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Forget facts.

Forget logic.

Forget everything that seems real.

You just trust.

Believe. Believe. You can't. You know your life is just a dream, don't you?

Don't you?

Voices in the Canopy by The Fractal Wizard I grew up in a family of avid hikers. Both my mother, a botanist, and my father, a biologist

for the University of Tasmania,

would regularly visit the deepest wilderness areas of Tasmania during their field studies.

These trips were disguised as camping and hiking adventures for the family.

I never minded it, as I was just as passionate about the outdoors as they were, even from a young age.

Keyword being, was.

Because after what I went through, even 20 years later, I still refused to return.

We lived on a property, a short driving distance from Lake St. Clair, a popular tourist destination.

This was the only place that my parents would allow me to camp and experience the wilderness

alone, as long as I brought my German Shepherd with me. He was a former police dog and very

well trained. At 12 or 13 years old, I didn't mind it.

It felt like my own little slice of freedom and my own little slice of wilderness, despite being

surrounded by people. It was easy to ignore them. But as I got older and more brazen, I found myself hounding my parents to let me take my quad bike deeper into the park to camp.

...