One random thing I have been thinking about lately is a confrontation with the unreal. Think about your life. Every day you just go around seeing things that are normal. You might sometimes see something that is out of the ordinary. Maybe some kind of accident or strange behavior. These things don't happen often, but they still fit into the view of reality that you have. Take, for instance, someone riding a unicycle down the sidewalk. You may have only ever seen someone ride one at the circus or something. You may have never seen one in real life, up close, ever! But the unicycle is still a part of your base reality. You know that it exists, and a close encounter with it is simply one of the many possible realities you can imagine.
Now take this situation instead. Imagine that one day, you get home. You have just had a fairly normal day at work. Tonight, you will join some friends in a night out. Dinner, drinks, the like. So, you need to get dressed. You go to your room and open your closet door. The plan is this: Retrieve clothes. Put those clothes on. Spruce yourself up. Make sure you have everything you need. And then go find your friends and spend some time with them. It is a fun-filled evening, but it is altogether normal. It happens a million times a day, has done so for centuries, and will likely continue to do so for a long, long time after we are gone. You open you closet door. Standing right in the middle of your closet is some Thing. It stands well over six feet tall, nearing the ceiling. You might describe its silhouette as like that of a person wearing a robe, but there is no fabric. It is more like a sheet of dark draped over some inscrutable form. Perhaps it is hunched over, perhaps not. From underneath the pall extends two arms and a neck. Along the length of the arms are multiple joints, causing them to bend in myriad directions. The skin is monochromatic, a weird mottled gray and white. It looks as though pieces of it are peeling off. The arms end in seven-fingered hands. Each finger bends in four different places and ends with a long and yellowed nail. The neck snakes up into a skull like that of some otherworldly bovine, branching off into many horns at its peak. From within the hollow eye sockets two pinpricks of light looking back at you.
This is the best I can do at describing the image I keep seeing in my head. I for some reason keep imagining seeing a creature like this standing before me, in such a banal place, and thinking to myself, "What would I do in this situation?" I mean really. Do me a favor and imagine your own monster. It can look however you want it to look. But it must be weird. It doesn't even need to be scary! It just needs to be something that, if you saw it, would cause you to throw all of your preconceptions of reality out of the window. Something that would strike fear into you not because it itself terrifies, but because the idea that such a thing can exist does. Now imagine if you saw it in your kitchen, you bathroom, your classroom, your place of work, hell, the grocery store, one day. What would you do? I mean, sincerely, how would you react? How do people feel when their very basic understanding of reality is destroyed?
I keep thinking about seeing a monster in my closet and asking myself these questions. Would I scream and run away? Would I freeze in place? Would I start crying? Would I pass out? I don't know. I really just don't know. I have experienced strange events, traumatic events, and horrifying events, but I have never experienced anything truly reality-shattering. I'm not saying I want to. I just want to know what it would be like. But I guess I won't know until it happens. That's all from me. Thank you for reading!
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