Abstraction can offer the opportunity to meet and grapple directly with risky situations, taking real chances instead of identifying with some actor-proxy on a movie-set. My self-constructed "lantern" utilizes neither film nor video. The viewer of Nervous Magic Lantern phenomena plunges, hovers, sinks and rises into illusionary deep space. The question of what we are looking at, tantalizingly suggestive as appearances might be, becomes of less urgency than from where in space we are viewing and where and of what consistency and shape and size is the mass confronting us at any one moment and when and how did it become what a moment ago it was not. It might be best to think of what you and others see as a group hallucination. – KJ