These parts are not unknown -
Travelers all, we have been shown
Hidden lands.

- H.R. Prinn, fragment from the poem, "The Dreamer Abroad", 1975, unpublished -

Prinn was not known as a poet and it is not my intention to judge him as such here based on the lines excerpted above. Nor is it my intention to muse upon the whys and wherefores of the secret poetical output, discovered posthumously, of the infamous science fiction author. Rather, it is my desire to take the quoted lines as my cue for a brief analysis of the real and the apparently real.

The theme of "The Dreamer Abroad" is crystallized in those three lines. The realms of the unconscious and dreams are known to one and all. Yet, despite the universal familiarity of these occult regions visited each night in sleep, they are considered "unreal". The waking world, because it seems to our five senses more persistent, is deemed the "real" world. Those who have made it their work to go beyond the pale of the accepted (I will resist the temptation to drop names here), know that, indeed, the "real" world is a waking dream. This is not an assertion that can be easily argued or proven. Those who do not know it will not know it until such time as they come to the knowledge. This is a matter of consciousness; individual consciousness for those who have not come to the knowledge of which I write, collective consciousness for those who have.

It is amusing and perhaps typically ironic that Science, that bastion of the empirical and "real", has in recent decades given birth to the field of Quantum Mechanics - a scientific theory of reality in which the "laws of physics" are not only broken but abolished. In the realm of the quantum the real world falls to unpredictable pieces and the consciousness I have alluded to takes on a role the dimensions of which have yet to be imagined - even by such luminaries of imagination as Prinn.

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