Thunder cake, talking umbrellas, gold doubloons, fairy hives, and a rabbit in a waistcoat. We all grew up with bedtime stories. There was little to no separation between the pages of a book and the pavement beneath our bare feet. With my generation facing the largest mental health epidemic, our parasympathetic systems are clinging desperately to anything vaguely nostalgic as a form of escapism. The romanticization of our dog days can take many forms; we try to dismiss the onset of reality with ephemeral moments. In our youth, the ratio between our sympathetic and parasympathetic worlds was vastly different and very blurred. In other words, we lived in the present no matter the dimension - now we do not.
