VI

They say that you don’t imagine anyone in dreams whole cloth. Everyone is someone you’ve met or seen. Isn’t that an idea? Everyone is someone, no-one is no-one, and there’s not a single person who has ever been invented. What does that mean for the myths and legends of the world? Apollo? Maybe he was a baker. Zeus? Perhaps a Casanovaesque Athenian. How about Ms Eyre? Lady Chatterly and her ‘friend’? What would it mean to the world if we had never inflated and conflated people and created the pantheon of heroes, villains, gods, goddesses, and all the characters of the world’s fiction? Could we survive--no, could we stand to live in a world without those whom we ‘invent’ and admire?

It’s like how, when we are children, we always make imaginary friends. Harmless perfect beings whom we trust to be true. We always give them up; we are always told to give them up. Why do we adults deny children of their perfect delusion, yet continue with our own? We still write stories about imaginary people and tell other people about them. It seems that the only difference between a child’s imaginary playmate and an adult’s myth or legend is that one is a private fantasy; the other, a shared delusion.

If everyone ever thought of was real, at least in some form, is the same true of events? Is the every happening in a story really a corruption of memory? Or perhaps memory is the corruption; maybe our legends and tall-tales are the real truth of the world.

Or maybe imaginary people, places, and goings-on are just that: Imaginary. Maybe stories are just acceptable lies. Maybe.