An Age Without Maps: Visionary Fiction and Our

Preface

We live inside a paradigm so complex that the intellect, however brilliant, cannot hold the whole pattern. In an age without maps, the inner compass speaks in quieter ways: intuition, dreams, and mythic storytelling. This essay explores visionary fiction as a waking mirror of the inner life, a way of remembering how to trust what can’t be proven but can be felt.

Article

He found her as she lingered in a languid threshold between waking and dreaming, floating within an unfamiliar mind. She weighed Earth’s bones, the immensity of its oceans and currents, as if an infinite recess inside her skull gave them utterance. There was no exterior world. It was all inside her, and she could touch any part she chose.

A natural mystic, he thought, but he knew she was frightened. The myths of her age, our age, often describe the mind as a dark sea of choppy waves, riddled with monsters in its depths. Colleen had never ventured out this far before. Emotional extremity, lashed by losses she scarcely knew how to weigh, had driven her past old landmarks, banishing safe bounds and familiar voices.

On that subliminal level, they were both aware of the gamble. A communication from beyond may have proved enlightening and consoling. It may also have deepened her conviction that she was losing her mind. But they both had to believe in her. Was that not the promise made before her birth, to trust in the course her soul had set upon?

His discorporate presence persisted through the medium of Colleen’s hand, even as she kept trying to anticipate her destination and take control of her pencil. Then she’d admonish herself to let go. Barriers between her vulnerable self and this direct apprehension of the universe were melting away, but the process occurred in fits and starts.

In visionary fiction, inner guidance can be dramatized as plot itself: the moment outer certainty disappears, something deeper makes itself felt.

This is why, in my story, Esperidi loses everything, including her mentor and the civilization that cradled her. She’s cast adrift in a world she’s never explored and knows very little about. She has no recourse but to turn inward, to learn to interpret and trust the guidance of her dreams, her intuitions, to feel her way through. Her mind doesn’t have enough information to even draft a strategy. She has to rely on inner nudges: “Go this way. Ask about this. Trust this person and follow them. Steer clear of this person.” Her inner being and her connection to the world of spirits give her what she needs to know in the moment to take the next step, and her quest unfolds to the extent that she’s able to trust that inner sense and act upon it.

Esperidi is intimately linked to Colleen, her sister-soul across the Veil, so the same lesson quietly echoes in both lives.

Beyond the Reaches of Reason

We’ve created a paradigm of such complexity that, no matter how much we educate ourselves or how much data we have access to, we can’t grasp or measure all the forces that are at work in our lives using only our reasoning minds. This is an impetus for us to develop a new kind of consciousness. Ours is an age in which the intellect finds itself more and more at the limits of its reach. It can’t navigate this jungle of modern life unaided. It can’t fully grapple with the complexity of its own creation.

Moving forward, it needs to learn to work in tandem with our inner world, our inner guidance, the place where intuitions, dreams, and the quiet place of inner knowing arise. The part of ourselves that’s forever aware of our connection with All-That-Is.

From there, we make peace with every portion of our lives as it manifests. We open to every moment as it presents itself. We’re perfect as we are. Perfect in our eternal becoming. Perfectly poised for the next step. Everything unfolds from where we stand. And there are limitless possibilities for creation.

To navigate our way into the future, even on a personal level, we need a much broader field of vision than logic alone can provide. Logic deals with surface events. Intuition deals with the underlying ocean of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that give birth to those events. It precedes anything manifest.

When we rely upon our intuition, we are grappling with problems at their source. We also perceive them in a much less distorted form. Many people find their own dreams bizarre and incomprehensible, but this is largely because we’ve forgotten the fine art of perceiving our outer experiences as reflections of inner reality. The inner world of our intuition is not the privileged province of mediums, mystics, and spiritual teachers. It is everyone’s birthright.

There’s nothing wrong with logical thinking. It’s just that human intuition was always meant to uphold and support it. And our intuition opens to vast inner avenues that logic can’t reach. It is this wellspring of wisdom and insight that holds the answers to the questions that most deeply concern us now.

Our dreaming consciousness, which we can consider composed of the same “stuff” as the world of our intuition, is actually much more attuned to physical reality than our rational consciousness. And like our dreams, the voices of intuition ring more clearly, and we’re more easily able to decipher their whispers when we give them attention.

Making the inner world a priority opens us to recognizing insights within us and meaningful coincidences outside ourselves. Logic was meant to ride on intuition’s shoulders; when we honor the inner world, reality answers back with guidance 

and synchronicity.

Worlds as Mirrors

The creation, or enjoyment, of any work of art can amount to a confession made to one’s inner self in an act of trust. Ultimately, that purpose is to make us more conscious, to help us become more deeply acquainted with our own inner reality.

In the above story, two realities reflect one another across the Veil. Ophia remembers what Earth has forgotten; Earth embodies what Ophia still dreams. Each twin world completes the other’s song.

In the hospital, Colleen writes to her departed sister. The form of her letter, half confession and half invocation, bridges worlds more surely than any rite. She begins to perceive that her grief is not a prison but a doorway.

The words on the page remind her that the contours of her mind will never fit into any neat package or label. Here, in ink and breath, she can claim herself without apology: Colleen Addison, glorious misfit. On the page, she can transform into a mythic version of herself. Though still tethered to the world of “facts,” she feels the dreamy sunburst of a reality too deep, wide, and unfathomable to be contained within any realm of fact.

She senses that this is true for all magical beings, even if the world’s “sacred cows” condemn the notion. And so she treats her luminous conscious mind like a candle, lighting it and watching where invisible beliefs cast their shadows. She hopes to find the strength to laugh when those shadows insist she is at the mercy of what she created. She watches distortions dissolve as they are exposed to the light. This is her script. She takes the yellow marker in hand and highlights every doubt.

Whether Ophia is “real” in the way the modern mind insists upon is not the most pertinent question. In mythic storytelling, truth is measured not by literalness but by vitality. If the world breathes, it is real. If a story breathes, it can become a mirror that reveals what is inwardly true—what casts the outward light and shadow. The mirror between worlds allows every reader to find their own reflection, the internal Ophia that waits behind the daily facade.

You can test that mirror for yourself. Hold your conscious mind like a candle and watch where invisible beliefs cast their shadows. The invitation is not limited to fiction. The same mirroring already occurs in your own life: the outer world answering the inner world, the visible reflecting the invisible.

You don’t have to solve the mystery to receive its gift. You only have to become attentive to the way your inner life speaks. Dreams provide blueprints. Stories give those blueprints a world to inhabit. And sometimes, in the small ordinary hours, guidance arrives the way it arrived for Colleen: not as a master plan, but as the next line on the page.

About Seth Mullins: Seth Mullins is a visionary speculative fiction author exploring mythic storytelling, inner guidance, and the meeting-place between the seen and unseen. His work blends lyrical narrative with metaphysical themes of transformation, dreaming consciousness, and the soul’s unfolding.

Seth’s Media: https://thedreamerscrossing.substack.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sethmullinsdreams/
YouTube: The Dreamers' Crossing -  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5YXEoa5MTvt3bn3pZLxNnA