“Everything’s an illusion”
The Mystery of The Invisible Dog“Everything’s an illusion” is Sonny Elmquist’s compact statement of a worldview that treats ordinary life and its desires as unreal. He develops the idea through images of sleepers and awakening, then applies it to Fenton Prentice’s attachment to possessions. The phrase gives the story’s meditation on material desire a distinct voice, while its dream imagery resonates with the later account of astral wandering.
Rejection of Ordinary Ambition
Sonny introduces the idea while describing his plans for the hours when his night shift is quiet: he can study. He dismisses school as unnecessary, recalling that his father wanted him to attend college and become a dentist like him. Sonny rejects that future in practical, bodily terms—standing all day and bending over people’s molars—before widening his refusal into a claim about reality itself: “It’s all an illusion, anyway.”
When Pete asks what he means, Sonny expands the phrase into a picture of universal sleep: “The whole world. We’re all like a bunch of sleepers having a bad dream. Me, I’m going to wake up!” The movement from “the whole world” to “Me” makes his conviction personal as well as general. He does not merely describe life as unreal; he presents awakening as his own aim. He identifies meditation as his chosen study and says it is the way to reach Ultimate Consciousness.
Desire, Possessions, and the Mandala
Sonny applies his belief to Fenton Prentice, whose collection, he argues, keeps him preoccupied with what he owns and what he might want next. Sonny says that desire is where trouble begins, and imagines Prentice becoming a pack rat in another life. When Pete protests that Prentice is a nice old man, Sonny clarifies the accusation: he does not mean Prentice would steal or hurt anyone to acquire things. The problem, in Sonny’s view, is that Prentice cares too much about his possessions and continues to want more, pursuing something that is not real.
The mandala makes Sonny’s criticism concrete. He says Prentice owns one but does not know how to use it, keeping it on the wall as though it were simply another painting. In Sonny’s account, the object that might serve a practice of meditation has instead become part of the collection: an item to possess and display. This contrast gives the expression a practical edge. Sonny’s claim about illusion is not only a broad pronouncement about the world; he uses it to judge how Prentice relates to things.
Dreaming and Astral Wandering
The sleeper-and-awakening language also finds an echo later, when Bob describes Sonny appearing in Prentice’s apartment while Sonny was known to be asleep in his own. Professor Eugenia Lantine calls him a wanderer and explains that a true wanderer leaves his body while asleep and walks around. That discussion gives the story a literal counterpart to Sonny’s imagery of sleep and waking, but it does not confirm his larger claim that the world is an illusion or make meditation the cause of his wandering. The connection rests instead in a recurring boundary: Sonny speaks of waking from a dreamlike world, while the later account makes sleep the condition under which his body is left behind.
