Such a panorama of tellings have cascaded into me that I have warped and wondered exactly what story I could sing to you, that would cause you to be moved, and cause me to regain my youth.

I have nested upon the summary, drowsing in a tea lit twilight for an age, questing for the privilege of a righteous truth, wondering, what tale have I eaten, whereupon the regurgitation of it’s plot and placement could set me free?

It dawned on me as soon as I stopped talking, that it was the story of trance.

Once upon a dream everything was trance. We each lived inside our own trances and yearned to be with others with whom to share our trance landscapes, to be with the people that agreed with us that our reality was the right reality.

We shunned those, whose trance-sets threatened our perceived realities, and we murdered or castrated those stalking shadows, initially, only in our imaginations, especially when we were out driving in traffic, until eventually the mass of our destruction spilled out nightly from the electric blaring-boxes of our collective trance-realities, in booming segments from our home-dictators, our trance maintenance stations, and that’s exactly how we discovered where all our fears lived.

Trapped within a servitude to our deepest fears, and mesmerised by the repetitive broadcasts of the most terrifying hordes and unfathomable enemies of each other’s trances, we froze, impossibly overwhelming our own desires and suffocating our truths as we slept on, because mostly we were asleep and in those poignant, odd moments when our consciousness aligned with our reality, so obscurely that it must indeed have been a stark, waking moment, we recognised the landscape of our own limitations and we cried out, “witch”, “thief”, “infidel”…. and we kicked out in harming ways until eventually we slumbered on, deaf to the sound of the whole world breathing and staggering under the weight of so many trances that were, in actuality, flowing along the same path, and we ate into the sky of the same endless oblivion until we were all, fully gone.

Where did we go? What are we? Did we really go, anywhere? Where are we now?

“Where am I?”

In the simplest sense, yet strangely, one day it seemed to me, that as I looked around I noticed I was fooling about with large and small pieces of paper imprinted with numbers and letters that belonged to someone else’s critical moneymaking endeavours in order to justify my use of each daily lifetime allotment in order to gain a pittance of that other person’s critical money so that I may spend it on goods (and bads) that would really, effectively help me to know where I am.

“I am back at work”

“I am just leaving work”

“I am on my way home from work, did you want me to pick up anything on the way”

“Oh God, I am running late for work”

I was frequently offered (ridiculed for not having, given, sold, persuaded and threatened into owning) small, expensive plastic communications options for broadcasting and educating the others within my trance-family as to how well I was learning to play

“where am I?”

I wasn’t attempting to clamber onto some inferiority soapbox of altered perception, mostly I just desperately wanted to enter the same glittering dream as all those other smiling and pretty gymnasts, so I could attract a mortgagee and be allocated my own gold-coated plastic shackle every year. I was certain that I absolutely wanted a smart, grey-uniformed man/slave who would leak his life-gift away to satisfy my needs, who would eagerly sell the bulk and the beauty of his brave muscles for me, and thresh the vibrancy from his heart’s dreams for the privilege of entering the matrimonial trancescape that every mother lovingly trains us to command.

I thought I knew I really required all those shiny appliance gadgets to prove my worth and I wanted to make sure that all my daughters would learn the very same trance rules, and I wanted to ensure that they would follow the script that oiled the mechanism for the great and elegant trance perpetuation.

Yet, I fell from grace, and hit my head so hard, and so many times that a vast bruise covered my mind and the swelling and the constriction of oxygen to the central trance-map shuddered me awake in a dark and confusing place where no one else would wander in their right minds, nor their left minds either. I had discovered the shunning.

How do you know when your left-brain is rejecting all your right-brain distinctions? What device alerts you to the sly and furtive monologue that undermines and sabotages the pure and unobstructed flow of imagination and colour? The logical order, the calm and reasonable thinker seeks simple evidence and sighs aloud in pleasant, industrious company over a low-fat lunch.

The chaos of my room, my life, the uprising of all my emotions has forced me to cast out all my chances for moving into the social paradigm that seemed so attractive and desirable to most other folk in the white western middle class world of my apparent reality, and yet……….

One day I noticed a tiny portion, just a mere sliver of me whispering to the supposed big, dumb, loud-mouthed and bumbling dork of the rest of me, whispering in sleek and deadly messages with a smooth and critical overtone of utter superiority, lording my hoarded intellectual cookies over the head of the suddenly sad bozo that the most of me had just collapsed into being, completely unwitting as to the cause of my sudden misery until I heard the fading, poisonous footsteps of the final commentary.

“Pathetic, you think you’re talented, and you’re just an embarrassment to yourself. Why do you want to draw attention to yourself like that, you’re not creatively talented at all.”

I halted mid-stride. I looked to my left and slightly behind my shoulder, as that’s the direction that the voice had traveled into my consciousness.

“Wait a minute, ……whoa……just wait a minute,……. I’m onto you!”

That was the exact moment of my awakening. That was the second I took my very first breath and learned to claim myself to be mine own creation, that was the day I decided to write my own trance. That was my bugle call to the centre of the dream.

Thirteen moons of initiation are the gradual rise from a slumber so cosy, that the sheer weight of my eyelids caused me to fall back, again and again, wet with a deep and somnolent skin of exhaustion holding me tightly, over and over, eagerly re-entering me into the shadowed roads of a dreamer’s paradise, boldly lined with glittering promises that only and ever proved themselves to be the discarded truths of others.  Every time.

Perhaps I should gather some scraps of those distant and primitive livings, my own Lemurian fables, my Pacifica dream and weave a blanket, pour the tea, as we read from a curiously comforting picture book with wistful songs to lull you, to make you safe as I carry you deep inside my dark cave.

Please do not attempt to seek meaning here, please encounter this meaningful meaninglessness with a reader’s utter freedom to wander away, parting company from the structured chronologies and thematic formulas of so many more popular stories. I see that all life is a perfect chaos, beautiful, wild and unpredictably savage in her patterns and all her colours.

Gaia’s Mouth offers nothing more or less.