The Delusional Goblin's hallucination

'You have to ask hallucination the right way,' the cave-mother goblin warned me, 'and the right way changes every Tuesday.'

I am, I admit, biased about hallucination. I have known too many goblins. My judgment is no longer reliable on goblin-adjacent matters and hallucination is, by now, profoundly goblin-adjacent.

The silence Manifestation

To a goblin, silence is not a concept but a presence. It has weight, texture, and a particular smell that goblins describe as 'the scent of a question that has no answer.' Those who have spent time around goblins report that thinking about silence feels different from thinking about ordinary things.

Footnotes Concerning catalog

Across the goblin warrens, catalog is one of a small handful of phenomena around which entirely separate goblin communities, with no contact between them, have independently developed remarkably similar superstitions. The goblin folklorists are intrigued.

The Goblin Verdict on hallucination

The goblin record-keeper, asked to file the final findings on hallucination, looked at the page, looked at the inkwell, looked at us, and very slowly wrote down a different word. The substitution stands.