No living organism can remain sane for long in conditions of absolute reality.

— Shirley Jackson

It happened several times when I was young. The feeling that someone else is in the room with you, the heavy air, the atmosphere of dormant threat. At night, I would look around the streets to see who or what might be watching me from the darkness. From the portraits hanging on the walls and from the objects found in abandoned houses, residual energy swirled around an unspeakable traumatic core that I explored through psychometry, the pendulum, and other divination techniques. The entire cosmos teemed with presences as I was slowly vanishing. I was never alone; there was always something at the other end of the room, in courtyards, in warehouses shrouded in darkness, and in ruins by the roadside.

At home, I burned incense and candles in honor of infernal hierarchies with their princes, marquises, grand dukes, and generals. I would sit cross-legged on my bed in the dark, waiting for the darkness to fill with presences. And that is what happened: I experienced intense dissociative states during which my consciousness disintegrated and projected outside my body in the form of disembodied entities.

For years, I sought contact with demons, the spirits of the dead, and other dimensions. Until it was this very pursuit that destroyed me. The entities began to manifest themselves on the sensory plane, challenging every capacity I had to control and rationalize, at a time when I felt I was increasingly losing my grip on life and the world.

This encounter with the impossible led me to cut all ties with the occult and its strategies of manipulating reality. In the esoteric toolbox—whether ancient or modern, Western or Eastern—there were no instruments capable of analyzing, describing, defining, and systematizing the events I witnessed during those months. I was alone in facing a dual task: on the one hand, to reconstruct my personality, fragmented by years of practices bordering on paranoid schizophrenia; on the other, to understand a series of phenomena that did not correspond at all to the esoteric commonplaces but were not merely the product of hallucinations either. We might call them “concrete anomalies in the functioning of the world.”

In my case, the fragmentation of personality—due to far more mundane causes than transdimensional traffics—was accelerated and aggravated by a worldview that favors the radical dissemination of rational agents. This, on the other hand, is the theoretical pivot of all magic, including that centered on impersonal flows and chaotic forces: the idea that reality is a labyrinth of mirrors or illusions in which biological organisms are never alone. In magical thinking, we are always at the mercy of the Other. An Other that is not the psychoanalytic one but that of the early anthropological sciences: a mixture of the marvelous and the terrifying inherent in all things, before which humans can only express submission and devotion. The sacred.

The habit of projecting and disseminating intentionality and purpose onto extramental objects has even conditioned the way my unconscious expresses itself.

In my dreams, I find myself in an ancient villa that I have recently purchased or that has belonged to my family for generations. An immense space of astonishing beauty, almost always on a single floor, where one can walk for hours without ever reaching the end. This, in fact, is the villa’s fundamental characteristic: it continuously changes and expands, altering the arrangement of walls and interiors. A perpetual process of deconstruction and reconstruction designed to trap the unwary guest within the building. I am fully aware of all this; I know everything about the villa and its ghosts, yet I cannot resist the temptation to explore it. At the end of the dream, when I find myself at the center of the villa in the room, I know more than any other I should avoid, what happens, happens. It is the manifestation. A poltergeist phenomenon of immense proportions that engulfs the entire villa and plunges it into an abyss of pure self-destruction. At that point, the “thing” that was only a lump of pure energy, anger, and resentment reveals itself. And I wake up, entirely forgetful of that final act of revelation.

The clinical is at the root of all this, not the critical. But it is this stripping bare that shapes the work, dictating the starting point for transcending the distinction between the two poles. Neither clinical nor critical: metaphysical. Only the recounting of the three experiences, accompanied by a brief exposition of certain modern philosophical doctrines, can do justice to such a methodological choice.

The first encounter, the most modest in philosophical terms, initiated a catastrophic sequence of psychic phenomena.

It was late at night. I was lying on the bed listening to music. I was wide awake and in a good mood, so much so that I was swinging my leg to the rhythm of the track playing in my portable CD player’s headphones. The room was dark, but the lamp on the bedside table was on, pointed as always towards the back of the room, in the direction of the door leading to the hallway.

Suddenly, I felt watched. As I mentioned, I was no stranger to this kind of sensation, which constantly manifested itself in the form of micro-perceptions and hallucinations in the peripheral visual field. I opened my eyes and looked up, leaning over my chest to see the entire room at once. It was as if the foundations of reality had suddenly crumbled—a mental state I can only compare to that of someone at the epicenter of an earthquake. There was someone at the door. A thin, gaunt face with bright red eyes was peering at me from the hallway. For a brief moment, my mind disintegrated like that of H.P. Lovecraft’s naive characters. I plunged into a sort of confused state; I, who had challenged the powers of Hell and haunted houses, was praying for them to unleash everything they had on me.

The process of ego fragmentation (like its construction) is not linear; it behaves more like a swarm than an assembly line in a factory. It is not just a matter of adding or subtracting something but of assembling a series of disparate fragments into a patchwork, that is, a heterogeneous whole. This has been evident since the early days of psychoanalytic investigation, indeed even earlier through Kant’s synthetic system. Experience is not a continuum but a roller coaster made of different quantities, qualities, and above all, intensities. Trauma, in this sense, is an intensive breaking point in the otherwise smooth and compact fabric of the organic psyche; a discontinuity that alters the causal and narrative sequence that shapes the ego. There is a before and after trauma, a leap in connection rather than a gradual one, which indelibly alters the continuum of subjective experience. Terror is a rogue wave that erases every connection and forces the brain to reorganize itself as quickly as possible to avoid perishing.

When I was able to think again, the face had vanished.

A vision due to being half-asleep. The simplest explanation: the same one I gave myself before going back to bed and falling asleep. Any other interpretation of that phenomenon would come afterward, crowning a series of causal links between events barely related to each other. For weeks, whenever my friend’s girlfriend visited me at home, she would find herself staring at the back of the room, unable to shake the feeling that someone was standing there, motionless, in front of the wardrobe.

Autosuggestion, nothing more. The first psychotic episode of a vulnerable subject.

Everyone knows the basics of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For the German philosopher, the individual is nothing more than the objectification of a primordial, blind, and idiotic force, the Will, which pulses through all things—from particles to inorganic matter, from plants to animals. The Will manifests itself through volition, both unconscious in inanimate entities and conscious in animate ones: carbon crystals want to continue expanding and proliferating; plants want to reach sunlight; humans want to accumulate fame and wealth. It is not necessary to move from will to act; this is the crucial point: the Will boils within bodies even when they are at rest. It is inevitable. By virtue of these unconscious impulses, the Will ensures its infinite perpetuation. As long as someone desires something, it will continue to exist and objectify itself in the world.

From here, Schopenhauer’s thought delves into a series of considerations on the human mind derived from his philosophical idol, Immanuel Kant. For Schopenhauer, as for Kant, subjective experience is channeled within a series of rigid constraints. On one hand, we have the senses ordered according to time and space, which provide the brain with raw data already filtered by natural faculties (a certain light spectrum, a certain acoustic frequency). On the other hand, the categories—a complex apparatus that determines a priori the modes of perception and thought. In short, we cannot help but perceive a given object under the aegis of its quantity, its qualities (being a certain thing and not another), its relationships with other objects, and its mode of existence (light necessarily emanates from a source; a billiard ball does not always move in the predetermined direction).

What we experience, therefore, is not the world itself—the pure reality, so to speak—but a “representation” of it, determined by our natural faculties.

To the Kantian theory, Schopenhauer makes only a small addition, which is nonetheless fundamental to the development of his philosophical system. For both Kant and Schopenhauer, the principle of cause (as well as that of sufficient reason) does not belong to the natural world but to the mental realm of the subjective ego. For Kant, the principle of cause concerns the regular succession of sensible data (if I see smoke, it is because there is a fire) or a factor that arises from a subjective judgment and thus from a rational decision. For Schopenhauer, however, it is the mother of all categories, the ultimate category that precedes and anticipates all others. Without causality to establish the precedence of before and after, there could be no time, space, quantity, quality, relation, or modality. Subjective experience would thus be reduced to a mere reflection of the schizophrenic chaos of the naked Will. For this reason, the Will keeps us imprisoned within an abstract thermodynamic cage dominated by a linear chronological succession, in which everything is generated or caused by something else.

But what happens when the principle of cause fails?

According to some studies, the appearance of ghosts and spectres is attributed to temporary anomalies in the temporal lobes: sorts of micro-strokes or micro-epileptic seizures capable of suspending the normal flow of experience for a brief period. It would be nothing more than dopamine released during this process, giving emotional weight to hallucinations. In this, the subject would assume an unwittingly pragmatic attitude: if I feel something, then it means that what I see in front of me truly exists.

When one has met the devil in person, ghosts no longer seem so frightening.

The second event occurred a few months after the incident with the gaunt-faced man. It must have been seven in the morning. I had just woken up and was getting ready to go to school, piling clothes one on top of the other with the typical sluggishness and carelessness of every teenager. After choosing pants and a sweatshirt, I stepped into the hallway to have breakfast in the kitchen.

It is well known how the state of half-sleep can persist for a few minutes after waking, extending beyond the boundaries of dream and pre-dream experience. This is what happens in the context of so-called “night paralysis.”

In my case, however, it all happened so quickly and intangibly that I was more puzzled than frightened or amazed.

An elderly woman was standing at the end of the hallway, facing the front door. She was wearing a kind of overcoat topped by a large light apron, her head wrapped in a wide triangular cloth. But these were not the first details I noticed. What struck me more than anything else was the fact that she was in black and white and two-dimensional like a photograph. I stopped halfway down the hallway, and she, as if nothing had happened, came towards me and passed through me. I felt nothing but a bizarre wave of perplexity.

Without a doubt, it was an image imprinted on my retina. A sophisticated patchwork of light spots randomly arranged to form a recognizable human figure. A pareidolia.

Of course, I kept in mind my mother’s testimony, who years earlier had claimed to have seen the ghost of my grandmother while alone at home. I cannot say, however, whether that thing resembled my grandmother or anyone else.

But let us return to the most fundamental aspect of Schopenhauer’s theory—a point that is constantly overlooked in favor of the ethical and phenomenological aspects of his work. There is no causation outside the subject and its relationships with other subjects. This means, I repeat, that beyond representation, the world-in-itself is nothing but an unthinkable and chaotic vortex, devoid of extension, precedence, necessity, and logical consequentiality. An absolute simultaneity of everything with everything, limited only by simple ontological constraints (in particular, the impossibility of something existing and not existing at the same time). It is of this state of affairs that we have experience while dreaming, that is, when the conscious mind loosens its control over the ego.

In his Essay on the Vision of Spirits, Schopenhauer precisely investigates this hypothesis: the possibility that at certain moments, conscious experience might slip into a state analogous to dreaming, where the principle of cause is inactive. For the father of modern pessimism, ghosts appear when a given subject finds themselves face-to-face with the extreme limit between Will and representation. A borderland where the impossible becomes possible.

Not being a typical believer, Schopenhauer never supported the idea of an afterlife. In fact, the ghost theory he proposes to the reader does not concern the souls of the deceased but the mnemonic traces of individual wills imprinted on the immense abstract body of the Will. A bit like what happens in the modern parapsychological theory of the ghost as a “spatiotemporal frame” intent on repeating the same action in the same place and at the same time.

Too bad this does not necessarily follow from Schopenhauer’s own framework. What stirs beyond representation is free from any causal constraint, limited only and exclusively by the impossibility of existing and not existing at the same time. In fact, nothing imposes that something should not also be something else, just as an individual is simultaneously themselves as a child, an adult, and an elderly person. This is particularly true in a context where any sequence of events lacks ontological consistency.

In the Will, each of us exists together with ourselves as a young person, with our corpse, with the ancient Romans, with the dinosaurs, and with the androids of the future. For the French philosopher Henri Bergson (an unsuspected disciple of Schopenhauer), this is memory that coincides with matter, the great cosmic memory that transcends the dialectic of past, present, and future, expanding in every direction. Now imagine this “pure memory” not as the memory of a functional and socially acceptable individual but as the fragmentary, obsessive, and disorganized memory of a person suffering from schizophrenia, borderline disorder, or Alzheimer’s disease. This is the only possible way to think through faint analogies to the memory of the Will. A psychotic abyss that swallows everything and returns everything without any criteria.

When, for one reason or another, the principle of causation fails, one finds oneself on the brink of the abyss, at the point where the mind is forced to decide whether to erect defenses or be swept away by trauma.

Seeing or hearing something is only the tip of the iceberg. These are highly questionable episodes—attributable to chemical imbalances in the brain, ambiguous mental states, superstitious beliefs, and biases of all kinds. It is factuality, not observability, that distinguishes subjective experience from shared experience: it is this characteristic that scientifically defines a phenomenon as analyzable and, under the right conditions, replicable in a controlled environment. I could see a gnome, point to it, touch its beard, and even exchange a few words with it; however, it would be nothing if I could not show it to others, photograph it, and take it to have a sandwich with my best friend. Its existence, however real, would remain bound to the solipsism of pure subjective experience.

Here is an object: a plastic grocery bag almost bursting with tangled Christmas lights. The object exists independently of my senses, my psyche, my language.

It is about midnight. Almost a year has passed since the encounter with the gaunt-faced man and the two-dimensional woman. I am at the home of an elderly relative, my mother’s aunt, an ancient dwelling carved into the massif of the Sila mountains. I am playing a video game on a portable console, sitting on a rug at the foot of the bed. The lamp on the large enameled dresser next to the bed is on. I have nothing else on my mind but the video game.

The lights in the plastic bag start buzzing. I don’t immediately attribute the noise to the objects in the bag: I first think of the lamp, a malfunction in the electrical panel, or the buzzing of earwax in my ears. But then the lights in the bag begin to flash once, twice, and three times in unison. I see them out of the corner of my eye. I abandon the console on the bed and keep watching. After a few seconds, the lights suddenly flare up all at once, without rhythmic patterns or color alternations. A constellation of white dots arranged in a spiral.

The phenomenon lasts for almost ten minutes as I examine the bag and confirm that the plug is unplugged from the socket and neatly placed at the bottom of the bag. When the lights go out as suddenly as they came on, I know as much as before. It could easily have been a hallucination, a dream, or a psychotic episode. I have no witnesses to certify the veracity of the episode.

All I ask myself is: if it wasn’t a dream or a hallucination, how is it possible that an electrical circuit operated without power? Until then, I had been able to explain the other two episodes by appealing to psychologism and cerebral anomalies. But what I had just encountered called into question electromagnetism, electronics, and a long series of fundamental forces. It was a concrete impossibility, almost on par with a square triangle or a body without extension.

When the impossible becomes possible, it reclaims and changes the meaning of every other past event. This is the true a posteriori of supernatural experience, not the pale and disheveled one of causal correlation. What is revealed is the instability and profound chaotic nature of the world-in-itself.

This leaves me at the mercy of one of the most extreme metaphysical formulations ever devised: the absence of any metaphysical structure.

We find this approach in the work of one of Schopenhauer’s most radical heirs, the Czech writer Ladislav Klima. According to Klima, there is no difference between the Will and individual wills except for a differential in scale as well as mode: the subject can only experience certain aspects of existence determined by their biological makeup and cannot even perceive the world in its entirety. All they can do is investigate those moments when glimpses of truth are seen, partial scenarios of nullity and desolation. And it is precisely this investigation that reveals the unity of Will, the willing subject, and the act of volition.

In one of his macabre and terrifying novels inspired by both Poe and Schopenhauer, Klima subjects the protagonist to the torments of a spectral persecution: the ghost of a woman guilty of killing her fiancé along with his lover. Glorious Nemesis (Slavná Nemesis, 1932) is the story of how three individuals, separated by the abyss of time and irreducible ontological differences, find themselves sharing the same spacetime plane. The bond of hatred and fear that arises between the protagonist, the ghost of the woman, and the reincarnation of the dead lover in the first part of the book gradually turns into the realization of a necessary love capable of transcending all material constraints. The three discover that they are intimately connected within the pulsating heart of the Will and that only death will reunite them. A collective suicide that annihilates the individual boundaries of the three characters to produce an extraordinary spectral trinity.

The ghost as a dark operator floating within a series of non-causal, non-logical connections—at most, affective. This is what prevents us from configuring the ghost, demon, or specter as entities existing outside the self and the material world, or conversely, as projective components of subjective experience, or still, as natural phenomena yet to be explained.

What I experienced (or did not really experience) over the course of about a year is a sequence that may have completed its arc of meaning or may yet find release in something even more ambitious and spectacular. I cannot know whether I am right or just getting carried away. That is precisely the point: the suspension of the principle of cause and natural regularities marks the transition from the unity of the self to its disintegration. A psycho-cognitive decline that paves the way for a new form of unification: that between self and world, and between the latter and its fundamental negation.

How can we live in such a world? But above all, how can we die?

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Claudio Kulesko is a philosopher, translator, and writer. For Nero, he translated “In the dust of this planet” (2019) and “Infinite Resignation” (2022) by Eugene Thacker. Among his works are “L’Abisso personale di Abn Al-Farabi e altri racconti dell’orrore astratto” (Nero, 2022), “Ecopessimismo. Sentieri nell’Antropocene Futuro” (Piano B, 2023), and the sci fi comedy “Al limite del Possibile” (Zona 42, 2024). He was part of the Gruppo di Nun, with whom he co-wrote the collection of essays “Revolutionary Demonology” (Urbanomic, 2022). Along with Gioele Cima, he edited the essay collection *Metal Theory. Esegesi del vero metallo* (D Editore, 2024). His essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He also published the essay “Il più forte del mondo. La filosofia di Dragon Ball” (2024) with Moscabianca Edizioni.