Fantasy Stories

By James R. Long Jr.

This book, Fantasy Stories, has five fantasy stories in it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984548122

James R. Long Jr.

James R. Long Jr. was born in 1948 in Brownsville. Pa and was raised there and surrounding areas. He has no degrees in anything and is self educating. He is an artist and amature scientist. He had many odd jobs but none of them met his satisfaction. He is a solitary thinker and spends much of his time in the woods.

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Copyright © 2018 by James R. Long Jr.

ISBN:                Softcover                    978-1-9845-4809-2

                          eBook                          978-1-9845-4812-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 08/24/2018

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CONTENTS

The Golden One

Jake Meets The Golden One

The Hiding Place In Jake’s Forest

The Dream Machine

Puppet Land

NATURE SPIRITS

BY JAMES R. LONG JR.

Once there was a colony of birds called cedar waxwings living in the third hollow from near where I live. I would go down to the third hollow just to see them. Over time, the birds were no longer afraid of me. I tried to get them to land on my finger as the birds came very close to me. They would fly up close to my head and hover, and then dart away. I noticed that cedar waxwings are very agile flyers and can hover like a humming bird but flaps its wings much slower and can out maneuver other birds. I was fascinated by these birds and how they became very friendly with me. Some time later a human friend of mine, a fellow artist came down to the third hollow with a rifle and killed all the cedar waxwings in the hollow. He picked them off one by one. I saw him do it. I was standing there in shock at what I saw. I didn’t speak up. I remained quiet about it as if nothing wrong happened. I felt that I was the one at fault. I lured these birds to their death and set them up to be killed. My friend the artist should have found it easy to kill them off, as they made no effort to save themselves. In my youth, I was persuaded to shoot birds with my friends but over time, I got over it. This was peer pressure. It is only natural that people like to kill things. It is only natural that animals do the same and have a chance at survival. I undermined that chance. I made up my mind not to do that again. It is not my place to make friends with anything in the wild. It would only set them up to be killed. My place is to be a part of the human race, like it or not. This part I don’t like, so I chose not to like it.

My favorite color is green but I noticed that I cut grass, hoe weeds and use a weed whacker. I am destroying the very thing that I like. Why do I do this? The logical deduction to this is what would happen to me if I didn’t do it. If I didn’t cut grass, my landlord would get on me and there would be a fine to pay. This is part of being the part of the human race that I don’t like. I also have a vegetable garden. This involves hoeing weeds and eventually killing the plants that I take care of. Plants are living things and are the only thing that lives without killing anything. There are a few exceptions. Without the exceptions, this makes plants the closest thing in this world to divinity. To kill a plant is murder! Cutting grass is a sin. I realize that necessity is evil and there is no way around it. We don’t need to push the bounds of necessity to a greater end but we do. To eat meat, someone must kill cows, pigs and chickens. To eat vegetables and bread, someone must kill the plants. To build houses, someone must kill many trees. To have paper to write on, someone must kill many trees. Necessity is evil. Necessity doesn’t make us all evil but it can. I will not justify the destruction of a tree for any reason. There are many trees being destroyed for no apparent reason. I just sit back and watch it happen just like watching the cedar waxwings being killed but this one is not my fault or is it. Necessity comes in to play and this is shared blame. It takes a lot of effort to destroy a tree so this is no oops. Is this their aesthetics?

What is aesthetics? If killing and destroying is an aesthetic then this is evil. I always thought of my self as an aesthete and thought it was on the safe side of art. I am not sure about this at all. Is there a better definition for where I am heading? Maybe the word aesthetics does not include the sufferings as an art of beauty. Obsessions may be the evil substitute for aesthetics. Repetition and uniformity is another form and all of this can mimic aesthetics, often in a negative way. Many things contain aesthetics but not as a goal. The aesthetics is just along for the ride. The goals are something else. With an aesthete, the aesthetics itself is the goal and preoccupation. It is highly valued as the main purpose. It is an abstract but the end results are not. In our society, aesthetics as a main purpose and goal is not acceptable.

I am held between two opposite persuasions. One is the disappointing and depressing persuasions of mankind; the other is a natural calling that is most noticeable in the woods. This is not the call of the wild; this is something else on a spiritual level. Nature can reveal all of its secrets if I go into it far enough. My problem is the mankind end of it. This is a barrier. I can’t make friends with cedar waxwings as people intrude on this and nature as a whole. My nature is impeded against as well. The picture of nature that I get is not clear but I think I gone farther than most people. There are people that lived in the woods all of their lives and don’t get it. Their interests seem to be more on survival and necessity. I said necessity is evil and that is a distraction. People that go into the woods with the intentions of killing something, is not in the right state of mind to find what I found. Before I get to the point, I must say that I was preconditioned to see what is going on. First, I am an artist, then I have premonitions, and I have some education in dendrology and fractals. When I was studying trees, I learned how to identify some species of trees without any leaves on them. The branch arrangements were the source of their identity when seen as a silhouette against the sky. Each tree had its own pattern but each tree had its own individuality added to it. The branch patterns of each tree are different and I can tell them apart as a species in spite of the fact that they are different from each other. This was most noticeable with deciduous trees and less with conifers. Understanding these branch patterns got more complex as I practiced observing them as time went on. I became suspicious about the trees. I began to think that the trees were communicating with each other with a branch code. I figured that this code was simple growth instructions on how to follow the light, how to avoid the wind and hint at nutrients in the ground. The code would allow small trees room to grow. If trees can communicate with each other then there must be some consciousness involved.

I have some psychic abilities. I feel different in the woods then when I am around people and man made forms. It is more so in town. The feeling I get in a town is deadness or a lack of energy flow. I can feel the contrast between the town and the woods. The woods are alive and the town is dead. The town is filled with live people but the town itself does not come alive. The woods are alive all of the time and feels like it. It affects my mind and how I think. This affect has been going on most of my life and made me a part of it. I am more like the spirit of the woods than I am a part of mankind because the ebbs and flows of the energy of the woods have strongly influenced me. I was open to it and most people are blind to it or they wouldn’t be the way they are.

The more I look into the branch patterns of trees the more I am convinced that this is not a language of the trees survival but something else. This is something that the trees are set up to do by some outside influence. The nerve cells within the brain are a complex set of pathways just like tree branches. These are the axons, dendrites and synapses. To look at the branches of the brain, it would seem as if nothing is behind it. This is where our thoughts and dreams are. The branches of the brain have a pattern that is a language of form that can be deciphered into thoughts. The thoughts are invisible within the cell branches but are laid out. The branches of the trees in the woods are layer out like a brain. One tree is like a nerve cell, the trunk is like an axon, the branches are like dendrites and as the branches of one tree confront the branches of another, this is the synapsis. If the trunks are axons then the roots are also a part of the thought processes. The language of the trees is the same as the language of nerve cells of the brain. A tree is part of a bigger network. Anyone who cuts down a tree in the woods is lobotomizing the forest.

The animals of the woods may not be a part of the network but may be unwitting participants in the tree thoughts. Trees are empathic towards animals but animals don’t respond back. Animals only exploit trees the same as people do. Insects are the same way. All types of plants are a part of the tree thoughts. Plants that are isolated from forests are a part of the tree mind, but I think the distance is limited and I may be wrong about that. Roads and highways disrupt the tree communication but trees reach across narrow roads to reconnect creating a tunnel affect with the canopy. Trees arch across roads with a strong distinct appearance as if it is very important to do so. Trees also arch across creeks and narrow rivers. Basswood trees are at the forefront of doing this. It seems to be its primary goal to arch across creeks, growing and bending its trunk. Basswood trees that are not near creeks grow strait up. Other trees arch across roads and creeks, such as box elders and elms. Deciduous trees seem to be the smartest of the trees and plants. The trees are protecting something much greater than themselves.

If trees are part of a brain then what are they thinking? Psychic people can know. I know and I am a part of it and what I have written is the attitude of the woods towards mankind and it is my attitude as well. Trees are totally empathic and this has been demonstrated by experiments. Trees are the makers of a big dream and that is hidden from most humans. To understand how trees dream, first is to understand how we dream. The brain does not think or dream by itself. It is just an organ. Something must live in the brain that is not physical. It is the soul or a spirit that is the will of the brain and lives in it. In the woods, there are spirits or types of ghosts that are the will of the woods. They orchestrate the growth and branch patterns of the trees and make blossoms and flowers bloom. The spirits are the intelligent behind it all and their intentions are entirely aesthetic. These spirits of the woods are the aesthetes of the woods and are entirely responsible for the existence of all plants. We come to know these spirits as fairies. They have no clear form but can appear as a sprite of blue white light or appear as something from our subconscious, usually as a human with wings. The language of the tree branches is the language of the fairies and that language is of their sense of art. The woods dream of other woods that is unseen. The dream woods tend to be psychedelic with unusual formations. The dreamers are themselves made of the dream substance. Because of this, the fairies can read our thoughts and we are transparent to them. We don’t believe they exist and they can see our dreams and us. We tend to believe that fairies are nothing more than products of our imagination. Nothing more? We underestimate what imagination is. We tend to assume that thoughts are confined to our heads and do not exist anywhere else. This is the idea of church going people that learn conflicting concepts and don’t realize it. So, fairies are nothing more than products of our imagination. Lets break this sentence down. First, get rid of the ego word ‘’our’’, and get rid of the belittlement words ‘’nothing more than,’’ and what is left is the following sentence. Fairies are products of imagination. Imagination is also the product of fairies. We are also products of imagination and producers of imagination. We are the same as fairies in the cosmic sense but we are at the bottom of it all. We are made of heavy atoms to drag around and our thoughts tend to drag along with it.

Many of our forests are being destroyed and it is becoming less and less available. Hundreds of years ago the forests were abundant and there were more people aware of fairies. William Shakespeare’s play, ‘’ A Midsummer Nights Dream ‘’, reflects the nature of people in those days. Sleeping in the woods was common and these people were not burdened by the tormentuous concepts of the industrial age. Those who dreamed in the woods were under the influence of the spirits of the woods. Fairies were more in contact with people in those days. Today a sleeper in the woods is less likely to be under the influence because today’s thinking is filled with counter thoughts. I don’t believe that Shakespeare himself knew of fairies personally but wrote about the things of his time. One of Shakespeare’s characters was Oberon the king of the fairies. Shakespeare was projecting human traits onto the fairies. That is not a part of their ways. Fairies do not have a hierarchy of any kind. There are no kings, ranks, status or pecking order. In the animal kingdom, the pecking order is the survival response turned against its own kind. It is the same way with humans. It is the quest to subdue another human. It is the quest to subdue another animal to eat it or make it their subservient. Subservience runs rampant in the human race and just as much in the industrial age as in the futile age. It is the main thing in the military because their business is to subdue its own and its opponents. The word pecking order comes from the idea of bird behavior. Turkeys are the most noted for a pecking order and they are extremely dumb, so this must come from a primitive part of the brain in the form of pecking order reflexes. Humans are preoccupied with pecking order reflexes also and in the conscious level of the pecking order. Fairies do not have pecking order reflexes and in this state of mind see humans as being savage and evil. Fairies do not give in to uniformity, as they are individuals. Their creations, the trees have individuality and this is a part of their aesthetics. To a fairy, our concepts are too regimented and our sense of freedom is to confining. As artists we fail them. Our goals are diabolical and are like a wish to go to prison and live under the ideology of a prison. That is how we were trained to live by our pecking order leaders. Fairies can fly free; but we can’t even walk free in a free society.

When people enter the woods, their brains are loaded with contradicting thoughts that impedes against the aesthetic thoughts of the woods. The fairies see humans as a threat by their bad thought radiation and it is like a light that shines ugly in the woods. There are a few humans that don’t shine ugly in the woods and they are the friends of the woods and fairies. There are old legends of people being attacked by fairies. Lawyers and bankers have their brains corrupted by numbers and ego. Ego can corrupt our lives and minds with numbers. Some of these people have ventured into the woods alone. In the old days there were many back roads through thick wooded areas and that was very much the only way to get around. They traveled by horse and buggy. If the buggy was open and the banker was the only one there and at night, they would be ambushed and attacked. No banker or lawyer was ever killed by a fairy but they were roughed up. This shows that the mind of a bureaucrat has no place in the woods. Fairies shouldn’t attack humans because this is not what they are about and if they do, and then this is an act of desperation or just trying to get rid of something they don’t like.

I don’t know of any stories about fairies attacking people who are extremely destructive to the woods such as lumberjacks, strip miners and road builders. It would seem that this threat is too overwhelming to fairies and they just hold back or leave the area. Can plants grow without fairies? Yes, but they don’t do as well. Plants need a connection with other plants, and then fairies provide them with this and all the invisible needs. Houseplants live off of the emotions of the humans that take care of them. Humans make poor substitutes for fairies, but this is better than nothing. Fairies orchestrate the growth of plants to create an invisible dreamscape from the branch arrangements and that is their purpose but isolated plants are not functioning to that affect. They are prisoners. Orchard trees are the captives of mankind and are pruned to grow in a regime to produce. I am guilty of this with my garden. We do this to each other as well as with plants. If the plant does not conform, then it is executed. Fairies try to redeem what is theirs. Trees are pruned to grow in ways that conflict with fairy’s intentions. The fairies try to reorganize the trees to grow in their intended language form. Fairies don’t just compete with humans but with animals as well. Deer eat leaves and shoots, and unknowingly prune trees to grow in unintended ways. Beavers cut trees down and insects kill trees as they stand. The fairies are being robbed of their domain but they are in control of most of it as it all grows back.

Most of the fairy forests are in the after life created from the trees of this world, so if this world goes bust, then the fairies have little to loose.

The Native American Indians had a culture filled with stories of nature spirits. The psychic people of the tribes were in contact with these spirits as the others followed. They took it seriously and held it to their ways. Many of these stories are being lost and need to be preserved in our literature. Our culture denies psychic abilities and teaches against it. With me it was a struggle being inhibited by the culture I grew up in. I had the advantage to compare our society with something that exists in a dream world. We underestimate dreams and think it is just a part of the physical brain and science is asking the question,’’ what is the physics of dreams? ‘’. It seems that dreams can exist outside of the brain and be totally detached from it. Science can discover what psychics have known all along. Science can’t prove the existence of dreams in the first place. The people of antiquity were not so skeptical about fairies and had a nomenclature for them. There are the sylphs that fly in the air, salamanders of the fire, dwarfs of the ground and nymphs of water. The follow up is air, fire, ground and water. One spirit for each of these but there is no validity for any of this. Folklore is all we have to go on for now. Brain research and quantum science combined, can find this out along with ghosts and the afterlife. Fairies are in an afterlife state or a dream form. I think that the afterlife and dream form are the same. I heard that the human spirit is made up of two parts, the ambient and the will. The ambient is the part of us that creates the dreamscape and the will is the part of us that moves around in it. The ambient is analogous to the forest’s dream and the fairies are analogous to the will. There may be no difference between the fairies and us, according to the laws of physics. The dreams are projected from laser light or individually controlled photons produced in the brain. The stability of the dreams are possibly made of ether and supported by the astral level. The ether is a substance that is finer than atoms that could be a part of string theory. Strings are about a hundred billion times smaller than an atom and are the glue that keeps all things together. Atoms give things mass but are not the source of what gives us form or even what gives our thoughts form. The cohesiveness of atoms, such as valences, crystal polarity, nuclear forces, gravity and magnetism, comes from a finer level of smallness. These forces exist in the emptiness of space. Thought is the most mysterious of these forces of form.

I think the sylphs are the strongest of the fairies. They are the most versatile, creative and are totally free, and live mostly in the deep woods, away from human intervention. The fairies would not likely be found in woods close to a busy highway. Fairies prefer places of tranquility and are the keepers of serenity. They can live near humans that are peaceful, but that is only an extreme few. Fairies tend not to live in and near historic battle sites. These are the haunts of dead humans that hold to their destructive beliefs. This includes battle sites that are hundreds of years old. Humans just don’t let go in the afterlife. We tend to hold to our beliefs of necessity, which is evil. The dead soldiers clutch on to ghosts of guns, created from their own minds and remain in their uniforms. Is this the way to hell? There are stories of fairies going to war with each other but this is a lack of understanding of what fairies are about.

Our dreams are a conflict between the here and the hereafter. It takes the form of phantasmagoria. This is the fragmented mixing of our thoughts that make no sense to the conscious and awake mind. We can daydream with order but this involves the order of our cultural beliefs and our false wants. I am under the spell of the fairies so I can see this. Our dream state has its own wants and is given no admission by the conscious will. Our conscious will is the ego and worst then that, the super ego. Ego is blind. It sees only the worldly and is manipulated by it. The dream world lets go of all of that to show something new. The ego refuses to let go. We tend to disregard dreams as unimportant and not a part of our daily life. The end result is a conflict that is a worldly mess we create without our knowing. The western culture has a range between the animal ego and phantasmagoria. The phantasmagoria leeks its way into the conscious mind and sabotage our ways of life. We create turmoil. The dream confusion is awake with us. By refusing dreams, this creates the problems we unknowingly create. An extreme example of this is, if a person refuses to sleep at all, they would begin to hallucinate while being awake and brain damage would result. The dream will haunt the conscious in most cultures. Fairies are a dream state and live by the dream. That makes humans and fairies true adversaries. At best, humans can only be students of dreams in the afterlife. In the afterlife, humans and fairies are kept separate in most cases. We are just not compatible.

Are there demons in the afterlife? When animals die, their spirits remain in the same form. In a crocodiles dream, we are food, but it can’t eat another spirit unless the other spirit enters the crocodile’s dream and submits to a nightmare. The spirits cannot be harmed, other than having a bad time, being eaten by the crocodile. The condition dissipates. A dead animal spirit of this type can only eat its own ambient, but the ambient is self-perpetuating and can’t rely be eaten. The crocodile spirit only exists in self-indulgence, eating imaginary food. Crocodiles are just as dumb in the afterlife as we are. The only real demons of the after life are human and toils with itself in a similar manner as a crocodile. Don’t share a dream with a crocodile or an afterlife with a crocodile. Unfortunately only a few can tell the difference between themselves and a crocodile, so share the nightmare if you must. We still have