The basis of the current application is adaptation.

I first made note of Dali’s method in 2017, but it never appeared to be practically useful until I came home and started digging through websites instead of books. Within the first few days, I came across The Wyoming Incident; first the videos and then the message board, where the written components of the story were published as posts by people/characters within the narrative. It seems to get labeled as an ARG because of a participatory period, during which readers could join the board and interact with the characters of the story. (People who registered then can still post today, I believe, but registration is closed and there hasn’t been any activity since 2021.)

On that board in 2007, during the most active period of the story, one of the writers/characters posted a set of instructions on “How To Summon an Aspect of Paranoia“. To me, it reads a bit more like a method of meditation on horror, but I guess part of the horror is the notion that you might be inviting possession. Which would obviously be terrible. Whatever the case, that practice itself is easily reworked a hundred different ways. Some easier than others, but paranoia is probably the easiest.

It wasn’t until two months ago that I had the adaptation complete, more or less. The visualization was as simple as possible: the paranoiac projection carves corridors – almost like digging a mine – occasionally finding cavities, or rooms. I can’t pretend I understand the finer details of this, but there is apparently a big difference between the projected corridor and the room. The projected corridor is simply that: a constructed way to, and from, and between, which only exists as the result of deliberate effort. The rooms are already there and, even as virtually featureless voids, they are prewired for the network. In other words: whatever you put in that room, no matter how foreign or false, is immediately, intrinsically, imperceptibly linked to all the other rooms and corridors which emerged from genuine perception and recollection.

The first session began, naturally, at the beginning. The writing within the session was addressed to myself, which is very unusual and wildly uncomfortable, but it was effective and it produced a certifiable, and very emo, reconception:

She was telling the truth: you did have something which she’d lost. But there was never any way she would get it back, and you were just the most potent depressant she could find, fast. You were used. Swallowed like a pill with side effects including high strangeness, from concentrated doses. But you were not even all of enough, and you are fucking miserable company regardless, so she maintained a steady diet of vodka. Probably a lot more than you even knew.

...and off I went. Of course, this interpretation has been thoroughly discredited worldwide, and heavily ridiculed among literal circles, since the night we watched Closer.

You’d never seen it. I knew it by heart. A few bars into The Blower’s Daughter, I felt your eyes on our locked hands. You didn’t look away from the screen again until the reprise at the end of the film.

As Jane strode between a pair of palms, I looked over at you. Your eyes were closed. They opened, already on me.

“Make some coffee, crybaby,” you said.

A few minutes later, as the first drops splashed across the bottom of the pot, it finally dawned on me that you’d just referenced the movie.  I walked back out of the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room. You were standing beside the coffee table, shoulders slouched, hands in your pockets, eyes on the floor.

I felt a chill.

“This will hurt,” you said. The rest happened fast.

Your hands slipped from your pockets. Your left swung behind your back, wrist to waist. My eyes were on the bend of your left arm as you took two steps toward me, but I caught the look in your eye at the last moment. I never saw your right.

flash.

This was the first time.

crash.

Back in one piece, one place – on my back, on the floor – my eyes refocused and found yours, fixed on the space where I had just been standing; wide with shock, drifting closed, then half-open and looking at me through unshed tears. Your left hand was still behind your back. Your right hand fell slowly back to your side.

You sighed.

“Oh.”

And smiled.

Now, at some point after I’d completed the first projected room and began transcribing the reconception I excerpted earlier, another door emerged in the wall opposite the threshold back to the corridor. Not projection, but recollection; I have seen this door before.

Considering the state of mind required to reach and enter that room, I think it’s understandable that it took a long fucking time for me to work up the nerve to go near it. But after a long fucking time, I did. And it led straight to The Blower’s Daughter and a suckerpunch.

So, why that memory? And what, precisely, triggered the link between the memory and the projection?

Good questions, if you ask me.

I’m struggling to get into this next part, because I haven’t yet gotten a grasp on it. I think it sails clear past the realms of mnemonics and projections, directly into madness. At the moment, madness is not a constructive state for me to be in, so I suppose I am treading carefully. As such, the barest facts follow:

Thursday morning at 1:18AM, during the session which began Wednesday morning at 5:00AM, a “window” appeared within one of the projected corridors. Like the door which had emerged before, this window was not a projection. It was familiar. Through the window though, things were more complicated. It was a place I knew, from a perspective I didn’t know. But it didn’t look like a place, located on the other side of a window. It looked like an image of a place, displayed on a screen, on the other side of a window. My attention was very quickly drawn to a pair of lights, moving together along a thin gray margin. I watched them for several minutes, occasionally blinking out or disappearing from view, but maintaining the same course forward upon return. At one point, very briefly, they both seemed to turn, facing toward one another. At that moment, something bright white and freezing cold shot past my right ear from behind, over my shoulder and straight into the window. I don’t have a way to describe what followed, but the general sensation and the experience was as though the entire corridor had exploded with me inside it.

The moment after, I was back on the bedroom floor in front of the mirror. Fucking horrified. I had no idea what had just happened. It had all the hallmarks of catastrophe and, whatever it was, I had absolutely no control. One thing I had not expected in an induced paranoid state was for something to vindicate every last fear I’d been manufacturing. As I was pouring a third glass to get a grip on myself, something terrible dawned on me. Five minutes and two search queries later, I’d found this:

As I write this, it is creeping toward half-past-three on Monday morning and um. I’m working on it.

The good news, I suppose, is that the corridor apparently did not explode. It was Friday morning before I’d composed myself well enough to sit down in front of the mirror, but once I had, I found things mostly as I’d left them. That window, however, was gone, and not far from the place where it had been, there was a series of new rooms which I had no hand in.