Lizard King

Who breathes us? A reptile at the base of the brain! That’s the famous lizard king, right?

The most intimate science fantasy about dragons is the triune brain proposed by neuroscientist Paul MacLean: In that model, the human brain is actually three brains: the neocortex of conscious thought, a limbic system generating emotions, and the reptilian complex, which beats our heart and keeps us breathing.

We are all dragon breaths. A dragon is breathing us from a deeper life. Our most basic physical functions originate in a far different realm than the mind: The brain is our ultimate reality. And what is this neurology that lives us and creates our dreams? And drives our compulsions?

The brain is a lot scarier than the mind. Physical reality is more than we can imagine: ultimately unknowable. It’s made of imponderably tiny points of mass in mysterious fields of energy: no one really knows what it is, this stuff we’re made of.

It freaked out the mystic poet William Blake:

“Mental Things are alone Real, what is Call’d Corporeal Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place, it is in Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought, Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool.”

Welcome to the mind a Fool: the human brain, which figured out string theory and the Holographic Principle, suggesting that the physical world is, indeed, a “Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture.”

Mental Things are alone Real. And here be dragons.