title: Wraith Walking
Creators: name: Coley, Jason
Publisher: name: University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Year: 2009

description: With this work I wanted to explore the space between memory and  imagination: namely, how much imagination fills the fissures that run  though our knowledge of our past. The protagonist, Joshua, has been  estranged from his family for nine years and learns of his father's  death while in China. But without explanation, Joshua is awaken one  morning by an old fabrication of his childhood imagination--a character  now very real--who accompanies Joshua on his search for a fantastical  object.
Pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing  figures and faces in vague stimulus, such as clouds and wood grains. It  is commonly believed that human beings are hardwired for such activity;  our minds involuntarily try to put order to chaos. This idea has been  made popular in behavioral psychology with the use of the Rorschach  inkblot tests, in which inkblots are used to assess a subject's mental  state. My intentions are to demonstrate the effects when Aristotelian  logic encounters unexplainable phenomena--specifically, how peridolia  can reshape reality--by using narrative instead of inkblots to assess  characters' mental states.
The characters here  come from a Pentecostal background. I think this a good vehicle to  express the supernatural (literally, that which is above nature) for two  reasons: First, I have great intimacy with Pentecostalism, and  therefore believe I can respectfully deliver both the awe and fear that  comprises the strong undercurrent of that faith. Second, Pentecostalism  has a fantastic mythos: glossolalia, the Holy Ghost, and resurrection  are reality to some communities. The protagonist has to reconcile his  existentialism with his Pentecostal heritage. For the first time in his  life, he considers that answers to some important questions may not  exist.
As for the setting, the narrative begins  in China and spans two more countries. I believe it is important for the  protagonist to literally be the stranger in a stranger land: He has  turned his back on his community and has made the last nine years of his  life as transient as a person can. This is important, for identity is  one of the lenses we perceive reality through; we comprehend the world  in part from how it is different from us, and to do that we must first  have an understanding of who we are: for Joshua, that is the realization  that time and memory are not linear, but rather the past exists all  around him and is inescapable.
The reader will  also find the archetypical Holy Grail. Holy Grails have traditionally  represented the boon of a long quest and granted its founder with  magical powers. Here, the protagonist has spent these last years  searching for a legend. He doesn't believe all the stories he hears  about it--a caravan of vagabonds aimlessly wondering the earth--but  suspects that there is something behind it all. This is pareidolia:  Joshua is convinced that there must be a cause, that within this  ephemeral myth must be some unseen form. His obsession for finding the  Caravan is the protagonist wandering through the fog with his hands  stretched out.
The mind also employs pareidolia  when it sifts through memories and glues them into some kind of idea: a  happy or a sad day, an experience, or even into a value. The same can be  said of a story.