Mar 30

 Ares came to see me last night. 

It's been a while. I thought I had seen the last of him. His visits fewer and further between.

But he visited me last night. And gave me one of his big hugs.

I was very glad to see him. People in my dream questioned how it could be him. It couldn't be.

It's him. Don't question it. Don't sit and negatively explain why it isnt, and can't and everything else whilst he sits on my lap and gives me a hug. Don't question it. Just be happy.

I was maximum protective.

He does this I said. He now comes and goes. Not here very often. But sometimes comes back to visit. Happy. And healthy. Same old Ares. But also. Not. More conscious somehow. And in a pinch. Able to talk, in a simple way.

At one point I asked if he knew where he was, when he was. He said he didn't, but he could, but he would rather not. It was simpler than that. I can't remember the exact words.

After a while, I woke up. Happy I had seen him. Followed by loss and sadness.

As I've got older I've pondered on the nature of reality. Mainly because of my sense of memories, how they can change, and their relevance to the now.

When I was younger it was clear.

There is reality. Here you are, a very imperfect interpreter of reality - a brain wired to a set of sensors that picks up a fraction of the objective, which then gets assessed, filtered, altered, added to, and then is processed by your brain.

That's it. A blind, deaf, senseless meat lump riding in a flesh mech, able to perceive the world only through the screen in front of it, and the earphones given. It is imperfect. It makes things up. It "AI" fills in holes, like your blindspot in vision where the physical optic nerve connects. Rather than render the image with a black spot, your self correcting intelligent fill AI makes a guess at what's there and fills it in. It can be fooled into revealing itself. Spots will appear and disappear depending where your focus us.

Your vision also suffers from lag. Sometimes up to 15 seconds the scientists now reckon. The brain smooths out and intercepts the signal taking the worst noise out. You can also trick this into revealing itself by watching the second hand on an analog clock. Look back and forth at the clock. Sometimes the second hand seems to move slower in that instant you look at it. Chronostasis. A real effect. And the revelation that your brain has a "lag prediction" bit of software running that makes you see what should be expected and not always what actually is.

That used to be my understanding of reality.

Reality is sketchy to human experience. Entirely manufactured. Not objectively representative of shit, except our own fleshy mechanisms, and enough information to allow us to navigate the world.

As time has passed and I have first hand experienced that gap between what has gone and what is now, my understanding has shifted slightly. I am keenly aware that once things go out of existence from the past, dead, knocked down, removed, their place in reality becomes one of imagination. There is no subjective difference between a memory of a "real" thing and that of an imagined thing. Which becomes painfully obvious when you talk to a younger person that has no memory of that thing in person. To them. You could be talking of dragons. Fairies. Sometimes they won't even believe what you say. On historical things they will wade confidently forwards in what they think happened, even though you lived it first hand.

Well. This is easy. One is reality. The other is second hand reality. Right ?

Sure.

But. As I say. Subjectively. They are the same. Once something disappears out of reality. Its presence is just a memory. A figment of your imagination. It can change. Things are forgotten. Things are remembered. Other things are enhanced.

And in a very real way. My memories of what the 1970s were like, are, to a modern generation, just fairy tales.

And when you stop, and consider, and see all the things that even in that short timespan modernity gets wrong about that. The confidence in errors of history in the retelling by people that were never there.

You realise that all of history is like this. And no doubt. If there were an ancient Roman alive today. They would be grinding their teeth at all the confidently wrong facts you would tell them about the Roman Empire.

But of course, that's impossible.

And reality is just a construct inside our heads. Part of that is our memories of things that have gone by. Subjectively just another set of constructs. Indeciperhable from imagination. Only save that we earmark it, oh, this happened, this did not. A small ephemeral earmark. Were you to lose your notion of that. A jangling of the neurons. You would not be able to determine one from the other. Or indeed. Arguable how much of a fiction your "experienced reality" is, when much of it is made up on the fly by your brain, no memory is ever static, and your subjective experience is tiny.

All of this is to say.

My idea of what is real and what isn't, from the reference point of a single person, has become a lot more sketchy. For me it has started to lose that concrete objectivity and begun to be replaced with nothing but subjective dreaming. All of it.

Your experiences in the moment of a situation, emotional, the conclusions you draw, the hurt, or love, or suffering, and all of it. Can be so very different from someone standing right next to you experiencing the same.

Which one is reality ?

Neither. Both are the individuals subjective experience of the world. And your inner you only world, with your thoughts and feelings.

The Matrix film makes a small point of electrodes being plugged into you, to feed those subjective senses, any kind of reality you like. What does it mean, Neo asks. I have all these memories. Good noodles. None of it was real.

I think in the end, to that very subjective human point of view. Reality is what you make of it. It can be nothing else - you are trapped at the hardware end by subjective inputs that fiddle with the data. And at the software end, everything is a construct. It seems to me then, that with enough oomph, belief, confidence, whatever it is, reality to you, can be a variety of things. Belief in God. Belief that the 1970s were a certain way - your history book says so.

There is within there, within certain constraints and limits, a capability to construct your own reality.

You can make it more happy or more sad. You can place characters within it. Remember somethings. Block others. You construct the play you see. It is not just a free for all "well this is reality and how things were". It is more malleable than that. There is no such thing as the concrete objective. It is all very subjective. And as such. We can choose some aspects of what our reality are. Within reason. Or perhaps without reason. Live in that la la land, far detached from anyone elses idea of subjective reality.

I don't mean this as some carte blanche that reality is nonsense, and you can believe anything and that is the truth. But. It's an acceptance that all your information is biased. Some of it is just made up. Even the bits you are absolutely sure are a perfect representation of "reality outside", they are not. Science has unravelled them. Factually. Measurably. Physics. Biology. What you perceive ain't what is out there.

And somethings, you can't perceive at all. Hopelessly blind. Unable to see the ultraviolet patterns in the flowers around you that insects can. Is that flower yellow ? Or a vibrant super purple that you cannot see ?

So. Bottom line. Reality, or rather, the human notion of it at any point is sketchy. Unreliable. A madeup fiction of narrative where you actively seek one thing over another, negative bias, positive bias. Remember this. Also remember that within that frame of sketchiness you can choose one thing over another. But also that what you choose doesn't make it real to anyone else. Just you. Be sane. Be objective - as much as you can. But also understand everything is subjective, be kind to yourself and your struggling fiction writing brain. Your reality is yours alone. And within reason. Fill it with whatever entities you like.

Including dogs that come visit you in your dreams.

And as I write this and finish, Athena has asked for a cuddle, and hefting her up onto the bed, she has curled up beside me to snooze. And my heart is full of melancholy.