HeyJaredThe Diving Bell Spider
I'm Nirmala Nataraj: writer, artist, active dreamer, liminal walker. Here for the (not-necessarily-just-external) transformation and sigh of ontological relief. Remember to breathe.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 12, 2026
Latest issues
The Blue Rose and More Tales of Summoning (opens the original)
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The stories in this post were compiled from the notes I’ve been hammering out lately on the Substack app, mostly as a form of accountability to my flood of musings and my desire to tickle beauty with my hands and mind whenever I possibly can. Like all of my recent stories, these glommed into being from the pea soup fog of recycled, recurring dreams. For years, I’ve been notating my semi-lucid adventures, mostly as a form of self-excavation (who doesn’t enjoy noodling around in the dark of their
The Inner Cleanse (opens the original)
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Errant Hymn with Blood in the Drain: A Poem (opens the original)
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I’m 46 now, closer to the mid-century mark than I am to the symbolic tidal shift into adulthood that 40 was. I assume this means more of my life is behind me than ahead of me, although trifling with the story of one’s inevitable death and chalking it up to a slow descent into old age is yet another abstraction that presumes I know exactly what’s gonna happen. Maybe it’s more prudent to forecast being squashed like a bug in the middle of an ecstatic, youthful reverie. One can hope. I’ve been trai
The Spiral-Torus (opens the original)
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A confession before we begin: The following essay was occasioned by a dream in which I was visited by the deceased New Age composer Iasos. Maybe you’re not familiar, but he’s the man behind Inter-Dimensional Music (1975), patron saint of crystal grottos and pastel synth washes, a figure whom one is statistically more likely to encounter on a random soundbath playlist than in the canon of Western metaphysics. He arrived in my slumber, and I gave him the cordial reception anyone would accord a gue
The Gods Forget, But Love Remembers (opens the original)
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The gods, drunk on their own omniscience, descend into the Earth like falling stars. Ah, how did I get here? Naturally, they forget everything. They forget their genesis, the full stretch of their bodies when they’re standing tall and certain, their infinite sprawl of knowing, the eternal that radiates light from the star whence they came. Ferried along by the half-life of their own unstable decay, they swell into bone and putrid breath before lapsing into the exquisitely terrible condition of b
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