The Dreams and Fleetwood Mac

(Editor’s Note: If you haven’t read all the previous chapters, go to the Historical Lies page to catch up.)

Chapter 6: The Wall and the Synthetic Forest

The darkness of the Pacific didn’t just surround me; it pressed into my skull, heavy and absolute, until the boundary between the water and my own mind dissolved. I wasn’t just dreaming; I was remote-viewing.

I found myself at the precipice. The Ice Wall wasn’t the sparkling, clean frozen edge you see in fairy tales. It was a jagged, towering monstrosity of black, compressed slush and iron-hard permafrost, stretching up into an abyss where the stars didn’t twinkle—they blinked, like surveillance cameras monitoring the perimeter.

Then, I pushed through. The other side was a graphic nightmare of biology gone wrong.

• The Giants: These weren’t men. They were tectonic-sized entities, flesh the color of bruised plums, their skin weeping a gelatinous, translucent fluid that slicked the ground. They moved with a horrific, synchronized stutter, their limbs bending at impossible, multi-jointed angles, crunching the terrain beneath them like dry leaves. Their faces were featureless, save for a single, vibrating rift where a mouth should have been, emitting a low-frequency hum that turned my teeth to powder.
• The Silicone Forest: There was no wood here. The trees were synthetic, pillars of translucent, pulsing silicone that stood like diseased veins rising from the crust. They didn’t grow; they extrude. Each trunk was translucent, showing internal, blackened fluid pumping through them with a rhythmic, sickening throb. When they swayed, they didn’t rustle; they shrieked, a high-pitched scraping sound like metal on glass.
• The Fauna: Creatures skittered beneath the silicone canopy—things that looked like a hybrid of arachnid and deep-sea crustacean. They had too many legs, chitinous and razor-sharp, and their eyes were milky, multifaceted orbs that tracked me with predatory intelligence. They fed on the weeping fluid of the giants, their mandibles clicking in a wet, rhythmic cadence that haunted me long after I woke.

It wasn’t nature. It was an industrial processing plant disguised as a wilderness.

Chapter 7: The Ghost in the Teak

I woke up gasping, the taste of ozone and metallic bile still coating my tongue. The gentle, rhythmic slap of the Pacific against the hull of my Formosa 41 felt like a soothing hand on a fevered brow. This boat—my wooden sanctuary—is the only thing that keeps me anchored to reality.

She was owned by the Fleetwood Mac camp back in the late seventies. You hear stories about the excesses, the cocaine-fueled writing sessions, the legendary breakups, but you don’t hear about the boat. They needed a place to disappear, a vessel capable of handling the open ocean when the glare of the flashbulbs got too intense.

But the boat holds secrets deeper than just tour stories. A few days ago, while I was stripping down a stubborn drawer in the nav station, I pried loose a false panel that hadn’t been touched since the Nixon administration. Tucked inside was a yellowed scrap of lyric paper—not a standard song, but something darker. It was scribbled in a hand that looked suspiciously like Lindsey’s, a frantic, desperate note from a time when the world’s biggest band was trying to outrun a reality they weren’t supposed to know about:

“No horizon where the giants stand,

Just a curtain of steel above the land.

Run to the edge, where the water bleeds,

And the machine consumes all human needs.”

The weight of that paper in my hand changed everything. It confirmed what my dream had screamed: they knew.

• The Hawaii Run: They used this very ketch to ghost their way out to the Hawaiian Islands, seeking the solitude of the deep blue to reset their frayed nerves. It was here, in the quiet of a flat-calm morning, that they’d lay out their charts and their lyrics, trying to find the rhythm of the tides to match the rhythm of their songs.
• The Cabin Sessions: My guitar, a beat-up acoustic with a few scars on the soundboard, sits exactly where the band members used to jam. They say the acoustics in the aft cabin, with all that seasoned teak and the brass fixtures, were unlike any studio on the mainland. It provided a natural, woody warmth that you just can’t replicate with digital processing.
• The Navigation: They didn’t sail with luxury. They sailed with heavy, full-keeled determination. I’ve spent hours tracing the wear patterns they left on the teak decking near the helm. They didn’t just sail for fun; they sailed because they were running from the machine, just like I am now.

Every time I tighten the shrouds or polish the brass, I feel the resonance of those chords still buried in the grain of the wood. This boat has crossed the Pacific under the influence of legendary music, and now, it’s carrying me toward the edge of the world. Jan and Minke, the Dutch couple in Ensenada, might think I’m crazy, but they’ve never heard the wood whisper the secrets of the sea. They’ve never sailed a vessel that knows the difference between a song and a soul.

I’m ready. The chart is laid out, the water is waiting, and the Wall is closer than they’ll ever admit.