My Life As A Stori

Sorry it took so long to get back on here, guys.  I’m sure you all were just shaking in anticipation about what happened to me - crying yourself to sleep and all, right?  Heh, sure.  Anyway, I actually just got really busy and wanted to keep my focus on my studies.  I know, you’ve gotten it figured out by now that I’m pretty much in a coma-like state, so you’re probably wondering how in the world I could be busy.  Well, Henry decided he needed more help from my end to figure this mess out so he actually went and ordered me a whole bunch of books pertaining to physics, brain wave functions, surgical procedures, and anything else that might give us that little bit of knowledge we were missing.  I gotta tell ya, being able to actually “see” how textbooks describe the way the world functions is incredibly fascinating.  It’s the first time since the incident that my parents really let me just read through entire books, and I gotta say, it’s been fun!  I’ve learned a lot and I managed not to overload, which is what I assume my parents thought might happen if I got to go through one whole book (a real  book, not my little brother’s kiddie stuff).  Now that they’ve seen it’s fine, perhaps I can read a novel once in a while?  What do ya say mom?  Give me a little adventure on a pirate ship or a space shuttle from time to time?

Okay, well back to the main point - looks like it’ll still be a while before Henry and I can pour through enough material to figure this out, so I might as well continue with my story.  So, anyway, I thought I had my process firgured out and snuck into Henry’s lab one night to try out my invention.  The Dream Reader, itself, is like a thin metal headpiece with sensors embedded all around the inside ring to read brain functions.  One band rests on top of your ears and wraps around the back of your head while another band goes over the top of your head.  When you’re wearing it, it sort of looks like you have on two different sets of headphones only without the speakers - really sleek, actually.  After all, no one would want it if it didn’t fit comfortably while they’re sleeping, not to mention looking ridiculous if the thing looked like a space alien helmet.  What I added to it was just as sleek, I’d say.  I had to make sure the thing could translate words on paper to visual images, so I added these little eye pieces to the Dream Reader.  They hook into the ear pieces and slide down in front of your eyes as easily as the microphone flips down on your basic X-box headphones.  The part that rests in front of your eyes is just a small, round circle that looks like nothing more than a clear glass lens.  Here’s the genius part (not to sound cocky, but I was pretty proud of it) - the lenses actually contain tiny microchips that process the words as your eyes pass over them, connecting what you see to the Dream Reader, then projecting the images the Dream Reader displays back into your eyes instead of on a screen.  Between the visual stimulus from the lenses and the tweaking I did to the Dream Reader’s programming to keep the imaginary audio internal, when you read anything you’re immediately placed within the setting of the book based on how you imagine it.  In other words, two people can read the exact same book but get a different experience out of it depending on how they interpret what they read or how active their imaginations are.  I have a very active imagination, by the way.

Sounds cool, right?  It so could have been.  The only problem was, I screwed up somewhere in the programming.  I don’t even know whether I messed up in the microchip technology in the lenses or if something else changed in the Dream Reader that wasn’t supposed to when I altered it.  Either way, something was obviously wrong because when I put it on and flipped that switch, I ended up getting stuck in imaginary mode for good.  I didn’t know it at the time, of course.  I chose a short story to test the machine with (The Tell-Tale Heart - love Poe!) and was thrilled to be playing out the part of the narrator.  It was creepy and suspensful and totally awesome!  I could not only see and hear everything as the character would, but could actually feel the emotions pass through me as they did the character.  It was great until I got to the end of the story.  I stopped reading, and then there was just nothing.  I have no memories of anything that happened after those last words until a few weeks later when Henry was able to rig the Dream Reader back up to a screen.  He figured out they could communicate with me by writing down messages for me to read and that all he had to do to get me to respond was to literally write “I respond however I see fit.”  It took a few times to figure out how to phrase things, because while it’s natural to want to write “you respond however you see fit” to instruct me to do something, I read it as “you” and not, well, me, so it didn’t work out quite the same.  My brain knew Henry was talking to me, but the machine translates sort of literally, so it created this trippy effect where I was outside of myself watching me trying to respond - gave me a headache.  Anyway, the whole thing sums up to the fact that I don’t do anything unless someone writes it down for me to read.  I said in the beginning that I can only write this blog because my dad writes down “I write my blog” or something to that effect.  I have free reign to write what I want at that point, but once I’m done, the slate goes blank for me until I read something else.  Every day, how I perceive my life to be is whatever someone makes up.  If someone was to write down, “I jump up ten feet in the air and then wiggle my nose,” that’s exactly what I would do.  Not in real life, of course, but it sure feels like it to me.  My life is quite literally a story and I am the main character, the puppet that the author controls unless he chooses to write that I can do what I want for a little while.  Really kind of sucks…unless I get to have at least a little fun with it (ahem - mom, dad).

So that’s it in a nutshell.  Just bear with me here and I’ll keep you posted on my progress.  Oh, I haven’t forgotten about that lemonade stand thing, either, just been busy.  I’ll get to that one next time, too, so read on loyal followers if you will.  After all, my adventure is really just beginning…

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