Highbrau 12 - Dreams & Reality by Highbrau Magazine

Volume III, Issue IV

AUTUMN 014

HIGHBRAU

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DREAMS & REALITY

HIGHBRAU MAGAZINE HBMAG.CA Volume III - Issue IV - AUTUMN 014

Words 17 4-5 14-16 8 18-19 12-13 6-7 3 20 9

ANONYMOUS CASSIE JASINSKI JAMES W. JESSO JOHN MURRAY LEWIS JENNA LUELO JULIA A. MCROBERTS AMY PLACHTA DENIS ROBILLARD R. SCHULTZ J.J. STENFELD

Mark Ciesluk

IMAGES

JOHN G HARMONY KAN CHRISTINA MACLELLAN EVA MACMILLAN ALYSIA SACKS R. SCHULTZ IAN WILLMS

10-11 6, 12 3, 5, 13, 15 18 20 9 8, 16

Cover: IAN WILLMS BACK COVER: DAVID THOMPSON INSIDE BACK COVER: IAN WILLMS

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Graham Engel

Website Editor: Samuel tisi Copy Editor: R. SCHULTZ Creative Consultant: ETHAN GREAVETTE

HIGHBRAU RADIO HBRADIO.CA

ZED DR. MARK INTERSTELLAR SAM

DJ CONAN DJ SAVIOUR BLOODY MARY

THE OFFICIAL FOUR MONTH PLAN To be included on our mailing list or enquire about future topics and events contact us at:

submissions@hbmag.ca

Statement of artistic ownership: Highbrau is a limited local publication and is run and funded on a not-for-profit model by an all-volunteer staff. All words and images submitted to Highbrau may be posted on our website and/or printed within this magazine, for which we solicit donations in order to recover our costs of printing and webhosting. All published artists are credited and thanked, but we are unable to offer financial incentives for contributors at this time. You retain all other rights to your own work.

HB #13 - Education/occupation Highbrau was founded in 2010 by three students of post-secondary educational institutions, all of whom now spend our time contributing to fields other than those which we once studied. We value the experiences and skills gained through our time in school, but we have also been told that our situation differs substantially from the landscape our parents faced just a generation ago. Apparently, for many the pathway from education to occupation was once well defined: Get to college or university, earn a degree or certification in something you enjoy doing, get a job in your field, count down the days until retirement. Sounds good to us. So, what went wrong? Or if you are one of the lucky ones, what went right? How did your education prepare you, or fail to prepare you, for your adventures in employment? Is our school system doing an adequate job of preparing a workforce for the jobs of today?

Submissions Due: February 1st 2015

HIGHBRAU SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Words We are soliciting any and all opinion pieces, analyses, stories, poetry, and other original written works. Please send all submissions as a .doc file. Submit 500-750 words for one page with title and picture, 1500-2400 for 2-3 pages. Submissions may be edited by our staff for formatting & clarity. Highbrau strives to provide informed perspectives in all of our articles. If your submission is intended as an argument rather than an expression of opinion (i.e. it makes substantive fact-based claims) we encourage you to submit a list of websites, papers, books, etc. as references and further readings.

Images We are soliciting any and all photographs, drawings, illustrations, comic strips, and other original visual art in any format. Submit images and photographs in the highest resolution possible as .png, .jpg, or .pdf files. Remember that we print in black and white. We can and will transform any colour submissions into B&W images. Images, photographs, and other visual submissions will be lightly edited (brightness, contrast, etc) in order to optimize them for appearing in print.

Send all submissions to submissions@hbmag.ca by the deadline above. Please contact us early to announce your intent to contribute, if possible.

DREAMS DENIS ROBILLARD

In this dream, I am wearing a vest of bees. I promised myself I would be good for one hour and a half. I would sharpen all of my pencils and pretend to write something. But then I fell asleep. In this dream I was wearing a vest of bees. Some people live in the land of postcards and dreams and adapt quite well. Like me their limbs move in sleep like sleek secret scissors. Leg blades slicing you into delicate meat as you dare to dream. We grow accustomed to the sound of the water here as it runnels among the beast salads and the fluvial dawn. Both of us in tune to wakefulness and the green dreams that prevail. Fresh thoughts sprinkled spread over the salad aspects of these marvels. Now there are scenes of the opening and closing of trees like an Erie lock that has rusted out of purpose. There among the birches your basket eyes bask. There among the verdant wood your festival dreams dream again. Still flourishing. In my next barn dream a friendly circle of wasps are trying to make a home. Their nest of gray conical anger is put on reserve for the winter. We burn it quickly with kerosene and rags. The bee vow now broken. Their insect language destroyed until we awake.

I’m staring at these ants, amazed, through rusty beer bottle caps which act as crude binoculars. The old camp cabin mosquitoes are lamenting the day at the torn window screen. I can’t shake loose this interlocked humming inside of me that speaks of finality.

April 22, 1992 This dream is of barnyard animals, an enclosure for cattle, an outlying valley and a clump of trees. I can see cows and a few horses. Up in the trees,

weirdly enough, is a monkey howling at me and staring down throwing bananas. I’m trapped inside this muddy coral, slouched down on all fours like a greased pig scampering to flee through thick mud. Cloistered by white planks, an enclosure with no clear exit.

In a panic I push through an emergency door, on my knees, wading through a thick slop of fresh mud. Some slippery goo is slathered all over my body. All I can think about is an albatross around my neck.

September 23, 1990 There are red ants scurrying on the ground towards a sandy hill. HBmag.ca

Christina MacLellan

SHARK JAW CASSIE JASINSKI

e had bought it three years before, during a trip to the Caribbean, from a man on the beach. It was originally the business end of one of the large species of fish that frequented the area where he’d vacationed. The ring of teeth was larger than his head. Crusty ligaments stretched along the off-white joints that had once mobilized the smooth, serrated teeth set in the jaw in irregular, recessed rows. That rough white bone, that dead, uneven grin, had accompanied him wherever he’d moved since. He sat in his new apartment now, with the lights off. A persistent drone of late evening traffic accompanied the oily breeze that filtered through his open, screened window. He rested his arms on his knees and his head in his hands, and shifted the weight of his weary body on the edge of his bed-the only piece of furniture he had set up so far. The shark jaw gaped at him from an open cardboard box on the floor by his feet. In the darkness of the room, the box seemed bottomless; the rest of the shark’s body could be stretching through the floor. Could be - but it wasn’t. The jaw was only menacing in the world behind his eyes. Here, in the normalcy of his apartment with the smell of the sea 300 miles away, it was, once again, just the product of a rash decision. Suddenly agitated, Marcus jumped up, slammed the lid of the box closed and, with shaking hands, rushed a tape gun across the open cardboard seams. The dreams had started the year after he bought the shark jaw, when the world suddenly became all-tooaware of the collapsing ocean ecosystem. As if goaded into ghostly life by the threatened fate of its species, the shark jaw, which had hung mutely on the bedroom wall of his old apart4

ment, began to leer at Marcus accusingly. It snapped at his conscience and, somehow, followed the trail of his repressed guilt into his sleeping mind. Now, in his dreams, a cloudy, finned presence drifted languidly at the edge of his sight. He had considered throwing the jaw into the garbage after the first night, but the selfish part of him remembered the money he’d spent in the Caribbean and curbed his urgency to dispense of it. Lying in the empty apartment with the shark jaw less than a meter away from the foot of his bed, he rethought his decision yet again. As ideas formed, they became more unintelligible and fantastic until he realized he was slipping into sleep. The rush of cars was now the rush of bubbles; the smell of oil and smog was the salt of the sea that swallowed him.

he visibility was worse than usual, worse than it had ever been. Marcus stretched his hands before him and he could barely see the tips of his fingers; they were blurred, like the familiar form of the shark always was. Indefinable shapes hung at the top of the waterline where the shallow light poured down to meet the murky mess below. He floated, suspended as if in molasses, unable to move except at the whim of the water. It was then, as he floated there, that he felt something aerodynamic approaching from behind him, pushing waves of vibrations against his back. The movement stopped unexpectedly. The water cleared and the molasses hold released his limbs. Now, he could see the long line laced through the water above him and the finless bodies of hundreds of sharks floating limp in their fatal grasp under the ocean surface. With one cautious push of his freed left arm, he turned his body in HBmag.ca

the water--and faced a broad-nosed shark with striped skin. It, too, was caught on the line and when its mouth was pulled open by the draw of the current, he realized its jaw had been ripped from its head.

hen Marcus stirred the next morning, he remembered only two things about his dream: it had been different than all of the others before it, and he had seen a shark up close. The image of its broad, striped snout flared in his mind. Once he had consumed his morning Advil, he ventured over to one of the lonely, stillpacked boxes that was stored in the farthest corner of the room, opened it, and drew out his last purchase from his previous town: an old encyclopaedia of sharks. His fingers flipped through pages until he identified the dead animal he had seen in his dream. It was a tiger shark. Marcus closed the book and knelt, thinking. Surely these dreams would stop soon. It had been so long since he’d dreamed of anything else besides the ocean and its shadowy occupant. It was true he’d never felt threatened - it was rather astonishing, given the stereotypical association of the words ‘shark’ and ‘attack’. Nevertheless, the dreams left him agitated in a way he couldn’t understand, as if he had no control over what was happening and no choice but to open his eyes a little wider each time. Two weeks later, the dreams intensified. Each night, in the distance of his mind’s ocean, a live shark became more visible. Its form became sharper until he could almost distinguish the individual tail fin strokes that pushed it through the water. Then, inexplicably with the coming of winter, the shark vanished altogether, and whenever he dreamed, he drifted alone through the limitless water.

he shark didn’t come back to his dreams. He was relieved until he realized that the shark’s absence hadn’t freed him from the molasses hold of the water. Every night, he was still there, restrained, alone, and

explain, it was once more just an object he’d purchased in the Caribbean.

arcus’ hand trembled as he brought the bottle of water to his lips. The clock on the bed stand read 3:00 AM. It had been six months since he’d last seen the shark. He was back in the Caribbean with his family and he had brought the shark jaw along in a last attempt to find the shark again. It had worked. Somehow, the shark had come back to his dreams. It glided ten feet in front of him with its mouth shut and its eyes covertly glancing at his tense human body. He felt its apprehension and curiosity. They eyed each other and then it moved on, its tail flicking casually from side to side as it receded from view. Having finished his water and calmed himself down, Marcus sat with the jaw in his lap. He was not afraid to look at it, to touch it now. It was, after all, the only vestige left of an animal that was long dead. He shut his eyes when the cool touch of the ocean breeze found him and fingered the jaw’s teeth gently. He knew what he had to do: send it back.

arcus walked into the surf and with a smooth movement of his arm, flung the arch of teeth as far over the sea as he could. Maybe the lonely water dreams would stop now. Perhaps it was enough that he’d sent it Christina MacLellan back, he mused as the sea shackled his ankles and then released him again. That night, when Marcus slept, There was something terrifying about floating in his mind flashed with colour. There a dead space. It unsettled his mind and left him was sand, coral, and shallow, cryssearching the stillness for what had disappeared. tal water. There were dazzling flashes of fish and crustaceans, sea slugs aware that he was so - a solitary, floating the stillness for what had disap- and eels. And sharks. Not finless, not ing human. The waters of his mind peared. He kept the jaw in sight after caught on hooks and dangling in an were empty… although, he recalled, the shark’s disappearance, unpacked endless, lightless limbo, but swimon the nights when it rained, the pat- his apartment and hung it on the wall ming near him and far from him, ter of hooks hitting the top of the wa- at the foot of his bed like he had in his darting into crevices and gliding docter. previous residence. It still gaped at ile just above the sand. Marcus had There was something terrifying him but without the imagined vitality never slept so peacefully. Somewhere about floating in a dead space. It un- he’d previously attached to its arched in the ocean outside his window, the settled his mind and left him search- teeth. Now, for reason he could not shark jaw continued to grin. HBmag.ca 5

DREAMS & REALITY AMY PLACHTA

flipped through the pages of the photo album, reviewing 2011: The Year That Was. The beginning of it all, small victories, family and friends showing more pride than concern, coming home with more self-esteem than I’d ever had, and almost blacking out the very next day. The same day I couldn’t wait in line without my legs shaking, threatening to give out. The same day I shook and shivered at

the ATM, getting cash to buy a hoodie because even in the dying days of August, I couldn’t get warm. It had all started with the best intentions. I’d read about fasting. The internet told me that with medical supervision, fasting could lead to brighter eyes, clearer skin, and better concentration. The weight loss was just a bonus. Well, maybe for them.

tart small, they said. Try three days. Work up to a week. Ease in with vegetables and juice. Ease out the same way. That might work for people worried about bright eyes and clear skin, but I was morbidly obese and desperate. I dove straight in. On January first, the only thing to pass my lips was water. January second was the same, and the third, and the fourth. On February ninth I had some carrot juice and a pear. Forty days, fifty pounds. The number on the scale was all it took for my fractured, nutrient-deprived brain to become addicted. The most interesting thing about the pictures wasn’t the change in my body, but the change in my face. At the beginning of the year I had weighed 280 pounds, but I’d struck a mockcheerleader pose and grinned. By the time spring rolled around, I stood in a generic, hand on hip pose with a vague Mona Lisa smile. At the end of August I was upright, but limp. I posed for the camera with all the excitement and energy of a coma patient. My face was blank and tired. I took nine days off, allowing myself a strict ration of fruits and vegetables. Over the course of that week, I ate about a day’s worth of calories. Day Ten became Day One of another forty day fast. Nine days off and then twenty-eight days on. Seven days off. Twenty-eight on.

he days that I starved myself, I could think of nothing but food. I followed blogs dedicated to pictures of beautifully plated dinners and desserts. I read recipes and scrolled through kitchen supply store websites. I watched my coworkers eat. I stared at the food as it entered their mouths, ignoring the conversations happening in front of me and listening intently to the crunch of the fresh lettuce in a sandwich across the room. Seven days off. Twenty-eight on. Seven days off. Forty days on.

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Harmony Kan

I was perpetually nauseous. The eight

subway stops between my apartment and my office became too much to take. I would get off at every second or third stop and sit on a bench with my head between my knees, knowing there was nothing in me to throw up, but not keen on dry heaves and the taste of bile. When my head cleared, I would get on the next train with tentative hope that there would be a seat available. If there was, I might make it the rest of the way to work, but I’d also have to sit forward and start looking for nearby grab bars two stops in advance, because the muscles in my legs had withered and couldn’t lift me on their own. I was late for work everyday. When I finally got there, I didn’t accomplish much. I couldn’t focus. I could barely keep my eyes open. My chair pressed harshly against my bones. The only way I could distract myself from the pain and exhaustion was to scroll through websites about food and fantasize about the texture and taste. Every time I let myself eat, I lost a little more control. Weeks of obsession took the inch I allowed myself and stretched it into a mile. Food. Mountains of food. A day’s worth of calories in a sitting. I couldn’t stop. I ate so much that my body rejected it and I threw up. Guilt followed every meal, so I started to take a laxative chaser.

t first, one pill would clear me out in a matter of hours. But my body adapted, so I started taking two. Three. Six. Ten. Eventually they stopped working entirely, but I kept taking them. If they spared me even an ounce of weight, it was worth it. Nine days off. Thirty pounds packed on. The last photo in the album must have been from the end of August. I didn’t recognize myself, and when I realized it was me, I was horrified. My face was gaunt. Grey skin puddled under my eyes in leathery bags. Taken from above, my eyes looked especially large

compared to my body. The overall image looked like the lovechild of Tim Burton and Angelina Wrona. The worst part wasn’t my vacant stare, or my corpse-like skin. It was the abnormally slender fingers of my bony hand wrapped around my waist like the strings of a corset. My entire torso squeezed into a single fist, strangling my stomach, choking my intestines, holding my body hostage. I woke up that November morning on the verge of tears. The details were already swimming away, but that last picture was burned into the skin behind my eyelids. My conscious mind recognized it instantly as a caricature, but my horrified sleeping brain had seen a photo, a perfect record of the living corpse that had been walking around, going through the motions of my life for the last few months. August thirty-first had been the last day of my sixth consecutive fast. And I’d promised myself a break. I knew I needed it: my teeth were loose; my breath, body, and urine had taken on a strange odour; my muscles were weak; my lack of focus had dragged me from the Golden Child of the office to the verge of being fired; I was in pain; I was nauseous; my lungs were too weak to sing or even laugh; my hair was as brittle as straw; and I was having chest pains almost daily.

But the weight started to come back, and quickly. People stopped complimenting me. My new pants didn’t fit anymore. I tried to reboot myself with a quick, three day fast, but I failed on day two. I tried again. I failed. I tried again. I failed again.

hen I dreamed of a selfie painted in broad strokes of the modern gothic aesthetic, and in the horrified, disgusted aftermath I promised myself, no matter what, no matter how much weight I gained back, I would never, ever starve myself again. And I didn’t. I stopped taking laxatives. By the beginning of 2012 I was committed: I needed to recover. I couldn’t go down that road again. Even when I returned to my starting weight. Even when I surpassed it. I wouldn’t go back down that road. I reminded myself of the exhaustion, the pain, the nausea. I remembered not being able to climb a flight of stairs or get up from a lowpiece of furniture. I looked at a real photograph taken the night I met my idol. The night it was taken, all I could see was weight left to lose. Looking back now, all I see is how thin and brittle my hair had become. Two years later, I’m still recovering. My weight is the highest it’s ever been. I’m seeing multiple doctors and being sent for a range of tests to figure out how much damage I’ve done and what I might have to do to fix it. I know what I need to do and I’m desperate to do it, but everywhere I look things set me back. Journalists harass Anne Hathaway to find out how she achieved her deathly pallor in Les Miserables. They ask Scarlett Johannson if there was room under Black Widow’s body suit for underwear, and then they photoshop her into a new hip-to-waist ratio. A single word can send me into a pit of selfloathing, blaming my body for every wrong thing in my life, and hating myself for gaining back the weight I lost. I struggle everyday, jumping from optimistic resolutions to a trough of comfort food in less time than it takes to say “fat joke”. But then I remember that dream, that distorted picture of who I used to be, and I reaffirm the best promise I ever made myself:

I will not starve. HBmag.ca 7

HOLOCENES JOHN MURRAY LEWIS

ate was against Franklin Lovelace—that was it. Fate had to be against him. How else could his every dream expire, his every idea fail, his every line of poetry, ripped bleeding from his melancholy heart, fall unheard upon the earth? Franklin Lovelace had come from nothing and he had arrived at nothing. The universe did him no favours, lent him no help, whispered no kind words. He was not wealthy, not healthy, not happy; and for these and countless other reasons — all inscrutable to Franklin — his exasperated wife had packed up the children and fled for her mother’s just as the snow was starting to fall. Ian Willms

It was the craziest snowstorm anyone had ever seen. The man on the radio blamed the melting of the great Antarctic ice sheet. The woman on the radio said “Now we’ve done it!” and laughed. Then the power went out. Franklin stood at the window of his empty apartment and watched the sidewalk, then the bushes, then the fenders of his car all suffocated in white; and then he was determined to end it all for good. He penned a parting haiku, but tore it up after four 8

drafts and flushed it down the toilet so that no one could ever find it. He trudged out to his car, took a deep, frigid breath, and plugged the exhaust. But the snow was falling, cascading down like an avalanche from some unseen peak, and it concealed completely the treacherous patch of ice by the driver’s side door upon which Franklin slipped, hit his head, and lost consciousness.

he snow did not stop falling, the cold did not relent. Franklin could not have known this, but on the day he decided to end it all a new ice age was dawning. Hours passed, then days, months,

years. The snow gathered, compacted, gathered, compacted, until his apartment building was transfigured into a towering cathedral of icy spires.

Millennia passed. Ages passed. Eras. Glaciers rose, receded. The people who find him and thaw him are human, but not the same kind of human that Franklin is. They don’t speak English, but the linguists among them have studied the prehistoric record, and with a little effort HBmag.ca

they can understand Franklin and make themselves understood in turn. They take Franklin to the authorities, to the media, to the scientific societies and museums. They have him speak about his ancient life: his dreams, his ideas, his poetry, even his wife and children—if time allows. He recites some verses of his own creation and the luminaries of this new world stand breathless in the face. Eventually Franklin finds that he is content, that he is appreciated, that he is even, so to speak, a celebrity.

ometimes, when Franklin is taking questions at a fundraiser or a conference or an exhibition, a journalist remarks upon his good fortune: that he has survived an ice age, that he was perfectly preserved, that, despite all odds, he was rediscovered and resurrected. And on these occasions a sudden chill comes over Franklin, and he recalls, for a moment, that day

thousands of years ago, in the parking lot outside his apartment, and he wonders if he is perhaps still frozen there, suffocating, crushed by snow, and that this, all this, is just a fantasy played out by his failing brain in those final few seconds before the elements claim his body forever But when this moment, like the eons before, has passed, he smiles. “It’s a dream come true,” he says, and takes the next question.

WHAT CAN YOU SLEEP THROUGH? J.J. STEINFELD

Will you, deep in your sleep, negotiate with metaphysicians, and dream slyness and evasiveness sidestepping deception and betrayal?

A jab to the side? A pitiless rifle shot? The thunder of guilt? The knocking of remorse? Violence near and far immediate and repeated? The screams and bleeding of others known and unknown? Will you awake or grip tightly to sleep?

Will you dream the question, What can you sleep through? Will you hide even in sleep?

R. Schultz

Will you finally escape sleep finding everything gone like in a treacherous dreaming?

MODERN J.J. STEINFELD

Today I’ll read some Dickinson Browning, Frost, Auden, or Pope If I can muddle through.

First I’ll warm a mug of Earl And set my table right. The windows, casting sight Onto snow –

Slippered feet is the foreground (very proper) The t.v. resting a corner away Is a distraction. Ellen is on.

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A MOMENTARY DIVERSION

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COURTESY OF JOHN G

III

VII

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FIN.

DEAR BROKEN HEART JULIE A. MCROBERTS

t had been years since I last saw her and here she was in the middle of my office as though it had been scheduled for weeks now. Given a recent break-up, it was comforting to see such a familiar face; even though she was also the source of years of headaches with her constant inquisitions and battles for authority with me. She had not aged a single day - quite surprising since it had to be nearly five years since she last sat in one of my lecture halls. There was, however, one time she spontaneously arrived from her travels overseas. I calmed myself enough to amicably welcome her,

beaming expression continued and I attempted reconciliation with the prodigal student once more. “So, how have you been?” She seemed to almost laugh at my question. Her eyes squinted into some internal and eternal jest at my expense. She always seemed to have some internalized dialogues and critiques of my “character” in her life’s story. Again, not a single sound was made from her. She regained composure and beamed her large eyes at me once more in anticipation of the recognition I had yet to realize.

became unnerved by the student’s presence; she was not exactly a favourite of mine. I don’t even remember particularly liking her at all. So why was she here? My panicked mind swirled into a chaos of possibilities; all possibilities concluded to a violent ending and these coinciding conclusions caused me to lift out of the chair as I became light-headed from the threat which sat peachy before me. Telepathically, she comprehended the situation which occurred in my mind. She corrected her relaxed posture and jumped onto the desk with her feet planted on the other side of the chair’s arms and created restraints for me in my seated position. A placard mere millimeters from my face read: THIS IS YOUR IMAGINATION. Stunned by the circumstances - ensnared in my seat by a deranged ex-student with a materialized sign that brought a message of peace - I maintained a frozen stance in hopes that the wild bare legs of the student would release me from this trap. The letters disappeared from the card as a new message bled onto the white canvas:

“It’s been so long since -” Something jerked me out of the sequence of thought. The situation did not feel right; she was not to be here. As she stood in my office and looked directly at me, she failed to respond or even make a noise for that matter as she quickly seated herself in the chair directly across from my work station. With the same bright and cheery eyes, she awaited for me to take my place across from her with the desk as our barrier. Perhaps that was the source of the odd feeling. I was never particularly close to this student, so why would I be now? It must be the recent departure of my ex and the desperation for the familiar which caused these conflicting emotions. Settled with my rational for the peculiarities of the situation, I proceeded to my chair, directly across the porcelain figure. Her

THIS IS ALL YOUR IMAGINATION. A MEANS OF COPING.

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Harmony Kan

Still perplexed by the situation I found myself in, I attempted to push the girl aside, only to find my hand touching a barren desk and the student across the room near a bookshelf at which I previously cornered her during my first year at the university. I somewhat liked her during that period, exposing her

to an author with whom she would eventually work and travel intimately about the world in search of some meaning to both of their lives. The placard once more in her hands with a new message: THERE’S NO POINT. SHE’S NOT REALLY HERE. YOU CREATED HER. My mind numbed to the repetition of information. I calmed myself enough to commence a comprehension of the situation. I did, after all, study and examine Heidegger—a drug-trip in of itself. The thought that I might very well have an acute and vivid imagination did not appear to be an overly exerting concept with which to contend. If Heidegger could go on to become a revered scholar, surely someone with advanced forms of education and learning could produce such levels of creativity and imagination while adhered to the daily tasks of a normal life.

voice, and grabbed at my head. I looked up from my outburst to verify that the student was not the source of this problem. I was confident in my verdict of innocence and afterwards I drew a new conclusion that I was to contend with a new voice in my head. I proceeded with my list. 3. I am still employable and should remain calm before someone realizes that I am envisioning a student that I do not particularly like and now have voices in my head that use my own critical voice to criticize myself. With my back turned on the less troubling vision of the muted student, I recited this last point to myself with the hope of clarity or at least a plan of action to emerge from the clouded mental facilities which plagued me.

odding my head at the imagined student before me, I deconstructed the situation I encountered into comprehensible information:

he student proceeded to play with my collection of books on my shelf - even my imagination made her as intrusive as the live-version. I lunged at her to pry her away from the shelf; she materialized at the desk once more. How was I to contend with a brain that is clearly out to make me mentally incapacitated? Did I suffer from that much self-loathing? Wasn’t this the student that would prattle on and on about some mind versus body philosophy? I always hated how she attempted to correct my lectures whenever a school of philosophical thought arose. It was not as though it was an important…

What was I doing?!

I held my head and sat on the floor of my office. I sensed that the student watched my pained actions as I attempted to soothe the blurry confusion with a maternal rock of my head within my hands. When I raked my face with my hands to look up at the student between the slits in my fingers, another message awaited me: YOU’RE DOING THIS TO YOURSELF. DO YOU REALIZE THIS?

1. I am imagining a student with whom I have had no communications, relationship, or of whom I have had no admiration.

I groaned and shoved my face into the cavern of my palms. When I looked up again, armed with my hands readied in position to choke myself to death, the student was gone. Confusion nestled deeply into my subconscious as I took the moment of mental clarity to escape the confines of the room and dashed into the parking lot.

2. I recently left a long-term relationship (more like she left you - an internal voice corrected) “Shut up!” I retorted at the internal Christina MacLellan

“Shut up!” I retorted at the internal voice, and grabbed at my head. I looked up from my outburst to verify that the student was not the source of this problem. I was confident in my verdict of innocence and afterwards I drew a new conclusion that I was to contend with a new voice in my head. HBmag.ca 13

RENDERING ALTERNATE REALITY JAMES W. JESSO

he current overarching cosmology of the dominant western mindset - a mind-set which favours a paradigm of mechanised and dualistic materialism - conditions the mind of the common person to create a, to say the least, drab reality. Advances at the largest (cosmic) and smallest (subatomic) scopes of physical sciences are coming to realisations that echo the great mystics about the paradoxically boundless nature of a perceivably finite universe. Similar existential realisations about the paradoxical wonders of life are emerging in the arts, such as within what is commonly called the “visionary arts” movement. Yet, the reality of the everyman, and of society in general, is no longer moved by new advances in art and science. Thus, whether it be of the vested interests of clandestine organizations manipulating the mind of the public in a Bernaysian fashion, or of the unfortunate sum of mediocre, distracted minds; the reality fed as the truth of human existence, well, it sucks. It kind of looks something like this (read with tongue-in-cheek tone): Birth, short childhood, school, more school, job, work, work, work, work, make money, buy things, work, buy things on credit, work to pay off credit-bought things, obtain social recognitions for your things, work, work, rinse, repeat. That description is definitely an obtuse generalization, but it isn’t an inaccurate one. It is part and parcel of a common paradigm that is consequentially stunting the development of the planet by favoring a one-dimensional foundation for human potential. Essentially, it does this by placing the waking state consciousness, the state of mind wherein conditioned patterns 14

of behaviour play out most readily, as the only state of empirical value. Wherein all other states of human existence – i.e. excitement, sadness, awe, joy, arousal, creativity, religious wonder, etc. – are essentially seen as hiccups on the steady road of work, buy, work, buy, follow orders, work, buy, die; “a truly useful life”. {Meta-Narration Block: Now at this point, you may think that this article is moving towards some sort of diatribe on recreating social paradigms that engender more vibrant, creative humans with potential towards a fuller, more beautiful existence. It isn’t. The short trip we have taken into social commentary will work simply as the conceptual point of reference for investigating the manner in which information is rendered as a perceivably meaningful human reality.}

onventional society, with its foundation in the aforementioned paradigm, has engineered the informational substrate (subconscious mind) of the average person to render a reality that holds the normal waking state as the best, right, or proper state of consciousness in some way. Yet, this perception is inherently flawed as there is (and pardon me for being Kantian), really no way to determine that anyone’s waking state reality is the same as anyone else’s. The best we have is the capacity to observe and measure a person’s ability to externally communicate, verbally or otherwise, their reality, which we can then examine in comparison to a dataset gathered from doing the same thing with other people to establish averages and comparative values. Reality is mutable; the waking state is not the baseline, but an average. An average that is not recognized as merely an average until it is disHBmag.ca

turbed. For me, this is where the potential of research into chemical and technological interventions on the normal operation of the neurological system becomes so interesting. We are able to knock waking state out of the ballpark and gather new sets of data. We can feed the knowledge base for consciousness studies in the externalized academic sciences of neurology, biochemistry, and psychopharmacology, as well as the sciences of the inner-world like psychology and philosophy. Furthermore, with things like Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), we can combine and compare the datasets between the physical and nonphysical to create an integral understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms of reality. Which is, like, really cool. *Insert mind-science geek squeal of excitement here*

ut, beyond just the advance of the human knowledge base of scientific research, there is a personal element of potential here as well, and it has to do with self-awareness and the personal potentials of one’s reality. Every experience, whether waking state or otherwise, is an experience of the Self - the culminated dataset of patterns of information in the individual manifesting as self/other awareness on various levels of interaction within the perceivably external/ internal world. All of one’s reality, regardless of its overlapping commonality with other individual peoples’, is an experience of raw sensory data being conceptually rendered into a perceivable, meaningful experience. Wherein, on the surface level of conscious experience, we are interacting with the concepts we have unconsciously applied to various sensory stimuli. These concepts are rendered autonomically in accordance to the informational substrate encoded into an individual person’s unconscious mind, and the physical capacity of the psychosensory nervous systems to coherently render perceived data,

ssentially, that which we experience as reality is the epiphenomenon of a conditioned psyche, operated in congruence with the ‘physical’ organs of the body, rendering inherently meaningless sensory data into a meaningful experience, processed at the higher levels of the CPU of consciousness (the brain) and then projected back onto the perceived data as a set of experientially meaningful concepts. All of one’s reality is like the creative rendering of information into conceptual structures precipitating from the depths of the unconscious mind.

he surface of our awareness is merely the most superficial expression of a vast profundity of unconscious structures modeling reality. The contextually normal operation of our brain maintains a perceivable commonality to this reality, wherein the context of a conventional life dominated by the western paradigm, outlined earlier, is the norm. This norm, as also previously outlined, kind of sucks, but due to the limitations within this paradigm, we are mostly stuck splashing around at the shallow end of individuated consciousness and prevented from exploring the grand coral reefs of the mind. “…kind of sucks”. Yet, it is possible to change our surface reality, decondition the socially-embedded patterns, explore the structures of the subconscious mind, and learn to conceptually integrate new patterns of conditioning that enable an ongoing awareness of the larger processes of life in play at any moment. Thus, awakening a new set Christina MacLellan of potentials for the manifest reality we are unconsciously rendering; unlocking whole new spectrums of reality (read: self ) to be explored; revealing a vibrancy of potential experience hitherto denied… But how do we do this? Well, the {As you may have noticed at this point, this article is pretty much just answer is, like the nature of the uniabout geeking out on consciousness. verse itself, paradoxically simple and I hope you’re enjoying it as much as infinitely complex: alter the normal operation of the central processing I am.} HBmag.ca 15

Every experience, whether waking state or otherwise, is an experience of the Self. wherein the brain works as the central processing unit (CPU) for this entire operation.

Ian Willms

unit; alter the neurochemical operation of the brain, endogenously or otherwise, in a manner which facilitates the emergence of unconscious material to the surface of conscious awareness. There are many ways to do this, some more reliable than others. Personally, as I have written about extensively in my books, I believe the classical psychedelics - such as, but not limited to, psilocybin mushrooms or LSD - can offer just the deviation needed to break us from the invisible cattle guards of the socially conditioned western mind. But that’s a whole other topic…

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish [...] A fish does not realize its medium until that water changes through the adding of ink or poisons.” Marshall McLuhan “Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness […] and the psychedelic is like a dye-marker being dropped into this aqueous system. And then you say, ‘Oh, I see – it works like this… and like this.’” Terence McKenna HBmag.ca

James W. Jesso is a self-motivated independent writer focused on consciousness and philosophies. Deeply inspired by the psychedelic experience, his books Decomposing The Shadow: Lessons From The Psilocybin Mushroom (2013) and Soundscapes & Psychedelics (2014) as well as his audiobook The 4 Archetypes of Psilocybin (2014), explore many of the concepts presented in this article in vastly more extensive depth. Check Jesso out at

www.JameswJesso.com

MAY CAUSE WAKING NIGHTMARES; NEUROSIS ANONYMOUS

’m on mushrooms again. Just a gram, but it’s still a risk. My trip buddy tells me about a breathing technique to reduce anxiety. Inhale through your nose, exhale slowly through pursed lips. He learned it for going up a mountain in Hawaii to help adjust to the rarefied air because if you need an oxygen mask up there, you’ll be banned from the mountain for life.

he Raw Shark Texts is a neat little story about a man trying to defeat a too-real idea-of-a-shark that keeps taking bites out of his self. It happened to me, except that the shark was drugs. I should rephrase: The shark was me and my insecurities on acid or mushrooms. It was a concatenation of fears (that my dancing was too slutty, that I might be accidentally leading on my best friend’s brother, that my friends were judging me for taking more drugs than I could handle, and so on) that came rushing to the surface and ripped into my sense of self. It didn’t help that I was burning through a string of awkward relationships at the time – an insecure emotional atmosphere makes tripping a questionable venture. This kind of misfortune always happened at my favourite music festival. It’s a three-day party that attracts funk, bluegrass, and psychedelic musicians every Victoria Day, Canada Day and Labour Day long weekend. The festival property is an old vacation ranch north of where I live. The Saloon serves as the music venue. Cabins with names like the Jail and the Saddlery can be rented out as sleeping quarters, though most people brings their tents, RVs, and VW vans. Attracting between three to seven hundred hippies, bikers, country and city folk, it’s simultaneously

sketchy and sublime.

I always find stay awake for of good music, explain why I hallucinogens mixed results.

it hard to three nights which helps kept taking despite the

The bad trips, maybe four or five in three years, added a neurotic edge to my daily life. I’d heard that acid and mushrooms have been shown to bring about personality changes for up to six months, and I became half afraid I’d somehow compromised my mental health. Even sober, a flash of light in my peripheral vision would make me freeze – did I just hallucinate? No, it was probably just the glint of a passing car. What really terrified me were the two or three times I heard voices. They usually came late at night, when I was overtired and stoned. They were just phrases, like a man’s sarcastic ‘Yeah, right’, but they petrified me. I’d had good trips in the past. My first mushroom trip was with my then-boyfriend, and we’d spent the day drawing on each other and wandering in the spring sunshine. Another good time was a short film festival on acid. On my first acid trip, I’d hugely enjoyed bantering around an enormous camp fire and seeing lizards in the coals. But even that time, after making a giddy faux pas of running halfway around the fire to get a joint instead of waiting for it to be passed, I spiralled into inarticulate shame and retreated to my tent.

finished my bachelor’s degree. I’d been studying part-time and spending a lot of my spare time in my room, brooding on bad relationships and bad trips. A lot of these trips were spent hiding in my tent, incapacitatHBmag.ca

ed by acid and eavesdropping on my friends’ conversations. I was too high to tell what was and wasn’t being said, but I was certain they were judging me hard. The paranoia and embarrassment haunted me even while I sat doing nothing in my room. In every day social situations, I watched myself closely for erratic or wanton behaviour. I made good use of my humanities major and went to teach English overseas. I worked ten hours a day, five days a week, and on weekends I went out to explore the country. I was too busy to fantasize about going crazy. A year went by, which helped too. The misery of the nightmarish trips faded. My grandmother died in May. At the memorial service, my aunt told us about an exchange she’d had with Gramma in the hospital. They’d been talking about my aunt’s relationship in which she’d been badly hurt. Gramma said that it takes a long time to forgive, to stop hurting. I imagined her words being addressed to me about a particularly awful ex-lover who recently, out of the blue, had sent me a wordless friend request. I cried until the end of the service, grateful that no one could tell how self-centred my tears were. The moment of cross-generational empathy brought a sense of self-acceptance so complete it reminded me of my first mushroom trip. I felt more myself than I had in ages. The neurotic anxiety and internal pressure dissolved. It was as though some benumbed psychic limb was suddenly refilling with blood. It was the kind of peace that makes careful self-control unnecessary, at least for a time.

y friend and I are still tripping. We head to the Saloon to see a band. I’m surrounded by people and their eyes. The change of environment makes me a bit nervous, and the nervousness makes me worry about having another blunder of a trip. I exhale slowly through pursed lips, over and over like I’m rubbing was a lucky rabbit’s foot. I’m fine. 17

DREAMS TO REALITY JENNA LUELO

“Our intentions create our reality” - Wayne Dyer

s a psychotherapist, I often work with individuals who come to counselling with a desire to make personal changes, but who struggle with the will or the “how-to” get what they want. Often times, the therapeutic process is centered around the ques-

tions, “What is the challenge that brings you to counselling, and how would you like to go about addressing it?” When we have direction in the therapeutic process, we are essentially developing a personalized strategy for turning your desire (your hope) into a will (a deliberate choice). This strategy occurs through a process of goal setting. It is fundamental, in the attainment of your goals, that you understand not only workable strategies of goal setting, but psychological influences that play a role in whether

you act in a way that is aligned with your dreams or if you do not. The process of goal setting is to reflect on your intention in order to generate a shift in your reality. The space between the contemplation stage and the action stage of change is where many cognitive processes are taking place, but generally on an unconscious level. To be successful in our goal attainment, we need to bring a level of conscious awareness to that moment before we set an intention, this will help derive our goals from an internal place of meaning. When we have an internal connection to our action, what we do has deeper meaning. Our goals need to reflect our values. To know our values, we must develop a sense of selfawareness.

Eva McMillan - devadreamhypnosis.com

HBmag.ca 18

ne of the most important cognitive processes, and one equally required in development of self-awareness, is being in-tune with your internal dialogue. In my psychotherapy practice, I am listening for your internal dialogue. How you talk to yourself, conveys to me a lot about your self-esteem. Your self-esteem, or self-efficacy, is directly related to your ability to make changes and adapt to your world as it happens. Things will change. You need to have a belief in yourself that you can handle and thrive in the space of that change. This internalized sense of control and attribution influence our perceived ability to effectively produce change. If our perception of control or attribution of events is flawed, achievement of our goals becomes hindered. Understanding how your internal dialogue and perspective impacts your intentions is essential. Sometimes, just a small shift in your self-talk, which is the voice of your internalized sense of control and attribution style, can create a positive shift in perspective. This positive shift can give us the energy to create behavioural action or to follow through on the goals we have set. Once you’ve identified underlying value in what you choose to do or have developed a sense of self-awareness that influences your intention, you’ve explored your meaning, or motivation, and with that you can pass through the contemplation phase and be ready to alter your thoughts into an action.

Here are 5 straightforward steps to moving your intentions to actions: 1. Identify what you want. Define your desire. Set your goal. Make it realistic, but keep it challenging. This step is about balance, making both shortterm and long-term goals will keep it sustainable. The goal needs to be clearly defined and measurable. This will help you track your progress.

Sometimes, just a small shift in your self-talk, which is the voice of your internalized sense of control and attribution style, can create a positive shift in perspective. 2. Research and Strategize. Who do you know that has accomplished this goal? Talk to them, get information and be informed. Learn what you need to do. This step is often overlooked but planning is important to success. 3. Get organized. Get a routine; get a schedule of how and when this goal can be achieved. When we are organized we are more effective and we are using our best time management skills. 4. Form a team. This works in two ways, first they will support you and second they will hold you accountable for what you say and do and how that relates to what you want. Your goal shouldn’t be a secret. Sharing your goals is a sign of commitment to the process and confidence in yourself. 5. Be flexible. Goals inevitably change over time, just like we do. This is not failure; this is an opportunity to create a new goal that is more in tune with your current self. There is never only one right path; there will be obstacles, some of which you won’t be prepared for – this is life. We need to believe that our strengths and our supports will get us through. Keep in mind, that during the course of your goal achievement, motivation will ebb and flow. Be prepared for this, it is part of the process. Strategies such as visualising yourself completing the goal and positively reinforcing behaviours by using a reward based system have proven helpful for maintaining the effort required to consciously shift your behaviour. HBmag.ca

hat we also need to be mindful of, during all stages of change, is the “F” word. Fear. A fear that floats just below your consciousness prevents a desire to evolve into a will. Fear becomes an enabler of delay, it is suggested to be a root cause of procrastination, and if not addressed, it will impose itself onto your success. However, we can use a sense of fear to identify perceived barriers to accomplishment and then identify your strengths in opposition to these barriers. When we challenge our inner fearful critic, we make space to see our achievements. When we aim to turn a dream into reality we are taking something we want and turning it into something that is. Tapping into our desires, wishes, hopes, and dreams, and connecting those to our actions and behaviours is fundamental to successful goal achievement. When this process happens on a conscious level by internalizing your intention and making it personal to you, we transform the goal setting process into something of meaning. It is also through the development of self-awareness, where we address our barriers and can focus on our strengths, that our intentions become attainable. When we align the way we think with the way we act, we add a deeper meaning to the process of change.

Jenna Luelo offers professional counselling services in Uptown Waterloo. You can find out more about her and her therapeutic philosophy at

www.bliss-therapy.org

STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS R. SCHULTZ

ur definition of reality is coloured by the lens of perception, and perception can easily be altered. Think about a tired driver’s slower response time at the wheel, or the drunk frosh student’s belief that he is speaking quietly. Human perceptions and awareness of dreams and reality, or their states of consiousness, vary many times per day depending on things like drug use, level of fatigue, emotional state, and sleep. Two of these states, dreaming and drug use, work in similar ways on the brain by creating ideal conditions for a temporary psychotic state, loosely defined as a separation from reality paired with abnormal thinking. It is important to remember that psychoses occur on a spectrum, which means that experiences range in severity. People experiencing psychotic states may experience false sensations, hallucinations, or false beliefs, delusions, that lead them to interact with the world in such a way that suggests their brain is perceiving an alternate version of reality than the one we agree to agree on. Have you ever woken up from a dream only to be confused about whether it really happened for a few seconds or minutes? While sleep paralysis prevents movement during dreaming, cats given a drug which allows action during sleep pounced, ran, and scratched as if they were awake. During sleep, human brains activate as if the dreamer was experiencing similar events in reality, allowing researchers to predict dream content at a rate higher than chance. In the studies, participants slept in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 20

machine and were woke every few minutes during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. It was possible to predict general dream content with 60% accuracy using a computer alogrithm that matches coded pictures and themes with real time scan results. It would appear that the brain ‘goes through the motions’ of reality while we sleep. This accounts for theories of dreaming that suggest we relive daily events to make sense of them in the context of what we know and have

imilarly, fMRI scans show that psilocybin, the psychedelic agent in magic mushrooms, alters brain activity in the same way that dreaming does.

Scans showed increased activity in the hippocampus and anterior singulate, key brain areas in memory and arousal respectively. Needless to say, the experience can be very emotional. Our brain processes these emotions in an evolutionary old part of the brain, the limbic system. Connections formed in the limbic system are longer lasting and more intense because they are linked to our survival responses: fear, escaping dangerous situations, food and drink, and reproduction. Hallucinators’ neural connections are unconstrained, leading to profound alterations in perceptions of space, time, and selfhood. It follows that the psychedelic experience can be seen as dreams overlapping reality. Fluid interchanges of dreams and reality based on individual states of consciousness means that there is no such thing as a single definable reality. Reality pushes its way into our dreams in disjointed and sometimes confusing ways that influence our waking life, such as solving problems in our sleep that we have been thinking hard about during the day. Some people choose to control when to expand reality through psychadelic drug use, but all of us experience the result of interconnected synaptic pathAlysia Sacks ways when we dream. Recent experienced already. If you analyze advances in scanning technology have some of your more recent dreams, you shown us that, contrary to past theomight find that you can identify most ries, our brains opens up when we of the content from what you have take psychedelics or dream. If you been doing or thinking recently. In want to loosen the restraints on your brain or experience psychosis, it’s as this way, reality overlaps dreams. simple as falling into REM sleep. HBmag.ca

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