Paracosm
It started when I was 12. I was one third of the way through middle school, having just completed sixth grade. It was perhaps the last time I felt totally stress-free. College and high school felt eons away, and the childish play of elementary school had yet to wear off. The year was 2011, the same year my family bought its first "smart" mobile device: a 32 GB black Wi-Fi-only Apple iPad 2. Naturally, the decision to buy the device was lobbied mostly by me, and when the shiny new product made its way to my hands, I couldn't wait to try out the features that I had waited for in anticipation. The first app I opened was Photo Booth—the iPad 2 was the first of its kind to feature a camera. I was oblivious to most social issues of the world, and as a tween, I probably wouldn't have cared all that much anyway. School was out, vacation was here, life was good.
The June of that same year, my family and I traveled to China to visit my extended family. The trip to China, let me tell you now, is the lengthiest if you're traveling from the United States. Starting from Columbus, Ohio, my family first flew east to Chicago O'Hare, then (after an ample layover) took off to Tokyo (where customs officials confiscated a good pair of scissors that my sister had unwittingly carried onto the aircraft). We then flew to Beijing. The whole experience was somewhere in the range of 23 hours. Don't get me wrong—initially, I was really excited for the flight. This was back in the era when seat-back entertainment systems were a rarity, and I was therefore elated to discover that the longest leg of my flight would be featuring one. What could be more exciting to a budding teenager than his own personal database of movies to commandeer for more than 12 hours? Not to mention, the whole concept of flying was immensely fascinating to me. I was a fan of the television documentary series Air Crash Investigation, which examined famous air accidents and incidents and described how their causes were determined and how they have prevented similar disasters. The show was able to impeccably explain how airplanes fly and how air traffic controllers direct the thousands of takeoffs and landings each day. For a time, I had seriously considered becoming a pilot myself one day. I still find the idea pretty cool. Regardless, the jet lag that the 23-hour flight produced is indescribable. I distinctly remember arriving in China in the light of midday. We had greeted a few family friends and, that evening, went out to share dinner. The entire time at the restaurant table, my head was lying down, glued to the table—I was out cold.
Despite being of Chinese descent, my Chinese language skills were embarrassingly suboptimal. I could carry a simple conversation—but not really much else. Surrounded by so much stuff I didn't understand, I couldn't help but feel slightly lonely and out of place. Once, somewhere in Beijing, I was riding an elevator up an apartment building, and another woman whom I didn't know entered the elevator car with us. My father struck up some small talk with her, and at one point she directly asked me what grade I was in. Stammering a bit, I replied that I was in "七年级", or literally, "seventh grade". I mean, it was totally factual from my point of view. The woman politely nodded, but her face betrayed her mild confusion. My dad just smirked. Later, I found out that the Chinese education system does not have a "七年级"—school years are referred to in association with their respective school type. Primary school in China (equivalent of elementary school in the US) typically lasts six years, middle school typically lasts for three years, and high school typically lasts for another three years. If one were to say they were in "五年级", or fifth grade, Chinese people would assume that they were in the fifth year of primary school. However, if one were to say they were in seventh grade, then they would have to say they were in the "first year of middle school", or "初一" (literally "middle one"). Since there is no seventh year of any of the school levels, saying "seventh grade" literally is a little ambiguous.
I had brought the iPad 2, along with a silver, 5th-generation iPod nano—the only iPod nano to feature a video camera (sadly, my own iPod camera's microphone had, for some reason, suddenly stopped working the year before). On my iPad, I had my English-language games; on my iPod, I had my English-language music; in my backpack, I had a few books. These were my companions, the only tokens of the culture I grew up in back in the States, the culture I had left behind. Of course, I had lots of fun on the trip too. However, amid the good times, I would often find myself retreating back to my corner of the room to have some time alone to engage with these bits of my American identity. It was in these special times alone when I created my imaginary world.
My imaginary world is exactly that: an entire world which I have created inside my mind—a paracosm. It has its own main characters, some of which I've stolen from existing TV shows, movies and whatnot, some of which I've created entirely on my own, some of which are people that exist in the real world. They all mean something to me. My world even has its own government system, movie theater, and transportation network. It is a world I descend to daily, whenever I'm alone. It is like an ongoing movie in my mind, for which I am the sole director, executive producer, and writer.
There are a few key things that led to the creation of my imaginary world, for which I'll be forever grateful. First is Owl City's masterful 2009 album Ocean Eyes. I had discovered Owl City the year before, after stumbling upon his song "Fireflies" at some creek in Virginia. I checked out Ocean Eyes some time later and put all the songs on my iPod. If I wasn't entranced by Owl City before my 2011 China trip, I certainly was after it. In my times alone, I found myself growing increasingly attached to the pure electronic vibe that Owl City resonated. The lyrics intrigued me, and I drew nearer and nearer until I was deeply engrossed, dying to hear more. I distinctly remember listening to one Owl City song—"Cave In"—on repeat as I was in a car en route to the next tourist destination. It was then when I made the fascinating discovery that I could close my eyes while listening to the music and be taken away to another world. What's in this world? Anything that I wanted.
Another key influence was Victoria Justice's song "Make It Shine". The song was used as the theme song for the Nickelodeon show Victorious. I wasn't a fan of Victorious per se, but whenever a show came on I would watch it. There was one episode that crossed over the shows iCarly and Victorious. The final act of that episode featured an epic mashup of their two theme songs, sung by their main characters. At the time, I hadn't listened to the full versions of either song, just the 30-second snippet that aired as the theme. However, when Victoria Justice sang "'Cause you know that if you live in your imagination, tomorrow you'll be everybody's fascination", I found myself emboldened. I wanted to believe that it was true. I put "Make It Shine" along with the iCarly mashup onto the iPod. During my times alone in China, I would listen to it, and once again, I found myself being able to close my eyes and drift off into another world.
I grew up watching the 1988 Don Bluth film The Land Before Time and its many sequels. The series revolved around a young "longneck" dinosaur named Littlefoot, who befriends four other dinosaurs of different species. In the original film, it is explained that the five kinds of dinosaurs—"longnecks", "threehorns", "spiketails", "swimmers", and "flyers"—stay apart and go their own ways. Indeed, as the now-classic quote goes, "threehorns never play with longnecks". When Littlefoot loses his mother to a "sharptooth", he breaks down the barriers of segregation and befriends Ducky, a swimmer; Petrie, a flyer; Cera, a threehorn; and finally, Spike, a spiketail. Separated from their parents and in a desperate race for survival, the friends must reconcile past conflicts and journey long and hard to find the legendary "Great Valley", where they believe their parents are headed as well. In my times alone in China, I found myself reminiscing on the old Land Before Time world.
I also grew up watching the combined CGI/hand-drawn animated TV series Code Lyoko. The show revolved around a circle of friends—Jeremy, Aelita, Ulrich, Odd, and Yumi—who must go into a virtual world called "Lyoko" that exists in a supercomputer to fight X.A.N.A., a malicious artificial intelligence that basically wants to take over the world. The goal of the first half of the series is to somehow bring Aelita, whom Jeremy found in Lyoko when he discovered it, to the real world. The goal of the second half of the series is to somehow destroy X.A.N.A. and shut down the supercomputer once and for all.
As I stood there in my little corner of the room, alone in a crowd, able to leave the world behind through music, I began to build my own world. This world—that is, the real world, where you and I live in right now—exists in my imaginary world. But so do the worlds of every movie, TV show, video game, book, or other fictional work that has ever been created. As a matter of fact, every single possible world that can ever be conceived—with any forms of life, any laws of physics, any progression of history—exists in my imaginary world. Think of each fictional world as its own separate universe. Normally, no living entity in one universe would have any knowledge about the entities in another universe, as travel between them is extremely difficult. The totality of all universes is a multiverse of every single world that has ever, will ever, or could ever be conceived. As a homage to Code Lyoko, I have affectionately entitled this whole multiverse "Lyoko", and each individual universe in Lyoko is known as a "sector". Therefore, my entire imaginary world can be referred to simply as "Lyoko".
The very first rendition of my imaginary world was rather childish (hell, I suppose the current rendition of the world is still rather childish). It all started with a single premise: what if Owl City was somehow able to transport himself to the world of The Land Before Time to play music for the characters there? Today, when I listen to music, I still imagine whoever performing the music playing in front of an imaginary audience in my imaginary world. This is why I am sometimes able to listen to the same songs over and over, without them ever feeling "old"—I keep imagining the songs being played to different audiences. The power of imagination means that you get to decide how the audience receives the performance. There is such an immense feeling of sheer possibility at this idea that I can't seem to get myself to grow out of it. It's addictive.
There is another premise that my imaginary world is based on. In such a wide realm of worlds, you can imagine that there would be some living entities living in it that have discovered ways to cross dimensions and transport themselves to other universes. Perhaps others have discovered ways to toy with the very fabric of existence and have the power to destroy existence itself. Malevolent access to the knowledge of control of the workings of Lyoko could lead to its own self-destruction, which would lead to unimaginable catastrophe, the creation of inter-dimensional paradoxes that would destroy the very fabric of the lower dimensions as the higher dimensions struggled to cope with the impact. If the higher dimensions break, Lyoko would be much like a broken computer, where a program in it caused it to crash. So what prevents evilly-aligned intelligent forms of life in one universe from conquering inferior forms of life in another? What prevents evilly-aligned life from destroying all of Lyoko?
The answer lies in an interdimensional governing body I call "the Administration of Lyoko". The Administration of Lyoko was created after the aforementioned event actually happened: evil intelligent forms of life from one universe discovered the ability to go to another universe and completely take over the inferior life forms of the other. Luckily, some members of that intelligent race decided that this was wrong, and banded together to overthrow the evil rulers of the two universes and impose interdimensional order. From this original band of intelligent entities came the first iteration of what became known as the Administration of Lyoko.
It has now been about four and a half years since my 2011 trip to China, and even now, I find myself sometimes alone, in my little corner of the room. Since I was 12 years old, I have been toiling around with this imaginary world, building and building on it, adding newer worlds, conjuring up mighty conflicts between worlds, and changing the way it is structured. I could make this post as long as I wanted—as a matter of fact, I have a 55-page (and counting) document on my laptop in which I have described my imaginary world in much fuller detail, primarily for myself if I ever grow out of it and wish to return to it one day. (Parts of this blog post were, actually, directly lifted off of that document.)
Why am I posting this to my blog? This is such a huge part of myself that I typically don't like to advertise. The true reason I am posting this is because I suspect I'm not alone. I believe that there are many others out there who also have these stupid, amazing, spectacular worlds hidden inside them. To these people: know that you are not alone. Keep imagining, keep living, keep dreaming. A character in a children's film once said: "Seeing is believing, but sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can't see." I'd like to believe that's true.
The June of that same year, my family and I traveled to China to visit my extended family. The trip to China, let me tell you now, is the lengthiest if you're traveling from the United States. Starting from Columbus, Ohio, my family first flew east to Chicago O'Hare, then (after an ample layover) took off to Tokyo (where customs officials confiscated a good pair of scissors that my sister had unwittingly carried onto the aircraft). We then flew to Beijing. The whole experience was somewhere in the range of 23 hours. Don't get me wrong—initially, I was really excited for the flight. This was back in the era when seat-back entertainment systems were a rarity, and I was therefore elated to discover that the longest leg of my flight would be featuring one. What could be more exciting to a budding teenager than his own personal database of movies to commandeer for more than 12 hours? Not to mention, the whole concept of flying was immensely fascinating to me. I was a fan of the television documentary series Air Crash Investigation, which examined famous air accidents and incidents and described how their causes were determined and how they have prevented similar disasters. The show was able to impeccably explain how airplanes fly and how air traffic controllers direct the thousands of takeoffs and landings each day. For a time, I had seriously considered becoming a pilot myself one day. I still find the idea pretty cool. Regardless, the jet lag that the 23-hour flight produced is indescribable. I distinctly remember arriving in China in the light of midday. We had greeted a few family friends and, that evening, went out to share dinner. The entire time at the restaurant table, my head was lying down, glued to the table—I was out cold.
Despite being of Chinese descent, my Chinese language skills were embarrassingly suboptimal. I could carry a simple conversation—but not really much else. Surrounded by so much stuff I didn't understand, I couldn't help but feel slightly lonely and out of place. Once, somewhere in Beijing, I was riding an elevator up an apartment building, and another woman whom I didn't know entered the elevator car with us. My father struck up some small talk with her, and at one point she directly asked me what grade I was in. Stammering a bit, I replied that I was in "七年级", or literally, "seventh grade". I mean, it was totally factual from my point of view. The woman politely nodded, but her face betrayed her mild confusion. My dad just smirked. Later, I found out that the Chinese education system does not have a "七年级"—school years are referred to in association with their respective school type. Primary school in China (equivalent of elementary school in the US) typically lasts six years, middle school typically lasts for three years, and high school typically lasts for another three years. If one were to say they were in "五年级", or fifth grade, Chinese people would assume that they were in the fifth year of primary school. However, if one were to say they were in seventh grade, then they would have to say they were in the "first year of middle school", or "初一" (literally "middle one"). Since there is no seventh year of any of the school levels, saying "seventh grade" literally is a little ambiguous.
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| This iPod was one of the primary contributors to the creation of my imaginary world. |
I had brought the iPad 2, along with a silver, 5th-generation iPod nano—the only iPod nano to feature a video camera (sadly, my own iPod camera's microphone had, for some reason, suddenly stopped working the year before). On my iPad, I had my English-language games; on my iPod, I had my English-language music; in my backpack, I had a few books. These were my companions, the only tokens of the culture I grew up in back in the States, the culture I had left behind. Of course, I had lots of fun on the trip too. However, amid the good times, I would often find myself retreating back to my corner of the room to have some time alone to engage with these bits of my American identity. It was in these special times alone when I created my imaginary world.
My imaginary world is exactly that: an entire world which I have created inside my mind—a paracosm. It has its own main characters, some of which I've stolen from existing TV shows, movies and whatnot, some of which I've created entirely on my own, some of which are people that exist in the real world. They all mean something to me. My world even has its own government system, movie theater, and transportation network. It is a world I descend to daily, whenever I'm alone. It is like an ongoing movie in my mind, for which I am the sole director, executive producer, and writer.
There are a few key things that led to the creation of my imaginary world, for which I'll be forever grateful. First is Owl City's masterful 2009 album Ocean Eyes. I had discovered Owl City the year before, after stumbling upon his song "Fireflies" at some creek in Virginia. I checked out Ocean Eyes some time later and put all the songs on my iPod. If I wasn't entranced by Owl City before my 2011 China trip, I certainly was after it. In my times alone, I found myself growing increasingly attached to the pure electronic vibe that Owl City resonated. The lyrics intrigued me, and I drew nearer and nearer until I was deeply engrossed, dying to hear more. I distinctly remember listening to one Owl City song—"Cave In"—on repeat as I was in a car en route to the next tourist destination. It was then when I made the fascinating discovery that I could close my eyes while listening to the music and be taken away to another world. What's in this world? Anything that I wanted.
Another key influence was Victoria Justice's song "Make It Shine". The song was used as the theme song for the Nickelodeon show Victorious. I wasn't a fan of Victorious per se, but whenever a show came on I would watch it. There was one episode that crossed over the shows iCarly and Victorious. The final act of that episode featured an epic mashup of their two theme songs, sung by their main characters. At the time, I hadn't listened to the full versions of either song, just the 30-second snippet that aired as the theme. However, when Victoria Justice sang "'Cause you know that if you live in your imagination, tomorrow you'll be everybody's fascination", I found myself emboldened. I wanted to believe that it was true. I put "Make It Shine" along with the iCarly mashup onto the iPod. During my times alone in China, I would listen to it, and once again, I found myself being able to close my eyes and drift off into another world.
I grew up watching the 1988 Don Bluth film The Land Before Time and its many sequels. The series revolved around a young "longneck" dinosaur named Littlefoot, who befriends four other dinosaurs of different species. In the original film, it is explained that the five kinds of dinosaurs—"longnecks", "threehorns", "spiketails", "swimmers", and "flyers"—stay apart and go their own ways. Indeed, as the now-classic quote goes, "threehorns never play with longnecks". When Littlefoot loses his mother to a "sharptooth", he breaks down the barriers of segregation and befriends Ducky, a swimmer; Petrie, a flyer; Cera, a threehorn; and finally, Spike, a spiketail. Separated from their parents and in a desperate race for survival, the friends must reconcile past conflicts and journey long and hard to find the legendary "Great Valley", where they believe their parents are headed as well. In my times alone in China, I found myself reminiscing on the old Land Before Time world.
I also grew up watching the combined CGI/hand-drawn animated TV series Code Lyoko. The show revolved around a circle of friends—Jeremy, Aelita, Ulrich, Odd, and Yumi—who must go into a virtual world called "Lyoko" that exists in a supercomputer to fight X.A.N.A., a malicious artificial intelligence that basically wants to take over the world. The goal of the first half of the series is to somehow bring Aelita, whom Jeremy found in Lyoko when he discovered it, to the real world. The goal of the second half of the series is to somehow destroy X.A.N.A. and shut down the supercomputer once and for all.
As I stood there in my little corner of the room, alone in a crowd, able to leave the world behind through music, I began to build my own world. This world—that is, the real world, where you and I live in right now—exists in my imaginary world. But so do the worlds of every movie, TV show, video game, book, or other fictional work that has ever been created. As a matter of fact, every single possible world that can ever be conceived—with any forms of life, any laws of physics, any progression of history—exists in my imaginary world. Think of each fictional world as its own separate universe. Normally, no living entity in one universe would have any knowledge about the entities in another universe, as travel between them is extremely difficult. The totality of all universes is a multiverse of every single world that has ever, will ever, or could ever be conceived. As a homage to Code Lyoko, I have affectionately entitled this whole multiverse "Lyoko", and each individual universe in Lyoko is known as a "sector". Therefore, my entire imaginary world can be referred to simply as "Lyoko".
The very first rendition of my imaginary world was rather childish (hell, I suppose the current rendition of the world is still rather childish). It all started with a single premise: what if Owl City was somehow able to transport himself to the world of The Land Before Time to play music for the characters there? Today, when I listen to music, I still imagine whoever performing the music playing in front of an imaginary audience in my imaginary world. This is why I am sometimes able to listen to the same songs over and over, without them ever feeling "old"—I keep imagining the songs being played to different audiences. The power of imagination means that you get to decide how the audience receives the performance. There is such an immense feeling of sheer possibility at this idea that I can't seem to get myself to grow out of it. It's addictive.
There is another premise that my imaginary world is based on. In such a wide realm of worlds, you can imagine that there would be some living entities living in it that have discovered ways to cross dimensions and transport themselves to other universes. Perhaps others have discovered ways to toy with the very fabric of existence and have the power to destroy existence itself. Malevolent access to the knowledge of control of the workings of Lyoko could lead to its own self-destruction, which would lead to unimaginable catastrophe, the creation of inter-dimensional paradoxes that would destroy the very fabric of the lower dimensions as the higher dimensions struggled to cope with the impact. If the higher dimensions break, Lyoko would be much like a broken computer, where a program in it caused it to crash. So what prevents evilly-aligned intelligent forms of life in one universe from conquering inferior forms of life in another? What prevents evilly-aligned life from destroying all of Lyoko?
The answer lies in an interdimensional governing body I call "the Administration of Lyoko". The Administration of Lyoko was created after the aforementioned event actually happened: evil intelligent forms of life from one universe discovered the ability to go to another universe and completely take over the inferior life forms of the other. Luckily, some members of that intelligent race decided that this was wrong, and banded together to overthrow the evil rulers of the two universes and impose interdimensional order. From this original band of intelligent entities came the first iteration of what became known as the Administration of Lyoko.
It has now been about four and a half years since my 2011 trip to China, and even now, I find myself sometimes alone, in my little corner of the room. Since I was 12 years old, I have been toiling around with this imaginary world, building and building on it, adding newer worlds, conjuring up mighty conflicts between worlds, and changing the way it is structured. I could make this post as long as I wanted—as a matter of fact, I have a 55-page (and counting) document on my laptop in which I have described my imaginary world in much fuller detail, primarily for myself if I ever grow out of it and wish to return to it one day. (Parts of this blog post were, actually, directly lifted off of that document.)
Why am I posting this to my blog? This is such a huge part of myself that I typically don't like to advertise. The true reason I am posting this is because I suspect I'm not alone. I believe that there are many others out there who also have these stupid, amazing, spectacular worlds hidden inside them. To these people: know that you are not alone. Keep imagining, keep living, keep dreaming. A character in a children's film once said: "Seeing is believing, but sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can't see." I'd like to believe that's true.