My Reality Tunnel

“Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.”

“The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.” – both Robert Anton Wilson

In the early 90’s Hypertext fiction on CD-ROM and online were all set to herald the death of the printed linear novel. This of course has yet to happen and may never do but the concept had a very big influence on the imagination of many of the young people in Co. Leitrim at this time.  

A now forgotten pass English substitutive teacher at Drumkeeran secondary school was a believer in this new form and explained the concept to his Leaving Cert class in 1997. He also showed them the film Rashoman (1950) by Akira Kurosawa to instill an understanding of differing subjective viewpoints. He then asked them to come up with characters, location and a plot and they wrote a collaborative opening chapter together for a story that came to be known as, My Reality Tunnel. They could then write their own personal following chapter to take the story in different parallel directions to the other members of the class. Each week the new chapters were given out randomly as each story evolved and in some cases collided together.

For the students who were struggling he showed them how to use the cut-up technique by pasting the text from a previous chapter into a word randomizer which printed out the words in a random combination. They tried reading this and got ideas from the odd meaningful coincidence that would appear in the newly cut-up text and found they could write best from this source by using a first thought best thought approach. This was a concept of Brion Gysin, which he  developed at times with William Burroughs. Early on in the process he even managed to persuade the writer and thinker Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007), who was at that time still living in Dublin, to give a talk to his class about his concept of the reality tunnel.

Very quickly these students understood the interactive nature of the project and began to introduce new characters as well as themselves into their stories. Real or potential situations they were familiar with also began to appear in the text as well. Very soon they were figuring out issues, imagining things about the world, predicting the future, asking questions and receiving answers about their own lives through fiction.

The teacher was so excited by this turn of events that he began to photocopy some of these stories with instructions and sent them to other English teachers in the county system.  Within the space of a month the practice was widespread among teenagers all over the county as they took the stories even further into their own hands and lives. At one point it was estimated that over 1500 different stories featuring many of the same and unique characters were in circulation. It had truly gone viral before that term existed. At the end of the school year it didn’t stop however and the popularity of it ebbed and flowed in more informal and circuitous ways over the next 20 years to today. For some reason 2001 had the least stories in circulation and this situation would continue until 2012 when there was a rediscovery of the practice after an artist led initiative published a fraction of the stories in book form and an article in the Leitrim Observer followed up on it. Today it is said to have again taken hold of young people’s imaginations with more stories than ever before in circulation. (Stephen Rennicks)