The most notable thing that happened to me when I was a young boy as Dennis Macadoo was the Fall of the long storm, what some called the long halloween. Thirty-one days of rain, and something else. Some don’t even remember the storm, but I do. I remember every detail, every drop of rain, every crack of thunder and every flash of lightning in the clouds. And I remember, most of all, the face of the mad-black toads that came with the storm.

Everything in the real begins in the dream.

Awake but dreaming.

It began with a belligerent disorderly conduct of the mind: a complete recontextualization of the so called mindframe I was living in, which had happened through the fruition of a hallucination brought on by a sneeze during a four-day sleep deprivation bender, a.k.a the sleep detox: the healthy resetting of the brain’s deeper processes which I believe can cure depression, which may actually be the case if you can bare the ride into sleepless self torture and the warping of perception.

I had had hallucinations before; drug-experimentation (mostly pills I stole from my pill addicted real estate agent mother and my himbo bodybuilder neighbor) is a scientific and intellectually meaningful activity in my case, but in this instance there had been no drugs, only the sneeze and the lack of sleep that was slowly killing my working fluid-memory, but my memories were mostly taruma and I didn’t need them anyway, and because sleep deprivation functioned a lot like delerients (if you wanted to see the shadow people, the doctor prescribed triple the benadryl and the sleep detox) you were able to achieve a level of tulpisticality (tulpaism or tulpamancy as a purely undistilled ideological force) akin to the monks of the age of enlightenment from which all the greatest imaginative possibilities of mindscape expansionism were achieved, hacking the mind in such a way that the limits to the human mental capacity were far expanded into a territory that would become known as simulation theory, foundationalizing themselves as the original simulationists building worlds better than the one from which they had been born as bioflesh, and it had been Pyrrho the long-dead philosopher who contributed to this region of ideological and post-pataphysical creedality by inventing the word ataraxia to describe these incredible mindscapes that were responsible for the Tulpistic possibility of pure-escapism, the state of imperturbability and absolute-equanimity, and it was precisely this ataraxia which was the precursor to possibilities unknown—freedom from anxiety allowed the mind to thrive unconditionally and eventually discover the infinite everything of the esoteric jux, to fully free the mind into its full potential of infinite world building—and the term was later used to describe the ideal mental state for soldiers entering battle, symbolically idealizing war as the ultimate road to meditative escapism, the same phenomena that happened if you played music loud enough: you would be cut off from the ability to self-reflect, and this over-barring music paradoxically led to the euphoric-mind and the possibility for existentialized tranquility; under such conditions it was impossible to maintain OCD, and so a good doctor always prescribed his patients a concert ticket for a night of peace and quiet, something that I had achieved during my four day sleep bender which had been comprised of (but not limited to) watching pixelated ideology in the form of television and consuming a gradually increased self-regimentional dose of neurostimulants in the form of energy drinks he stole from the neighbor across the street, a body builder named Allen McFarley (but who went by Ace Farley on stage), a self-prescribed anabolic steroid addictionist who had spent so long pumping blood into his arms that there was nothing left for his brain, and because Ace left his back door open during the day for his dog Rex it ment that I had access to everything a thirty-five year old bodybuilder did, a rainbow of stimulants that had the capabilities of mind-contortion and gateway-madness that could outperform even my strangest nightmares.

The fly on the wall had been there for hours.

Interdementionalized and transfixed within the escalating proprietary nature of my mind’s sleepless shape, I watched the fly on the wall, and had decided, since I was here, that I would kill the fly with my mind.

Just as this thought came to me, lighting struck outside my window, certain that it had struck a nearby street light or telephone poll. But as my mind bayed in obscureness and static templexity, I was unfazed by the bolt of lighting. The lighting had been coming all day and night, and as far as I was concerned, the energy of the storm was the very thing fueling my esoteric out-of-mind experience which would propel me into a kind of storming of my own mind inner thoughts, like the prehistoric storms of the time of the dinosaurs for which my mind had previously been astral-connected with long before my first birth and even before the time of the big fish and egg of consciousness; and perhaps even before the time of the ouroboros at the bottom of the bottomless void.

I watched the fly on the wall for hours, and conspired to take its life. At a single point I directed my mental energy, directly where I suspected the flys heart would be. I imagined a small, green and gushing little thing, and demanded it to explode.

Half the day was gone in attempt to kill the fly, with no avail. I decided to shift my energy from its heart to its mind in a clear escalation into psychological warfare. My long post-insectoidiadic brain was mostly incapable of understanding the lowly, almost prehistoric neurological framework of the insects brain, but this shouldn’t stop me from being able to telepathically send it some type of neurological information that it could perhaps vaguely understand or perhaps decipher in some archaic manner that would suffice. It was my hope that this would be enough to launch a larger attack on its mind, perhaps convincing the fly that I was some sort of higher post-insect god-entity or even a kind of terminator sent to kill him.

Suddenly the fly began to move around the wall for the first time in hours. These sudden movements were a sign that my mental attacks may have been working.

At about the point at which I could feel my own brain beginning to throb more and more rapidly, the fly came upon two other flies, both of whom were busy with a large dead spider. The three flies began to feed upon the corpse of the huge arachnid. It seemed that the three flies on the wall were comrades of some sort. Each, it seemed, recognised its comrade's identity as fellow fly without further need of communication of any sort—and together they feasted on the big meal.

In an attempt to subvert the fly and his comrades, I decided that I would do an astral projection and imagine myself in the body of a fly. Perhaps they would see me as one of them.

As a fly I moved about the wall and went to where the flies feasted on the large arachnid corpse. After some moment of time, something terrible happened. I accidentally began to astral project into the body of the arachnid corpse, and suddenly felt a great, immense pain. I closed my eyes and fell into great agony as the three flies feasted on my body as I dangled helplessly.

From the POV of the arachnid corpse I continued my psychological attack on the flies.

But the flies on the wall were wise. They had apparently been watching my mind for some time, and had no doubt at all that I was not only a powerful and terrible schizophrenic entity sent to kill them all, but that I might also be—they suspected—that I was sent as a spy by the arachnids who had been killing their fellow comrades for millions of years, torturing them in giant webs designed as sacrificial altars for whatever gods the arachnids worshiped. Either way, the flies knew what I meant to do, and that they must escape before that time arrived. They therefore, very cleverly, ascended from the wall in unisine, and began to flap its wings furiously; and soon it soared high above my mind. In my heart lurked fear—an ancient and instinctive sense of the supernatural. The flies now knew what I was thinking, and could decode my thoughts.

The fly buzzed past me and returned, and I watched it and considered killing it, but my brain seemed to be full of buzzing flies, and it took some time before I decided upon an appropriate technique, for my own brain is not a particularly large organ by any standards—though by those of the Earthly Fly Society it has long since ceased to be a fly-sized organ, at any rate; or rather, it is, as I have previously explained, no longer really an organ at all, having been transcended in its former function through the process I have indicated. The new organ has no definite boundaries except in the sense of a few peripheral organs, which are now, in the final analysis, the only boundaries of thought. And, besides, there are many other insects whose bodies are more than three feet high: the fly is a member of an obsolete class. But I am digressing, in the fashion of one who is beginning to talk like an idiot, for I am not a fly-talker (though in certain moods I can become a fly-speaker). My thoughts are not flies on the wall, I am the wall. The walls are not to be confused with the fly's eyes, which are merely its eyes, and the wall with the fly's body (the thing's original, real body, if we are to use a phrase that would be true of the insect), though the walls of my mind are sometimes covered with flies. So it must be with all flies, for they do not exist except as parts of the wall's own organic life-process (which is a kind of thinking process), and it is my task to take their place, so far as that goes, and keep the wall alive and awake in order to permit the fly's thinking process to occur uninterrupted.

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So it came about, finally, that I was quite tired of killing flies in the conventional manner, for I was becoming weary of flies (as I have already intimated, I am now thoroughly tired of everything—excepting myself, that is). So when the fly buzzed past me this time, I simply let it pass. Then I stopped trying to think at all and began to watch the fly itself; not for its own sake, but because I wanted to see what manner of being that was without brains.

It was a fly, in every particular. It had a fly’s feet, and a fly's wings, and a fly's antennae, with all the proper arrangements of sensory organs. Its abdomen was the typical fly structure, and the head was a fly's head, and so were the thorax and the carapace, and the fly's proboscis. It was a fly; or rather, it was one of the many varieties of fly-being that swarm, in the abstract of my dream world, upon the walls and the ceiling of my mind. For, after all, the fly is just another type of thinking creature, one that is not very intelligent, as thinking creatures go, yet much more intelligent than I am; and the wall, or my brain, is an organic extension of that fly-brain. In the first place I became aware that the fly had a brain of its own, which I had not seen before, hidden below the level of the flies' eyes and behind the proboscis and the antennae. Then I saw that this head was not merely a head, but an organ of a totally different nature; a new type of thinking creature, though one that was still very much a fly. There is, however, no fundamental difference between the wall and the fly, for both things are manifestations of an organic process of self-awareness; for, although the wall, as I have previously hinted, is an entirely artificial creation, the fly is not. Indeed, the wall is more artificial than the fly, while the fly is more complex than the wall. So the fly could not be the wall or the opposite of the wall, for both of these were forms of thinking creaturehood, but had to be one or the other; and in such a case, of course, there was no need to choose between them.

I looked at the fly-form closely in my mind, and observed that the fly's head was composed primarily of several layers of what looked like transparent or semi-transparent matter (for it was only in the last analysis that the fly was any kind of being at all, since it did not exist except as a form of organic, self-aware energy), each layer being separated from the next and forming a separate entity. These layers were connected with one another by thin, flexible membranes; a sort of delicate network that I knew to be capable of a considerable degree of elasticity. These membranes appeared to be made of a special substance that the fly could extrude in great quantities whenever it wished; and when the material had fully formed, the membrane, too, ceased to exist, though it remained as a sort of memory of the fly's activity (which might well have taken some hours or even days to complete). The membranes, however, were only the outer aspect of the fly-form, for the substance itself was composed largely of minute crystalline structures arranged in highly complex patterns. These crystals were capable of rearranging themselves, and they did so constantly, though it is hard to say how. Their arrangement changed with the changing light and the position of the fly—or the thought-process, as it now seemed to me to be—but I noticed that the more stable the arrangement, the faster the fly-form moved along, and the slower it moved when the arrangement was erratic. When the fly paused and seemed to rest, its crystal composition was in constant flux and change. This state of being and nonbeing was probably due to the speed of the fly's movement—the speed which it kept, despite the fact that it had to keep moving, or else would be caught by the walls and crushed.

So far I was able to watch the fly's movements and understand them almost completely, but as I watched a curious thing happened: a small hole appeared through the centre of the fly's head, and I heard the sound of voices. They were very faint and indistinct, and they must have come from quite outside my body, for that is the only place where I can hear. I listened carefully, but did not understand what the voices were saying. They were certainly speaking a foreign language. However, a few words were clear, and their meanings were startling. Apparently the fly's head consisted primarily of a brain whose functions were to control the fly's movements, to receive impressions, and to transmit impressions to external objects. That was obvious, because I now knew that the brain was not a part of the fly, and also because I had heard and partly understood the voices and knew that they came from outside the fly. Now I began to wonder about the voice transmission. I wondered if the fly's head communicated with the brain directly, or through the wall—a point which the voice had brought out clearly. I could not tell, nor could I determine how the fly communicated with the brain, unless I knew what kind of substance the brain was comprised of. But I was sure that the latter was made up of certain crystals—and, therefore, perhaps of something else.

At the same time, I was becoming more concerned about the nature of the voice I had just heard and about the nature of the thing it represented. For the voice was definitely a voice, and the fly-form was definitely alive; yet, despite this, I realized I could not think of the fly as living, since it was neither animal nor vegetable; being, rather, a sort of new kind of creature altogether. And, although I was not certain of the identity of the entity that transmitted that voice, I knew that it was neither a thought-creature (which, being a form of organic matter, was subject to death) nor an animal. On the other hand, it was a product of the earth and the air, and so, by implication, subject to death. Its source of food was unknown, but it would have been a natural source—that, if nothing else, was obvious from its ability to eat through the wall. So I tried to picture it as the ultimate survivor, and I felt a shiver pass over me.

This, then, was what I saw and heard on my return to the wall. It was not pleasant, for it showed me how the fly continued to exist and move despite its unnatural circumstances, and how, without my knowledge, it had entered my life and begun to work its will upon my being and thoughts. I had never given any thought to the possibility of such a thing happening to me, and I found myself almost frightened, but at the same time intrigued to some extent. At least I was no longer so convinced of the sanity of my own ideas and my own sense of reality; and I decided to go on with the experiment. I had not lost my courage so quickly as all that, though I felt some misgivings about the future. Nevertheless, I had the feeling that I ought to continue; for something had brought the fly to me, and the fly wanted me to do exactly what I was doing—whatever that might be.

I waited until night before I resumed the experiment, but the darkness helped, since nothing had happened during the afternoon and there was no further noise from outside the wall. As soon as it was dark enough, I went to the wall and examined it more carefully. The fly was still working; that much was clear, and I could see the faint trace of a luminous green light in the hole through the centre of the fly's head. After half an hour, the greenness faded and disappeared altogether. My fears and misgivings were increased, for it seemed likely that the fly was about to leave my house and proceed into the world outside. I decided to wait and see, but there was no indication of anything abnormal. In fact, the fly seemed as restless as ever, and it was difficult to keep my eyes on it for long. However, when I looked again, I was astonished to find that the hole was now a tiny slit that led directly out of my house. I stared at it in astonishment, and I did not know what to make of it. I was not sure of the nature of the creature itself—whether it really was a living thing; whether it could communicate with me from outside—but the way in which it had come into existence and how it had used my room to pass out of it were both beyond argument. I decided to watch the fly closely and hope that it would leave in a normal manner, and I determined at least to wait a day before attempting to enter another room.

It was with considerable trepidation that I resumed the experiment after a full ten days had elapsed. This time I was sure of the fact that the fly was dead, and the sensation of the previous occasion made the process seem less frightening; although I felt very uneasy about what happened, and I dreaded opening my door.

In a short while I felt perfectly at home within the interdimensional mind-scape; and I knew, too, that this was a place where time had no meaning. I was as aware of how many hours, minutes, seconds I was spending in the process of exploring my own psyche as I would be if I had been reading an ordinary book. And the longer I spent here, the less time I seemed to be wasting, and the more the room began to assume its true form. The walls became visible, and the ceiling—which had become like a far away world—became clear.

Now that I had killed the fly, I felt alone.

I went to the window to watch the rain outside. The storm was still raging as hard as it had been for the last few days. The neighbors house across the street had been brutalized by the storm. Tiles on the roof were missing, the yard was swollen with water and had become like some sort of strange aquatic swamp. At any moment I half-expected swamp monsters to start appearing from the underbelly of the once normal lawn.

It had been days since I slept now. But I truly was dreaming while awake. And I was prepared, again, for something unusual to occur.