Your Reality: Holographic Level

Reality is a bit like a science fiction novel to the extent that as a character in this fiction you often discover that the carpet's been pulled out from under you. You find yourself wandering through an environment that appears familiar but is actually radically different. Capgras Syndrome is a neurological condition where the sufferer is convinced that otherwise familiar individuals are imposters. On a more collective and less pathological scale you wake up into a new world in which one-time familiar sensibilities and milestones have suddenly become anachronisms. It’s as if you've lost your footing. It’s like those dreams where you're trying to defend yourself and all your blows seem to fall on air. You're suddenly deprived of the tools, whatever they were, which enabled you to ply your trade. While these changes often occur in a gradual evolutionary way, they can materialize overnight seemingly out of nowhere. Suddenly you're extraneous to the conversation, like a once powerful politician who’s been voted out of office. Soldiers on the front lines see their numbers decimated and one of the most basic and disconcerting evidences of this change of the guard are the empty seats and missing faces that occur in the places where people congregate, like churches or synagogues, where a seat in the pew occupied for years by the same individual is suddenly vacated. It’s not just that someone has gone, but a conversation has ended, leaving a vacuum that has yet to be filled.