"An Imposed Sanity" by Ben Cameron

Ever had that dream where you can’t tell if you’re awake or not?  That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Ever lived something so extraordinary, so bizarre that you’re sure you’re dreaming?  No, not winning the lottery, nor being offered a scholarship to Michigan Institute of Technology.  Rather, something so improbable that you question your own sanity.  Or at least the sanity imposed upon us.

Sure you have.  We were all children.  Once.

But, it was normal to see those things then.  It was accepted.

What made you stop believing in monsters under the bed?  What made you stop checking the little stream at the bottom of your yard for faeries?  Growing up.  Maturity.  Adolescence.  Puberty.  The same time you stopped thinking about ghosts you started thinking about your hair, your clothes, her figure and whether or not she liked you.

But does that mean they are not there?  Ask any child and they will tell you that of course they exist; that adults are simply incapable of believing, of seeing.  To use the old cliché: “spoken from the mouths of babes.”

I thought like you did.  I believed what my mind registered and didn’t question.  Look where that got me.  Or rather, didn’t get me.

It was after my first-born arrived.  A beautiful, bubbling boy; fine golden hair, bright, shining eyes; you know the stereotype.  That was him.  We loved him, my wife and I, with all our heart.  We still do, that has not changed.  Each night we’d put him to bed, crooning lullabies softly in his ear till he fell asleep.  On one such night three months after his birth, whilst tucking him in, he gurgled happily, pointing towards the ceiling.

To be honest now, it was for such a fleeting instant I cannot truly say what I saw when I turned my head.  Whether it was a trick of my imagination or…something else is irrelevant, for I saw it many times afterwards, the frequency and detail of which increased almost daily.

At first, it was a glimmer of light, almost too fast for my eye to catch, visible for only the shortest moment.  Gradually, I saw wings, fluttering quickly.  Over many weeks, a small fragile body solidified.  Finally, one night I saw her properly.  A tiny, delicate fairy.  My wife never saw it.

For the longest time I refused to believe it.  For the longest time I refused to acknowledge the little things creeping into my vision as I lived my life: the flick of a tail behind a tree, the swoop of a dark shadow across the sky or the tiny lizard sleeping happily amongst the flames of our fire.

It took many years for my eyes to be free of the self-imposed filters upon them.  By that time, my baby boy was no longer a baby.  He was beginning to think about his hair, his clothes, that girl’s figure and whether or not she liked him.  No longer did he check under his bed for monsters or down in our stream for faeries.

I watched, unable to intervene, as society’s blinkers fell across his eyes until he was like everyone else.  I watched forlornly as he forgot the times we shared watching the comings and goings of the fae; creatures so impossible I would have questioned my sanity had it not happened gradually.

Why do we refuse to accept?  Why do impose upon ourselves an unreal universe?  Because we refuse to allow science and fantasy to interact.  How can one exist with the other?  Yet they do.  I know they do.

So do you.  But you make excuses for yourself.  It’s a shadow on the wall, a bird flying overhead, an earthquake, a gas explosion, not a monster beneath the bed, a gryphon soaring through the sky, an angered mage nor dragons.

But I am not the only one.  On the verge of insanity, living with my family but worlds apart, I found I was not alone.  There are many like me.  Many are famous, but equally, many more are not.  We live in our own separate worlds, having deconstructed our self-imposed sanity of this world and built our own, true world.

We allow others to see, if but for a moment, the true world they live in.

We are the authors, the artists, the playwrights of this world.

We know and believe the truth.