For some time, my dreams have been tame, fragmented – white (I realise I’ve dreamt, but can’t remember what of). Albeit punctuated with spasmodic night terrors.

A reflection on time lived? Semi-vacuous existence through COVID, home working, low on human connection, glazed with normality, but fed by anxiety. Nothing new and of note outside of the collective sphere of concern and debate to stir the rumblings of my unconscious. No novel processing or the getting to grips with the diverse interplay of a life’s adventures. Smooth and tepid, a monotonous mass of time, undulating – a dull serpent, but one with a venomous bite. Paper dreams and paper life, flimsiness and adaptation to a more mundane, enclosed sphere, a gentle forward and back with no glorious dynamism. Life as flat lines and spikes.

Enter virtual reality (VR), a long-awaited excursion into the new frontiers of tech. On the horizon for some time, offering peculiar potentialities and fragmented experiences of embodied selfhood. Finally, a headset in my possession. A brave new (ish) world. A whacky artifice to throw into the oscillations of my existence. Delivering immersive, 360, hyper-visual spaces. Majestic and bizarre physics, embodied in an uncanny valley of near me, not me, virtuality.

Dreams bleeding flavour, colours vivid, narratives returning, fusing and now remembered. Spurts of novel ignitions, body and mind remapping. Vibrations of being, the unconscious busy sorting and structuring, processing novel stimuli. The grey serpent now glistens, its technicolour scales and bold oscillations creating psychedelics ripples in the grey amphitheatre where my white dreams once limply performed.

Feed me exotic bursts of dynamism, flood my senses with colour and aliveness, fill the amphitheatre with the bustle of experience.

Turn the venom into part of the exotic dance, embrace the bite and bask in patterns that dazzle.

Heed the warning though, the sublime overtures that dazzle and confuse carry a weight, a burden, a heavy load. Intense working, parallel processing. Novel demands and an intoxicating headiness.

The scintillating movements draw being into landscapes of phantasm, poorly trodden adventures in oscillations unknown, humming as an overlay to life already lived. Slither trails emblazoned through the maximal space of conscious experience, complex, tiresome but alive with possibilites.