I’m not an anarchist. Not now, not ever. Sure, I was one of the hoppers-on to that particular bandwagon as it made its rounds in school, and when all the little boys and girls shaved their heads and shouted their slogans, I did too. But this endeavor was, for me, but a kind of social obligation. Not once did I legitimately find myself convinced or even given but the merest pause by the anarchist doctrines. One would think that anarchism would have no need for doctrines, it being a mere absence of rule, and yet there is an abundance of scholars who think they can somehow arrive at an original observation about nothing. 

My innate distrust of anarchism comes from my own understanding of the human mind. Or rather, of my own mind. Have you ever wondered how you would behave in a consequence-free environment? I know full well how I would, as I find myself in such an environment every night, as do we all, though some of us do not realize it. I am, in a thoroughly pretentious manner, referring to the world of dreams. I know when I dream. I am what is in some circles called called a “lucid dreamer,” although my own case is thoroughly unlike what I often hear stories of. Your typical lucid dreamer is a man fully aware of his situation and surroundings, and of their ethereal, sham nature. He is able to use this awareness to cause events to occur, to mold the world around him to his own image, to make malleable the mountains and rivers of dreamland.

In my own dreams, I am initially unaware of the nature of my new reality, but find myself noticing things. “Hey, that cat has the wrong number of legs,” or  “That clock-face is too blurry to read.” It is after five to seven of these realizations that I become seized by powerful notions of abandon, murderousness, and other things I cannot discuss in the sanitized haven this publication offers to us weary livers-in of this fickle and funny cosmos. And yet, at no point do I know I dream. I merely know I can do as I please. It would seem that my unconscious mind would rather, while on the verge of some discovery on the very nature of being, merely surrender to its own base and animal nature and deafen itself to the pleas and protestations of its victims and better judgement.

In dreams, I rampage, I maim, I destroy. Delusory empires of half-there djinns are rent apart by my animalistic subconscious in a matter of eight hours. The faces of waking life are combined and mashed into unnatural combinations, either too lovely or too hideous to be found awake, and then mashed apart again by my own brute force. However, these terrors pale in comparison to that which, since my eleventh birthday, has always followed after one of these sprees, which I will presently attempt to describe. 

Once I have scaled and sundered each peak, lain waste to each spire and farm, I am patted on the shoulder by a monstrous ape-like hand. I then find myself in a room, a room whose width is some miles and whose length seems to stretch on and on into infinitude. Sat around a table in what I perceive as this room’s center are various forms, who identify themselves as a gathering of learned individuals, who have all realized the true nature of things. These individuals, for indeed that is as kindly as one can denote them in a way that would still suggest some semblance of humanity, come in many shapes. Some bury themselves in cloaks under which peek glistening, gesticulating, silvery cilia, others defy known geometry and appear to be polychrome fractal patterns bent loosely into four-dimensional likenesses of men and women. Some bear some countenance of the human male but are hideously disproportionate, with hands the size of a small child, legs driven up into their torsos and jaws that jut out to reveal multiple rows of gray teeth. Others wear pointed waxen hoods of lightest sky blue which drape and melt over their faces and steeds. Then, always, they hoist me up still on my chair, saying that through my actions I have come upon the cusp of some grand truth that has entitled me to their ranks, and that the final step to this enlightenment is some unholy baptism into a pool of opaque, black, non Newtonian fluid. It is at this point I always wake.

So now, dear reader, you know why I do not, and cannot abide anarchism. Because I know what dwells in my own mind once free from restraint, and my greatest fear is that this is not true merely in me but in all men. For if the whole of the human species were to rise up in promise of brotherhood against establishment, I fear those promises would soon be forsaken by a more learned brotherhood like that of which I dream. Individuals aware and awake to things beyond ideas and above morals. I ask you this: how would you fair without restraints?