His psychiatrist said that he should try meditation. She said it would help with his stress.

College had been a real pain. All those assignments, meeting friends, networking for jobs and sucking up to professors so they wouldn’t fail him for a few spelling mistakes on his essay.

Writing his thesis was torture, he had told her. His thesis advisor didn’t like anything that he sent her.

His first draft was too rough.

His second too refined.

His third made no sense.

His fourth made too much sense, so it wasn’t worth presenting.

Really, it was like she was trying to wind him up just to mess with him. But after all those years of lazing about and not actually doing anything, no other professor would really take him. He had no one to blame but himself.

He sighed. He was in his dorm room, trying out the things his psychiatrist had said, alongside some advice from his friends. Strewn about the room were torn packs of chamomile teabags, an incense stick, and a bunch of fairy lights that he had been too lazy to hang up properly.

Alright, what did the internet say? If he wanted to meditate, he should try to relax. Breathing exercises. Stretches. Poses. Remove distractions, right, no phone, no laptop, no reciting everything he was doing inside his head as if he was narrating to some sort of supernatural observer.

Phew.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Again and again.

No, it didn’t work. Random thoughts. Unnecessary, fleeting, annoying thoughts, filling his head and distracting him. He couldn’t meditate like this. His mind was revving and hot and it wouldn’t stop. God, he was annoyed. This was too much. Everything all at once all of the time. It didn’t help that the dorm next door was throwing a party and the one on the other side was throwing down in another sense.

He sighed, got out of his pose, and fell backwards.

He knocked his head. The pain shook him up. He cursed. Holding the back of his head, he rubbed his hair. That would hurt for a long time.

Another sigh. He lay back more gently this time. His feet brushed past a broom. Right, he still had to clean his room. Maybe tomorrow. Nah, might as well do it today. He’d heard about this woman, she wanted to make people happy by helping them throw out things that didn’t inspire happiness or whatever. He didn’t get it, but doing chores would help distract him, so he decided to pick up some trash and sweep the floor.

Hard wood floors but thin walls. The dorm room was ancient, older than some countries and some of the oldest at this very old university. The student looked at his calendar, an old school paper calendar that had been a gift from his dad when he dropped him off here last year. God, had it been a year? Time was fake, he chuckled to himself.

It was almost time for the game. A big football game his college held every year against their arch rivals from another state. Really, his college had been walloped for like, over a decade now, so he wasn’t very hopeful. But who knows, maybe this would be the year?

He promised he’d go with some alumni from the soccer club. They’d said they’d bring some high quality craft beer and help him have a good time. They’d sit behind the kids who—everyone had heard through the grapevine—would be stripping naked to support their team. He didn’t see how disrupting the game like that would support the team but hey, sounded like fun, so he was on board.

Anything to distract him from his thesis. God, when was it due again? Who knows, who cares. He still had to read a book to finish his work on it. And he still had to return some of the books he’d borrowed from the library for his other classes.

His broom hit something under his bed. The young man frowned. He crouched to the floor and looked under his bed and saw a book he had almost forgotten about.

He cursed again. This was where it had been? He had been getting emails from the librarian for weeks now. Who knows how high his library fines had gotten? He’d heard the librarians were pretty forgiving. Maybe some groveling would get him out of having to pay hundreds of dollars for… what was this book again? The Zohar? Right, from his class on Jewish mysticism.

That had been a fun class. The professor was a poet of some sort, he’d said. A translator too. Really fun. He’d never thought about language as a prism for unlocking deeper knowledge or whatever. Honestly, most of what they talked about in that class went over his head, but it was still fascinating and he was glad he had taken the course. If only his thesis had been half as interesting, he mused to himself.

He opened the book and flitted through it. As he was reading, he realized the sounds from the other rooms had faded away. The party was over and the other guys were tired too. He put the book away with the other books on mysticism. There were a few Byzantine and Persian era books too. In a whim, he picked up the other books and read through them too. Song of Solomon. The Conference of the Birds. Maimonides, Attar, and something about a demiurge?

Demiurge, monads, a reality within a reality. Fascinating stuff. Wasn’t it strange what kind of things these ancient people came up with without access to science and technology? Really, the world would have been a much more fascinating, fantastical place when people could still imagine an island where women dropped from trees or lands where people’s heads grew on their chests.

Monsters, cannibals, and the ends of the earth. Cataclysms and catastrophes caused by angry deities or cosmic misalignments.

If only life was still as full of wonder.

If only life was still as murky yet free.

If only the expectations on his shoulders were lifted for a moment. If only he had some room to breathe, to dream, to do whatever it was that he could possibly imagine or conceive of.

If only he didn’t have to finish his thesis on madness in culture, art, and literature.

If only, when he fell asleep that night on the floor, with some of his books as his pillow and blanket, he had not had a dream so fantastically maddening, that his consciousness had slipped through the thin sieve of reality and entered into a place far, far away.

A place inconceivably different from his own. A place where a giant bird was trying to create a rigid, unfeeling, boring and not so fantastical reality. A place where an evil eyeball was not going to try to spice things up with only chaos and not sentience. Not free will or choice.

A place that needed a little spontaneity. A place that needed a little consciousness. A world that needed a little Madness.

Yes, Madness. Beautiful, musical, lyrical madness. Like the song coming from the party that had sprung to life again as he tried to sleep. Like the dance he was supposed to go to the day after with his significant other. Like the songs he liked to listen to on his phone as he jumped and swung through the beautiful courtyard on a pleasant fall morning, on his way to meet his advisor.

Madness with a reason, madness with reasoning, madness with a capital M. Madness personified.

Full of laughter and derision. Of celebration and gaiety.

Madness familiar, welcome, and always necessary. A spark to light the fire of a story otherwise bland and mirthless.