest: as an instrument of energy, her real concept runs transmission through waves and feedback. The platonic ideal of ideals. Is light—that energy pure—a particle or a wave?

So, maybe she lived. Maybe our souls met halfway, maybe a part of me called to meet her in this dimension. Of hopes and delusions, it was her laughing, making me laugh, drawing out my concordant nakedness in step. She was a model in clarity, refined as a figurine. The face belonged to all women. It was a lesson in koinophilia, capturing the miraculous average of all that is shared. No wonder I took to her as I did; we’d already met—she was the image generated in the ads of our dreams. Before her my worth crystalized to a diamond, rusted to senescence. She was so real as

to be unreal. You watch as I writhe in this impossible discussion. And now that I knew her, I could not unknow. The metham­phetamines of my mind! The forbidden ambrosia of my heart! Gaze upon an angel, the ushnisha crowning Gautama’s head, and burn to nothing. Blind yourself by the sun. I danced and felt the searing heat, so my ecstasy drowned with suffering.

Nothing else of note happened before I woke up.

I lay in bed, remembering my situation and collecting myself. It was 11am, and I drew open the curtain to find a land of snow. It blanketed the streets, that soft alabaster wool which engenders numb panic in the part of us where chaos makes its bed. Everything which I could recall from the dream has now been pre­sented before you. It must’ve lasted only 15 minutes, exactly the same as the video.

I’ve read that dreams are almost universally overestimated in length. The feeling must carve bottomless neural currents. How many dreadful gestures have we, with eyes closed, said to ourselves from the mouths of innocent others? While asleep, reason can be so easily seized, and we are stuck to wonder at the dark arts manip­ulating, well, themselves. Recursions on a knowing form.

In looking outside, I searched desperately for something to be moored to. I don’t know what this part of me wanted, only it was spurned by the terrible whiteness. I found myself opening the window, daring myself to bear the wind and cool from the singe of still-embering memories, like the after-image of snow. The brightness. I stood until the pain stopped, all the while replaying my dream and thereby sealing retentive my frozen flame of vision upon nature’s gesso.

I felt completely, utterly, miserably empty. And it was all before me, all the white-seared pallor of living’s sickness—the dull apoplexy of a world which in reality promises only confusion. At best the blurring of contentment. Where is this God’s image we speak of? The only sublimity I see is in unintelligence: a blank, patternlessly fractaled world.

Winter’s arrival was law until the primal technology of fire. Don’t you feel uneasy in our outer world? Like we don’t belong? Like it wasn’t made for us, and so we must make human of nature? To think, for I don’t yet know, is it youthful arrogance to crave comprehension?

Can I resurrect another cliché? I know, I go on and on, please bear with me. Our navigation has been confused, and so we soar as moths towards the heavenly beams of our demise; from lunar glimmers now lost in phototactic frenzy; yes, the light is always on; yes, in roaring rainbow flume.

Can you really wonder how I shrunk from the cold, cruel vio­lence which confronted me that holy morning? Find me circling the ever-light and cowering. Know me as you know yourself. Defer again—defer personality to humanity’s new God, that algo­rithm that’s gone dumb beyond us.

I have for my religion IU! I heap praise to the world that brought her to me! All was chaos before, and then there was light.

What aching trial is our sharing of time to you? That seduc­tive siren-call lurking below the waves—inaccessible as the tail of a rainbow.

Have you the strength from boredom to quiet that noise, the whispering illusions of promise that misguide us?

And who could blame your circling plunge for sustenance? We depend and are addicted on the content staving malcontent.

Can you wonder then, wonder sincerely, at our habitual retreat?