There are those instances where I feel as if it will all come crashing down. As if all the realities in my life are a thin veneer, a delicate structure made of cards, and that I hold on by the barest thread. I understand that it is probably due to the slightest imbalance of chemicals streaming through my neurons, but that comprehension holds little sway on the way that I feel about the whole of the world. I casually think about the greater implications: how civilization itself could be seen as a collective dream of a billion beasts — and what will happen if they awake? … But I remember that I have felt this way before, and the world has not ended, not even this little one in which my personal experience dwells. I calm, and I stir the air within my mind to brush away the ill humors. For it is the opposite of how I feel: however intense the feeling of frailty, that is the illusion, and the things that function in my life are the solidities. Such are the pitfalls of the soul; that the whisper of bad things we hear, and the ordinary assurances spoken every day, we forget them all so easily.