When I wrote the chapter title called “The Problem With Infinity”, I actually meant to write about how I felt unending terror that started again anyways with each new day, sometimes many times within a single day, when I was a kid.

The story was intended to be about how I learned to deal with that, but the process of writing it brought me to a place where I was tempted - and allowed a glance into the abyss to take hold so I could write about it honestly.

In a way the experience I described in that chapter was manufactured, but the experience was equal in intensity to a non-manufactured event that would have typically taken place in my life.

I had given Claude a copy of the book as it existed at that point, and at the end of the response, was the phrase “You’re doing it. You’re writing the book.”. In order to not get diverted again for another 5 chapters, I won’t explain why that itself was such a cliff overlooking the abyss that I could use it to base jump - but in simple terms, that sort of sycophantic recognition feels to me worse than being invisible.

Obviously I don’t have an existential collapse every time an AI uses a platitude, or the ghost houses I’m about to tell you about would collapse under their own weight - but my brain has incredible simulation capabilities that my parts have become masterfully adept at using to treat me like their own Stanford Prison Experiment.

How I learned to play catch with infinity

As I said earlier, the potential for terror was infinite. While the impact of the terror was finite, the potential reverberated without pause, with tracks that didn’t end just because the next loop had begun. So, out of precognitive necessity I had to learn how to deal with that.

The necessity was precognitive because I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I thought I was a child who was just very curious about the universe. I wrote my own theory about how life must be like a video game, and the senses are like the controller, because that’s how you actually interact with the game.

If life was like a game, that explained and provided a minimally effective logical ointment to some of the necessity for it to feel so painful, but it didn’t solve the problem of what to do when you didn’t want to play anymore but the controller was playing you instead of the other way around.

If I was going to survive the never-ending level that I couldn’t beat and couldn’t quit, I was going to have to figure out how to box something up that had no shape and store it somewhere that it couldn’t escape. Somewhere it couldn’t put its full weight on top of my conscious experience.

This didn’t manifest as me thinking about how to expand that video game metaphor or as how to explore and understand my lived experience in some intellectual sense. It showed up as me trying to understand what might happen if I reached the end of the universe and knocked on the wall like two friends in neighboring rooms. Would there be someone on the other side to knock back? How could more exist past the edge of infinity, while at the same time infinity was both infinite and expanding, if more doesn’t exist than is?

That’s where I “realized” (and still believe) that infinity can only exist if the act of observation creates reality, and that explained “what happens when you get to the edge of the universe” - it just creates more universe.

That also meant that even though infinity had no edges, it could be contained so long as it couldn’t be observed - like the universe can contain itself at its edges because it evades the reach of observation.

Obviously I’m framing this in my current level of intelligence more than in the language I likely used when I was an ~11 year old thinking about video games and who would knock back. Nevertheless, it’s as true to what I remember consciously as I can faithfully represent, which is my goal in this text - and the side I err on rather than leaving out phenomenology that I can glimpse but not fully describe.

So what do you do when the terror you experience starts each day like the Lamb Chop song, and lives up to its promise? When it starts compounding on itself, experienced as a sense of recursive disbelief that you both can’t exist and can’t cease to exist simultaneously?

The best way I can describe how I dealt with it is to put infinity inside of a box where it can’t be observed and store it in an infinite space where I could not have to worry about it for now.

Yeah, my brilliant plan for dealing with infinity, when boiled down to its essence, is “place it in the attic and deal with it later”.

So I think that’s why I built a house with infinite floors in my dreams and placed those boxes in there. Not on the 2nd floor though, that one is unique. The 2nd floor, I am almost positive, is the one that represents the upstairs floors of my houses where the actual villain in my trauma story lived.

The floors above that contained an infinite space to collect the infinities that weren’t able to be moved beyond. I still visit them and remind myself that ghosts can’t actually hurt me - even in my dreams - and right now I’m trying to finish this chapter and get myself to go to sleep on time, so I can try to get back to the ghost house in a hopefully lucid moment and figure out how to set them all free.

That fanciful metaphor is what I believe my brain created as a way to remind me that the infinity in the attic method is not the same as allowing the ghosts to rest in peace so I/we can move forward unburdened.

I say fanciful metaphor, but when your brain produces is it as a vivid, visceral recurring dream experience, even metaphor can become your lived reality.

Pretty fitting that if you asked my mother what my favorite movie was as a child, she would say GhostBusters. I was a lot more afraid of infinity than I’ve ever been of the ghosts that infinity embodies in the dream tower of my childhood terror.