by Joseph Simpkins
The office is the least likely place you’d expect to encounter the marvellous. In this dungeon, built upon layers and layers of bureaucracy, the worker shuffles into their drab desk. They slave away (or at least try to make it look like they are slaving away) so that they can avoid getting fired and can support their livelihood. Fun is officially prohibited in these spaces, except in artificial ‘team bonding sessions’ constructed by management. However, it is in this beige prison of desktops and office chit chat that I have noticed a rather peculiar phenomenon within myself. The complete and utter dullness of my surroundings seems to excite a spirit inside of me.
It all began on an incredibly boring day at work. I was fatigued, it was sunny outside and I had nothing to do during my thirty minute lunch break. Having already eaten my lunch I decided the best way to pass the time was to have a nap. I set an alarm on my phone, put my headphones in and closed my eyes. It wasn’t long until my tiredness started pulling me into a deep sleep. Yet I couldn’t completely switch off. Even though I’d set an alarm to wake me up, the fear of falling asleep at work and being punished for it hung over my head. So although I felt sleepy, I couldn’t quite relax enough to fall unconscious.
Suddenly, I began to feel a rocking motion. Strange shapes seemed to whirl about in my mind’s eye and it wasn’t long until I found myself on what seemed to be a gondolier. The gondolier was sailing over an ocean of brown hair. Rowing the boat was a gigantic hooded man that had the legs of a heron. I peered over the side of the vessel at the hair below and noticed that the bottom of the gondolier was spiked like a hairbrush. We combed our way across the motionless brunette waves in silence and I looked around in awe of my surroundings.
This vision continued and I journeyed from the ocean of hair to a city where the buildings were made entirely from golden frying pans stacked on top of one another. Little girls without faces and with skin the colour of paper ran around this city with water cupped in their hands. Whenever I approached one of these faceless children they’d offer me a drink from their pale palms.
It wasn’t long until my lunch break ended. But I was enamoured by the images I had just seen. It was as if I had managed to lucid dream within only a few minutes and without falling asleep. Enticed by these vivid images I pursued this method of conjuring up visions further. I found that it was incredibly easy for me to enter into these lucid states and it wasn’t long before these visions became a regular fixture of my lunch breaks. To the point where I no longer needed to close my eyes to see them.
Quite recently I opened my eyes midway through one of these experiments and got the strange impression that my fingernails had been replaced with flaps of skin. As I looked at my fingertips to see these flaps of skin they suddenly opened. I was shocked to discover my fingernails had been replaced with eyelids! And they began to blink rapidly.
Because we have blinked regularly from birth we no longer realise that we feel a sensation when our eyelids move. But with eyelids on the tips of my fingers I could feel every blink. They tickled the stimuli on my fingers and it was one of the most bizarre feelings I’ve ever experienced.
Next I began to feel similar but less acute sensations elsewhere in my body. I realised that all over my skin I was covered in eyelids that were opening and closing. I looked at my torso and saw that on the other side of the eyelids were not eyes, but dark chasms. It was as if I was riddled with holes like swiss cheese.
Somehow I managed to enter one of these chasms in my chest and I found myself in a shadowy stone tunnel. Following the tunnel deeper into my body I came across a vast chamber. At its centre was a huge stone that seemed to emanate a sort of power that I could feel both in front of my eyes and inside my chest at the same time.
I have been rather fortunate throughout my life that I have never needed the assistance of drugs or sleep in order to access other worlds. There has been certain moments in my life where, whilst being quite sober and quite awake, I have been captured by extraordinary visions. But these visions tend to be rare, unlike the sheer amount I seem to have at work. These particular visions at work I have found out are called Hypnagogic hallucinations.
According to the fountain of all knowledge (Wikipedia), “Hypnagogia is the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, also defined as the waning state of consciousness during the onset of sleep.” This “waning state” between wakefulness and sleep is particularly drawn out at work because the fear of being punished for falling asleep stops my brain from fully switching off. Meaning that I am stuck in this sort of purgatory where I am neither asleep nor awake. I am instead caught between two worlds, the world of dreams and the world of work.
During my time experimenting with this waning state I have had many marvelous experiences. I’ve watched hare’s tightrope walk, planted trees where the branches are not wood but horse’s legs and had an incredibly ecstatic pool party with a group of women that were half worm half women. Not only this, but I have had many an outer body experience that is hard to describe in words. For example, I have felt what it is like for my body to become a landscape. For my skin to become sand and my head to become stone. I have felt what it is like for people to inhabit me, build cities upon my body. And these feelings are incredibly visceral and strong, yet unlike anything I have ever felt before.
Inevitably, this experimentation has spilled outside of this waning state and outside of work. I have found that the world has become re-enchanted. I can see poetry in the world more clearly. I can get ecstatic and find revelation in the smallest of things. No longer are my organs confined to my body, I can see how they stretch out into the world. The fire bells on the side of a building are breasts growing out of a brick wall. A homeless man vomits a rose onto the pavement. When I embrace my girlfriend she transforms into a cello and her bed becomes a desert. I recall a memory from a past life in vivid detail as if it were a memory from this life. I have a better understanding of the inner workings of my mind. The deeper I plunge into the cryptic and hidden depths of my brain the more I understand about the world around me. And the more I explore the world, the more I understand about the depths of the human psyche.
So used am I to surrendering myself to my imagination in order to access these other worlds, that I have realised I cannot claim any thought to truly be my own. I have learnt that I am nothing but a dead body possessed by the people, objects and things that surround me. To live, is to be haunted. To think, is to interact with phantoms.
Despite the joy and adventure this re-enchantment has brought me, I am aware that society does not want us to be enchanted. Even writing this now I am nervous about what would happen if one of my managers read this article. Even though I have been careful for this enchantment not to affect my productivity, a boss does not want a worker who is having hallucinatory outerbody experiences in the workplace. It’s risky, it threatens the bottom line. A good worker is sober and mindless, they must stick to their timetable. Sick days, holiday pay and maternity leave is already a wound to the bosses – a worker who needs time out to go down a rabbit hole of hallucination in the hope of discovering revelation is even worse. ‘Mystic Leave’ or ‘Hypnagogic Holiday’ is unfortunately not a thing the modern world offers.
This society does not want humanity to re-enchant itself. Because someone who is content exploring the depths of his own mind and can find the marvelous in everyday life is not a good consumer. Far from it, we are meant to only feel enchanted when we consume. When there is not a checkout or an ad break, enchantment is useless to a society that must monetise everything. If someone is so content with the re-enchantment of ordinary things, when they can find magic amongst the litter in a dingy alleyway, what use is there in trying to sell them luxury goods?
Amongst these visions and the re-enchantment of my everyday life I have caught a taste of freedom in such contrast to my surroundings. The other day I was out with some colleagues for drinks, when I met someone who used to work in our department. They’d since moved department and told me how utterly desperate their new job was. They spent most of their time bored to tears doing menial work that’s social value was completely unclear.
When I think about the freedom I have felt in my visions and marvel at the beauty of the human imagination when it is given free reign, I can’t help thinking that we are better than this. Humanity can imagine better than this society. And yet, a large amount of us spend our time doing jobs the social value of which is utterly unclear. All whilst we are told that the silly little visions in our head are nothing but ‘imaginary’.
But there are many things that are ‘imaginary’ and still important. Money, laws and borders are but a few things that exist in the collective imagination. If we all woke up one day and decided that borders were just stupid lines on a map then there would be no more nations. If something as important and dominant in our lives as a nation can be entirely imaginary then why don’t we set our sights higher? When I see the homeless suffering on the streets, people unfulfilled with their lives chasing the high of their next purchase and news coverage of innocent people being murdered in wars, I can’t help thinking this world of adulthood has got it all terribly wrong. If it is mature to drop bombs, if it is mature to let people suffer in poverty and if it is mature to get a ‘proper job’ that seems to be of no benefit to either myself or humanity as a whole – then I do not wish to be an adult. I’d rather be a child.
Last week in the office, a group of moths sprang from the corpse of a rabbit. The moths decided they wanted to take me somewhere. I followed them. They took me to a city in ruin where buildings lay in rubble and the streets were flooded with waist high water. I flew with the moths around this empty city and I recognised that this vision was not as fantastical as some of my other ones. The city reminded me of Gaza, of what we are doing right now to real people. Destroying their home and taking their lives. But it not only made me think of the present, but the future. This flooded city was an image of what is coming. The climate crisis looms over our futures, threatening millions of people’s lives and livelihoods. And what are we doing about this death? Is our society changing? Are we really going to continue on consuming and working as normal whilst people around the world die? When I pulled myself out of this vision I had to hold back the tears. And I was thankful for what the moths had shown me. They were refusing to let me slip into ignorance.
Hallucinating whilst at work has strengthened my conviction to revolt. We must revolt against the current state of things. We must work to re-enchant our world and free ourselves from the bonds of consumption. We must dare to access other worlds so that we can imagine a better version of our own. We must sing: Down with the enemies of enchantment! We refuse to douse the flames burning in our hearts. We oppose the separation of dream and reality, of poetry and life and of enchantment and adulthood. The revolution will come when we relearn how to turn our thoughts into solid gold.