When I was 12 years old my dad bought me a microscope. Nothing fancy, but solid. I spent hours at a time with my eyeball glued to that thing. I kept a Mason jar full of water from the nearby stock tank or the mud puddle in the driveway.

I looked at all the obvious things first. Salt, sugar, leaves. But nothing was better than a dropful of muddy water. So many little dramas going on that we can’t even see.

What must it be like? One second you’re munching on a protazoan or a blob of algae and next thing you know, you’ve been sucked down some rotifer’s gullet. None of them know about fish, or people, or air, or the stars. Not much thought going on down there, just pure survival.

And the poor things are so tiny they can’t even tell they’re on borrowed time. They’re battling it out in a drop of water and they’re all going to die when it dries up.

I’ve thought about getting a new microscope for years, but it’s a lot easier to watch YouTube videos. Besides, my interests have broadened. I always wanted to be an inventor, for example. Unfortunately, I am the opposite of technical.

But I didn’t give up. A while back I started getting into mysticism and psychology, read a bunch of philosophy books bought a couple of Tarot decks and I invented something: a psychroscope.

It took a long time to come together and it’s still not perfect, but I’m seeing more all the time. It’s like a microscope, but pointed outward, toward the psychic medium. And what did I see?

Same thing I saw in those drops of pond water. Life. Creatures of thought, Unaware of what they are or where they’re going, swimming through unspoken thoughts and little kids’ dreams. Narratives nested inside nested narratives, meta meta meta narratives.

Entities that live both inside and outside of us. Gods or monsters we all create together. Moving images we project onto the world, filtered through our fears and desires. Are they real? Depends on how you define real. If enough people think they are and act accordingly, they might as well be real.

I think they’re a bit like the cosmic horrors Lovecraft wrote about. You might call them “Elder Gods” but they’re not older than us. We made them. They’ve grown up with us. Whether they are evil or benign depends on us.