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Alexander:

What does the word “lucid” in lucid fiction represent, and which alternate words come close to being similar in meaning?  Can the world “lucid” be used in the context of non-fiction?

Tantra:

“Lucid” in general means being clear, limpid, lit up, understanding and seeing clearly. It describes a person who is clear sighted and has full use of his faculties. It also describes something that in itself is shining and transparent.

So, I’m referring partly to the fiction that has been created by the controllers of our society through manipulation, brainwashing, deceits, mass media, and literary fiction, becoming more transparent, being more easily seen for what it is. A fictional illusion. And being seen through, illuminated by people who have lucid minds, being able to see clearly.

It also means that the fiction itself that we live in is becoming lucid, itself. The continuum, our paradigm, the morphogenetic field, can become more realistic, less obscured by the lies of our religious and political leaders, for example, the more one by one, we become lucid within the dream they have created for us.

Because of years of studying well documented research, and my interacting with a lot of people involved in these studies, I feel the controllers include not only humans, but other dimensional beings, and non humans, which have had a hand in creating us to be as gullible as we are. We are able to see them more, as the shapeshifting becomes more apparent, and as we learn more about history which has been hidden. As history and biology have more light shed on them, we see that nothing is as it seems, and we are able to start to realize that we are more powerful than we have been led to believe.

We are spirit, wise, with huge auras, with siddhas, or psychic and paranormal abilities, and once we do things like Tantra Yoga, for example, we start to tap into the whole rest of our being which remaining stuck in the beta-brainwave frequency perceptions has kept us from experiencing. The rishis who have done these exercises and don’t buy into the limitations humans are supposed to have can do all sorts of things considered supernatural. So the fiction is becoming more transparent, as we become more lucid ourselves.

So, when I use that term, it has many applications. Reality itself, and yes, non-fiction that acknowledges these things, for example, books by Lloyd Pie about hominids, or books that describe how damage the official story says was done by glaciers in the past was actually done by floods. This kind of scientific fact is kept out of the schools, because there’s a whole fictional illusion of history that is vast, and all inclusive.

I also refer loosely to poetry, or fiction, or even movies, or music, art, memoirs, anything in the arts that sees the truth that has earlier been hidden by the mass media, etc. and has that as the context of the work, maybe not always the main subject, but at least acknowledges it within the creators work overall.

However, I specifically focus on Lucid Fiction as written literary fiction itself, as the core of the new genre I’m promoting. Creating a type of writing that acknowledges that things are not what they seem, that explores knew ideas about what consciousness really is, that helps us expand our awareness, expose what’s going on around us. I feel there is a need for these aspects of life to be acknowledged in literature for people to be able to relax into them and accept them rather than going along with the deceits.

Writers, for example, who want to discuss aliens, or MILAB implants, or mind control, or being able to heal people with energy, or remote viewing, or being able to disappear from physicality and appear elsewhere, or synchronicities, or any number of things that might generally be put in the category of Sci Fi have no place to go with it unless they want to set it in the future, make it technological and speculative, and follow the formula of that genre. That makes those subjects seem unreal.

But they’re real, so why not make a subgenre that allows us to admit they are real within the context of literature that is not speculative? It’s like Slipstream, or New Wave Fabulism, a genre that fills in some of the gap that is glaring in between speculative and non speculative writing.

So, shedding light on subjects which are taboo is one aspect, but definitely not the only one that makes it Lucid Fiction. Right now, I feel like Andre Breton, who would say who was a legitimate surrealist. But once the group of surrealists died, anyone who felt a kinship could call himself that, and make his own sliding definitions. I hope other people will run with this, but first, I want to make clear what I mean by it.

Another aspect is narrative form. Lucid Fiction is a type of experimental writing, and there is a lot out there that is extreme, and throws out the idea of plot, such as writing that is made up of nouns scattered across the page, for example. But for writing that does have something along the lines of plot, I’d like to see more that really questions what’s allowed. It’s something people just don’t seem to question often enough for my taste. Bounce, bounce….I want to Play!

Teachers and publishers and editors say it’s important to always have a traditional plot arc. Plots have to do with dualism, conflict, drama. Why? What the heck? We tell each other stories in real life all the time that interest us, and they aren’t always based on difficulties. We have interesting things happen to us that we enjoy passing on, and most of us actually would prefer not constantly hearing about a friend’s problems. To have plots always be based on that encourages us to see our lives that way, as being problems to be solved, and that’s what the egos do, and they make us addicted to adrenalin, keep us in the beta brain-wave frequency perspective of being separate beings who have to fight to stay on top.

Why should fiction encourage the very thing that keeps wars and such going? Wars are the agendas of the controllers of our society, and they make us do the dirty work for them. Why keep that going through making us believe that conflict is the core of life? There are many other things that can drive the plot of a story rather than that. I don’t mean they have to all be happy, or vignettes, or have no action. I mean we can explore far, far more than the traditional plot to really describe what life is like. That’s real experimental literature, isn’t it?

Another aspect is character. Why do we have to use the same outdated concept of what a person is that has always been used, now that we have been introduced to the New Physics worldview that we are part of a continuum, artificially making labels that separate us. So many spiritual people feel we have higher selves, and quantum science suggests to many that we have parallel selves, multiple selves, past lives and future lived all at once.

For example, in our lives, we can be walking along, and we happen to come across just the person we were thinking about and needed to see as we turn the corner, and we haven’t seen that person for 30 years. That’s sometimes just coincidence, but I see it as often being a synchronicity that the higher selves arranged…. or something did. Things really do seem to so often happen magically in life, as reality speaks to us in dreamlike ways. Most people I know have experienced this. Why not acknowledge this in fiction, and why not expand what a person is, and what a character is, writing maybe from the viewpoint of the flow of the moment, from the whole self, not only the conscious and subconscious but the higher self.

I don’t want to see literature like this be second rate, New Agey, just to make a point, but to be actually great, top notch literature that explores consciousness using the structure of the stories and choices about characters and what constitutes reality. I’ve written some articles that are published in magazines such as Unlikely Stories and Retort, and am right now finishing one up about John Crowley, who does this, exploring non-linearity, magic, the nature of consciousness, etc. I’ve found a few authors I feel represent Lucid Fiction to varying degrees, such as Francesca Lia Block, who includes synchronicities, for example. Peter Moon, V. Ulea, Jaimal Yogis.

Alexander:

How does Lucid Fiction relate to Surreal fiction or vice versa?

Tantra:

Excellent question, Alexander. It does relate often, in that surrealism is written from the theta brain-wave frequencies, bypassing the rational conscious mind and delving into the subconscious. Of course, rewrites can take place from the ordinary state of mind to polish it, but overall, it widens the scope of awareness and acknowledges the sense of identity to include more than what people normally present to the world. It is like a dream that the reader and writer share, and the reader can also learn new things about himself because of the nature of the archetypes in the collective unconscious.

Some what I write myself is surreal, lyrical fiction, and some of what I consider to be Lucid Fiction has elements of the surreal, though it’s certainly not a requirement. However surrealism traditionally uses the subconscious more than the higher self, and so Lucid Fiction includes more of the self than surrealism as it was defined by the originators.

To be considered Lucid Fiction a piece doesn’t necessarily have to go by every guideline I put forth, or it would be too narrow, but overall, it would ideally question something about the nature of reality as it has been presented to us, and surrealism doesn’t necessarily do this with its subject matter, structure, or new suggestions about what being a human is about. Some stories and poems will be both genres, as there is an overlap, but I’d say Lucid Fiction continues the revolution of experimentation that surrealism was part of.

Alexander:

What is the association between Lucid Fiction and abstraction or impressionism?

Tantra:

There is certainly room for overlap there. Within Lucid Fiction, if we are trying to capture what it’s like outside of the beta brain-wave frequency interpretation of the world, the hard-edged human-centric pretense that everything can be explained in cut-and-dried ways according to traditional narrative, and we are writing from the viewpoint of the theta brain-wave, for example, it may well be truly abstract. If we are describing a situation from the whole, standing back from the limited viewpoint of the human brain and imagining the flow of energy, the synchronistic interactions of all the elements in a scene, abstraction may be how it would look. Actual Abstract Literature communicates meaning without using much detail at all, different from Impressionist Literature.

Impressionist Literature focuses on the experiences of the characters without interpretation, sketching in the details from a subjective point of view, as, for example, the way our memory might distort something and leave seemingly random moments that still stand out to us. Impressionism in art is concerned with light as it hits the changing surfaces, and that concept, for example, could be explored metaphorically in a Lucid Fiction context.

Lucid Fiction can go any number of ways in experimenting, though if it is just using methods like these, which are only focusing on the models of art movements which began decades ago, it may not necessarily be moving forward in the cutting edge experimentation I’m looking for. Those movements were very revolutionary at the time, and the techniques can still be used very well in Lucid Fiction if they also incorporate the attempt, within at least some of the author’s work, to push aside the veils this society has accepted as normal, by the experimentations with literary conventions.

If you are thinking visual art, Alexander, I’ll give you the closest parallel I can think of offhand to the spiritual aspects of Lucid Fiction. The Russian painter, Kandinsky, wrote a book called On the Spiritual in Art. He feels artists should learn to intuit the spiritual dimensions, to see their colors, to influence them correctly. The lightning-like experience he describes is the Kundalini. His goals are similar to mine, including the desire to explore emotions and experiences that are so subtle that have not been named and labeled throughout the centuries, but in literature, require poetic language and the spaces in between the words, to try to get the nuances. His is “the search for a reality above our all-too-narrow terrestrial sphere” in order to form a union between the human and the quantum divine.

As he describes it, the artist, or writer, goes into meditative union of the subject and object, the work springing from the non-dual, uniting subject and object. I see much of my writing as quantum physics related, the wave and the particle, the individual and the universal. This is the nature of Tantra, which is ultimately a way to experience physics from the inside out. Check out the recent literary criticism of the Russian writer, Vera Zubarev, say, in Sein en Werden magazine. She is developing the genre of Quantum Fiction that corresponds with Lucid Fiction and we’re both excited about doing some work together.

Alexander:

Seems that poetry, from its freedom of narrative structure, would be a good way to express Lucid Fiction. What aspect of poetry enables Lucid Fiction and which aspects of poetry do not?

Tantra:

At the risk of being confusing, I do allow poetry or non fiction in my loose definition of Lucid Fiction, even art, or music or movies, anything in which this dream we are living in is becoming aware of itself, like a lucid dream, waking up to the falsities of what we have been led to believe, becoming more transparent as we see past the illusions.

However, the fact that poetry doesn’t necessarily have narrative structure means it doesn’t have that aspect to work with as fiction does, so it has a strike against it in tearing apart the artificial structures our mind have imposed on reality in the way that I’m describing.  I’m not suggesting we write fiction that has no narrative structure, necessarily, though if it is what is required to tell the particular story, then I do believe it should be allowed. I just don’t want us to be addicted to the traditional plot arc. Great writers, like William Faulker, or John Barth, have often used structure brilliantly as a means to get an idea across. The structure can be as important an aspect of the story as anything else. Most experimental writing does disregard tradition to some degree.

A lot of experimental writing is great, but isn’t necessarily always what I’d call Lucid Fiction, because it doesn’t, for example, push us past the traditional ego-based paradigm of the plot arc of our own lives, the need for drama, dualistic conflict, adrenalin rush which over-stimulates and then leaves our adrenals floundering and in need of more over-stimulation.  I want to see the structure serve the purpose of taking us vertically, sometimes, rather than just up and down a hilly road, one more story leading to the need for the next story. I love it when a writer uses the story to throw us up in the air, out of the ordinary way of looking at the world, into something more transcendent.

But in any case, I want the structure to be able to follow the needs of the story, and there are many types of stories which can be told that don’t fit into the traditional plot formula. There is an insistence in general literary fiction, on plot that is far, far too predictable for my tastes, and I feel this is something that has been imposed upon us so much that it seems normal. We need to question why such insistence on it? It seems closed minded to me to say a story isn’t a story unless it has some major problem solved by direct action, for example. What if there isn’t a problem? Can’t that still be interesting?

But yes, poetry can be Lucid Fiction, say,  if the subject matter includes subjects normally covered up by mass media, or if it is written from within deep and transcendent states of mind in ways that take the reader into those as well.

I have a chapbook manuscript called Soul Waves, and every poem in it is Lucid Fiction, very  quantum physics, Tantric, vibratory.  I also have one called Art For Dangerous Times, which is Lucid Fiction in that some of the poems address the need for our soldiers to just say no to their orders which are based on lies, illusions, deceits, evil manipulations.  Part of the idea of Lucid Fiction is joining the spiritual with the socio-political, which can often be bereft of spiritual awareness, and thus missing the magical, otherworldly reasons behind the political acts. If we combine awareness in both fields in our lives, and in our literature, our fictional reality will start to become more transparent.

Alexander:

What common aspect of this suggested “dream life” has Lucid Fiction’s greatest potential for evolution or realization? In other words, from your view point, what are some main aspects in life that you would wish others to wake up to? And when you think of those people who need some wakening, who are you including and who are you excluding? Who is best poised to benefit from Lucid Fiction and who would benefit least?

Tantra:

People who would benefit least would be those who are trying to keep our population under their control, dumbed down, addicted to conflict, convinced we are not very powerful.

People who would benefit most would be writers, editors, publishers, and readers who would be excited to see literature that is innovative in its way of responding to the realities of this world, striving to portray the whole self, and the whole of what is going on in the world that is normally hidden behind convention based on control.

As far as the looser definition of Lucid Fiction beyond the literary, our society’s revolutionaries who want to see change occur and know approaching it from a symptomatic, Band-Aid method isn’t working, will be happy to see the truth come out. Once people expand their awareness out of the trap of the matrix and see behind the veils of lies, it will be harder for all the nonsense to keep continuing. It’s not simple to agitate without repercussions being worse, I realize. But it’s better than just going along with the program as it is, because it’s deadly already.

I would exclude very few, because I feel we are continually in a process of waking up, at least in potential, and that is our evolution. There are some masters who have done the spiritual practices enough that they are able to see 360 degrees, literally, can levitate, can go without ever sleeping, can tell anything happening in the world. They are excluded, sure. Others who don’t even know that’s possible are the ones that would most need to wake up, as well as those who believe the official conspiracy theory, for example, that the buildings on 911 fell down against all laws of physics rather than following the laws of physics and being controlled demolitions.

I know a Tantric practioner who is very expansive, dedicated to his mantras and good deeds, but who is involved as a courier within a mind control program between musicians and the manipulators of society. So, though he is awake spiritually, he is naïve about how he is being used, so needs to be awakened even more to the parts of him that have been brainwashed.

I know someone who is a great political activist, who does understand all the brainwashing mind control programs, but who doesn’t realize the religious lies of our world. So, most people could use some waking up, no matter who we are, in one aspect or another. If the information that is out there in the alternative press could be made more acceptable through literature, and music, people wouldn’t be scared of being thought of as weird by admitting these things are true.

Just being good people who look into the issues isn’t enough to fully learn the extent of our human abilities, called the Siddhis in Sanskrit, or the machinations behind the social trends that are arranged so carefully through organized crime, secret societies, government agencies, the mass media, Universities, medical institutions, the entertainment industry, the church, big business and the military, not to mention, aliens.

I’d like people to awaken to the fact that this social reality we act like is true is an illusion created by people with an agenda. Scientists who publish forbidden ancient history, or findings outside of the agreed upon conventions are fired… United States History books tells completely different stories from year to year, even about who won wars, depending on who is in power…. The news is run by the government, so they don’t report on things like chemtrails, the crimes committed by politicians… The medical and pharmaceutical industry put one over on people all the time, selling products that make us worse, and still perpetuate the myth that vaccines are helpful. They are planning on forcing everyone to take vaccines in the event of a staged epidemic, and if we don’t do it, we are to be put away, under martial law at the time….

People see Reptilian creatures and aliens all the time, en masse, and if they go public about it, they have a harder time finding a job, because it’s not an acceptable topic to discuss….Another example: There have been 16 crucified Messiahs through history, with one detail exactly the same as the Christ story, and many more Messiahs with nearly all the same details…

Another example: The CIA was based on the OSS….And…..Time travel has occurred through operations based in Montauk, NY….Mind control operations allow people to be controlled through microwaves….Synchronicities occur all the time in people’s lives, outrageous, obvious….Magic works….Non-lethal weapons and biological weapons are being used against us by our government…MILABs are being used by the military in conjunction with the aliens, or pretending there is alien involvement in other cases, to carry out assassinations, etc. all the time. I could go on and on, but you see, these are all the types of topics that are not generally allowed in fiction, or polite conversation, or the news, because it might offend someone because it’s not the status quo, but instead, transgressive truth. Are readers getting uncomfortable yet?

Neither it is considered OK to talk about expanded states of awareness and people who are breatharians, for example, or the transmission of Shaktipat to awaken the Kundalini life force, which can cause peoples’ skulls to split, and big their toenails to fall off, in the process of the flow of the energy of enlightenment through the channels of the body. All these things are experienced by people often, but supposed to be hush-hush, behind the scenes. The more they are considered normal topics by any form of media, academies, institutions, etc., and the more they are allowed into serious literature, the more the Hundred Monkey effect will take place. As people learn to see, to become more lucid, more people will also learn. Our fictionalized reality will awaken from the inside out.

This reality is also fictionalized in the spiritual sense that we are looking at it from within the ego’s beta brain-wave perspective with the illusions perpetuated by mass media, and we are not seeing it often enough from the expanded state of enlightened theta brain-wave meditative visions of the quantum continuum. Those states of awareness are not represented by literature, or anything else.

Yet, I recently had the honor of teaching students in Romania, at the fantastic Atlantykron Academy of Learning, to see from that perspective, write from it, make music from it, and to interact from it. It was a good balance to the other lectures which focused on the beta brainwaves, and a great place to do it, as it was in nature, in primitive conditions in non-formal education, in an academy focusing on the cutting edge advancements, and Sci Fi literature. I feel that the more educational systems like that that include lessons on how to become lucid, the more our society as a whole can realize we are dreaming, and not have all the advantages of lucid dreaming, while awake. There is hope.

Alexander:

You mention a “looser definition of Lucid Fiction beyond the literary.” How would you characterize Lucid Fiction beyond literature? Is this denotation variant omitting “fiction” and pertaining to the word “lucid”? Or are you incorporating some notions of literature in this expansion of the definition since you refer to “fictionalized”? Could you can explain what “fictionalized” mean?

Tantra:

I’m neither omitting “Lucid” nor “Fiction.” You can see my interview with Ron Bales, if you like, as he and his band, Lucid Fiction, use the term in exactly the same way. I love how that happened. Maybe if enough people use the term people will start to understand, or become lucid, about how our society has provided us with a complete fictional version of reality. I’m incorporating notions of literature in that it is supposed to be not true, changed, and our own history, science, religion, everything is untrue, so we are living in a piece of fiction.

And mainstream literature follows the character definitions and subject matter, etc. that endorse and continue that falsification by the powers that be. Mass media is well known to give us complete false information all the time, as they are paid for by people who are perpetuating falsehoods. For example, the news goes along with the myth of how 911 was caused, rather than the reality that anyone who has studied the physics related to the effects of controlled demolitions will tell you. This is complete fiction told to us as truth. I want fiction that no longer complies with that, but helps that fiction to become more lucid from the inside out. We are living in a fiction that can become aware that it is fiction, like a dreamer becoming aware that he is dreaming, having a lucid dream.

Instead of just pretending that we have normal clouds and contrails, and going along with the fiction that there are no chemtrails, why not actually just admit they are there, in our literature, in our lives, and be real about the whole thing? We are walking around with chemtrails overhead, pure biowarfare, and Roundup under our feet, pure poison, eating genetically modified food with toxins that make people sick, parents being told they’re supposed to vaccinate their kids when there is no evidence it helps, only hurts health, as they take them to school to learn lies from history books, geology books, political science books, then bring them home to play games on the computer, including the ones created by the CIA recruiters who completely mislead what is going on behind the scenes, and make games that glorify wars, about which we are being lied to completely, with no mention of the relationship of drug running, for example.

Authors write books that allude to conspiracies, but they don’t actually tell the truth in the books, I’d assume that’s to keep from being blacklisted. But in experimental fiction, as we aren’t looking to have best sellers, I’d think we could take the chance and actually instruct at the same time as entertain. So many people love the sense they are learning something about history, conspiracy, religion, and the occult, from some books that become popular, but all that reading and excitement adds up to just one more diversion. It seems like such a good change to actually inform through fascinating literature. And as people would learn the truth, they fiction perpetuated by the Bilderbergers, Skull and Bonesmen, Masons, Trilateral Commission, Committee of 300, and such would no longer be able to fool us for their selfish agendas.

I’m digging as deep as I can to look at Lucid Fiction from a socio-spiritual approach. It’s not just the fiction perpetuated by those who are trying to dumb us down with MILAB implants and microwave frequencies and HAARP and psychotropic chemicals in our food that I’m wanting to make lucid. It’s also the limited perspective of the beta brain-wave frequency, the sympathetic nervous system dominance, the accepted ideas of what a person is, and is capable of, the Euclidian physics outdated notions, that I’m wanting to see become more lucid through experimental literature, and through our lives themselves.

We continue acting in our lives and our literature as if the little human first-world country perspectives of the present moment are an accurate portrayal of reality. Look at how much they’ve changed over history. Look at how New physics changes everything, when we see how dreamlike our reality is. Look at how differently a levitating rishi in India, who does Tantric practices and is able to disappear, float in air, go without food or sleep, know what people are thinking across the world, would see reality compared to a businessman in Detroit who has never meditated.

If the businessman were to wake up within his dream of being in a limited body, and became lucid to the idea that we are capable of much more, he would be much more likely to be able to have more ESP, for example, that very day. If he would read quantum physics, he might realize how parallel worlds work, with particles going in and out of them, how they are intelligent, how everyone is living in one continuum with randomly chosen boundaries and labels. He could become more lucid within the dream of living in a mundane world. If he could experience more synchronicities, and pay attention to them, he would realize our lives are far more like dreams that can be woken up inside.

So I do what I can in my Tantra teaching to help people become more lucid through the exercises. I try to portray the same quantum world through much of my writing as well.

Alexander:

So you are using Lucid Fiction in a very general way, not confined to literature, although it may be applied in literature and referring it to “lucid fiction”?

Lucid has references to truth, fiction has references to non-truth, wouldn’t you agree? If so, do you think this is a dualistic notion that is paradoxical if not contradictory? .. . like coining the term illuminating darkness. Do you see this dualistic notion in the meaning behind “lucid fiction”?

Tantra:

Ron Bales, of the band Lucid Fiction, describes the non literary, social concept well on their site, and in my interview with him. I wouldn’t throw myself into a promoting a genre that was only literary, as it needs to apply to something larger, needs to relate to something very real and pressing and urgent to be worth my spending this much time with, considering the real needs of humanity to pay attention to what is going on around us in order to allow the earth to survive. Every literary movement has social aspects, and the literature is a way of describing and considering society and new notions of consciousness, new paradigms of existence. Each one is relevant to social change, and Lucid Fiction is relevant to the new understandings our society is finally coming to. It’s been hard waiting so long for people to see through some of the illusions. But look at the falling apart of the Bush regime, the popularity of the alternative press, the Truth Movement, the transparency of the Patriot Act and similar methods of control, the fact that we are now considered terrorists if we mention the word “constitution” a few times, the popularity of David Icke books, and the movie Zeitgeist, the way parents are fighting forced vaccines and bringing to light that vaccines are not beneficial, the way that the majority of people no longer believe what they are told on the news or by politicians, the increasingly obvious conspiracies require literature that keeps up with the new illuminated darkness. We are able to see more easily what is in the murky depths which were hidden before. We can see how dark they are, and when the light is shone within the caves, we see the Reptilians lurching.

While the seeming paradox of the term “Lucid Fiction” is what makes it catchy and interesting, it isn’t dualistic. Lucid doesn’t mean truth per se, but the ability to recognize truth. So we are seeing the truth that we have been given a fictional, illusiory story about what is going on in our world. We are told there are disasters and Fema has to come along and help us. That there is an epidemic bewing and so we will have to have vaccines. And we have to be forced to have them, so we have to have Fema quarantine us and we have to have martial law. We aren’t being told that the martial law is the goal and the epidemic is being created by what is being put in vaccines. But more people are talking about how so many other epidemics were created by vaccines and similar methods, and how martial law is the plan, the fiction we are being told is becoming transparent. Transparency is another meaning of Lucid.

Lucid also means lit up, limpid. I am not only promoting fiction that is showing the problems of control but which is showing what it is they may be trying to control us in order to prevent, which may be our own awareness of our power, glowing beauty, potential. They may be threatened by our own ability to be lucid beyond just seeing their lies, and to see the whole fiction of being incarnate. Just being alive in bodies and in a society in which we are taught that we have very limited abilities is part of the control, part of the fiction. Some societies believe in many more abilities which would be seen as supernatural here, and the people have those abilities because they don’t have that fiction. They are more lucid about their own lucidity!

Alexander:

So based on what you have said, would you be satisfied if I explain Lucid Fiction as follows: Lucid is synonymous to awareness and Fiction refers to incomplete or misunderstanding about human’s relationship to life.  So Lucid Fiction refers to awareness or understanding the misconceptions about human life.  Fiction is not referring to literature per se, but referring to illusionary or artificial.  Also, when you say genre, you are not referring to literary genre, but a wider scope that can include visual art, music, video, theater, and perhaps applied psychology. Would you agree with my description?

Tantra:

To some degree. “Lucid” is not synonymous with “awareness”. It’s its own word, carefully chosen for all of its meanings. All of them apply. But if we are narrowing it down to some of one meaning, then, yes, that fits. Fiction—well, that’s part of it. Our misunderstanding about reality. The fiction I am referring to has a lot to do with lies we are told through everything including mainstream fiction, which constructs a wrong story people are living inside of, which is done on purpose, and which is perpetuated by literature unless it uses experimental form and subject matter to break through it. When I am talking about the Lucid Fiction genre, I am talking about the literary genre of fiction, specifically. But the term “Lucid Fiction” can apply to reality or to other forms of the arts and writing in a wider context, because it is the fiction we live in becoming lucid, becoming more transparent, as we become more limpid, through using the tools within it. Like a lucid dreamer becoming more aware of what is going on, and thus the dream itself becomes different.

Alexander:

Tantra, you mention what can be categorized as conspiracy theories as a type of fiction that you wish people would become lucid about or aware.  What other type of fictions do you notice in our society? And which is an aspect of life that most of us are already lucid about—without any fiction there?

Tantra:

To be able to express through lucid fiction, one has to be lucid oneself about the subject, and there has to be some fictional aspect for the reader to appreciate being awakened.  How does one know one is lucid about a subject and how does one know others have a fictional take on the subject?  Let’s take Euclidean physics, since I have some working knowledge and experience with it, and of which you suggested a fictional aspect of.  Would you explain what is fictional about Euclidean physics and what is there to be lucid about?

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Tantra Bensko has over 100 creative writing publications as well as numerous articles of literary theory, and other non fiction. Her short story collection is accepted for publication, and she has a column in Unlikely Stories. She teaches Experimental Fiction Writing classes online through writerscollege.com and UCLA Extension Writing Program. She runs a site called Experimental Writing as a resource. Her MFA is from Iowa, and she has won awards here and there. She currently lives in rural Alabama of all places. www.freewebs.com/tantrabensko.