MONSTERS AND MONSTROUS THOUGHTS
Monsters and monstrous thoughts were flashing through my mind. I was travelling through an ominously barbaric place where my 
life was in mortal danger. Gigantic wild beasts kept appearing from nowhere. They were grotesque and merciless. There was no escape. With every step I took, I was overcome by a feeling of certainty that I was about to meet my end.
Yesterday I had woken up in a cold sweat at two o’clock in the afternoon. I had fallen asleep after an exhausting night shift in Infinity Gateway followed by several hours surfing the web. I had just had a nightmare. It had seemed so real, so vivid, so terrifying that I was left gasping for air after being trapped in an alien world trying to stay alive.
Just before I had emerged from sleep, I had imagined myself writhing around on the ground in
pain, my flesh and bones dissolving in front of my own eyes. I had no more than a few seconds to live. There was no chance of escape. A demon watchdog called Rottsnarler had suddenly appeared in a place called the Stink Hole Caves and had showered me in deadly pandraxian rays. The monster’s deadly left eye had sprayed me with its lethal orange toxin. I was about to be reduced to a bubbling liquid of disintegrating flesh and bones.
After I had woken up and recovered my composure, I spent the next hour reflecting on this terrifying hallucination. I realised immediately what had been at the root of this shocking 
experience. Whilst I had been surfing the web on the Lightning Link, I had come across a new ebook entitled Monsters of Narratokia by Isobel Vellacott. Its pages were filled with graphic descriptions of giants, beasts, reptiles, serpents and tyrants.
The effect of this book on my psyche had been profound. I had relived the entire monstrous fantasy in my imagination, in my dreams and nightmares. A fire-breathing beast called the Rhinotaur had terrified me with its two heads, three eyes, bloodstained horn and murderous rotating tail embedded with nails and glass shards. A monstrous sea creature, known as a
Tentaculopod, had drenched me in black ink and attempted to crush and strangle me with its gigantic purple and white striped tentacles. An awe-inspiring prehistoric reptile called a Croculosaurus, had snapped its fearsome jaws at me, its poisonous blue tongue dripping deadly black venom.
Then, Rottsnarler had appeared, a colossal howling dog possessing the strength of one hundred elephants and a fiendish eye that discharged streams of pandraxian rays. And finally, to cap it all, a bloodthirsty villain called Terrox the Terrible had chased me relentlessly around the Plains of Dissimulation, attempting to stab me to death with a twelve-inch golden dagger.
There was something terrifyingly authentic about the whole experience that I had encountered in this imaginary place called Narratokia, even though I knew that it had been no more than a nightmare. The evidence was clear. My imagination had been taken over by a fictitious story in a book. It had been a monstrous fantasy. And yet, it had all seemed so chillingly real.
I spent the next few days with images of monsters flashing through my mind, unable entirely to dismiss the idea that it hadn’t actually happened in reality.
That’s the problem with life in the Anticlockwise Empire. You begin to lose your grip on what is real and what is pure fantasy generated by an overactive imagination. I spend so much time locked up in my own mind, unable to express my thoughts freely in public, that I begin to hallucinate, to imagine that my dreams and nightmares are in fact my unique brand of reality.
Anticlockwise is my own personal monstrous environment. It resembles in so many ways the fictitious world of Narratokia. The monsters and tyrants in Narratokia are undoubtedly savage and terrifying. Just pronouncing the names of these wild creatures is enough to conjure up fear and foreboding: Rhinotaur, Tentaculopod, Croculosaurus, Rottsnarler and Terrox the Terrible. Here in Globopolis, though, I have my own monsters: the Anticlocks, the Snoops and the ever-present and unseen surveillance agents lurking like wild beasts, ready at any time to pounce on me, to devour every last morsel of my mind and body.
In this Anticlock nightmare it’s never clear to me where reality ends and where my imaginary paranoia begins.
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