"People tend to see what they describe, rather than vice versa, and through maps, they formulate an image more than they develop a means of wayfaring.” H. Klinghoeffer, The Power of Projections. In these digital times, a "view map" link exists on almost every virtual space; maps are everywhere in our lives. They help us find our position in space, locate businesses, and attempt to categorize statistical information. As such, they appear to describe reality and are very often taken for objective truth.

But maps can lie. They can do so inadvertently, through inaccurate representations of boundaries, size relationships or object placement. They can be deliberately falsified, crafted to alter property rights, demographics or other perceptions. No matter what their motivation, they always reflect something about their makers.

When exploration demonstrated that imaginary Atlantic islands were not in their supposed locations, they were not discarded, but moved further west. And when Sixteenth century Europeans began mapping North America's coastline, they concluded they had found a land described in a popular work of Spanish fiction: the "Island of California," a paradisical empire inhabited, and ruled by large and beautiful Amazon women. And, despite contradictory evidence from various explorers, this incorrect information was propagated on many maps during the 17th and 18th centuries. Maps are mirrors of both conscious thought and subconscious desires and urges. They negotiate between a person’s inner world and the physical world: “constructing” the world, instead of reproducing it. What one finds generally resembles what one already knows, and if what is discovered doesn’t fit with previously-formed conceptions, it will be molded to fit.

Of course, 15th century North America was inhabited when those Explorers were mapping the "Island of California", peopled by diverse linguistic and regional groups. Though the land was unmeasured and unrecorded on paper, no doubt those people carried maps in their heads, psychic overlays denoting boundaries and markers for areas of resources, habitation, and sacred places. Existing in individual and group consciousness, the maps were fluid, with notions of about areas of ownership or usage shifting or overlapping between groups. It was not until the Spanish, Mexican and Americans claimed ownership, that physical mapping of the land began to impose notions of legal ownership, and the land was partitioned, and boundary lines recorded onto paper.

Our current Los Angeles county maps are the progeny of the first maps from loose mission and ranchero boundaries. We know where city limits legally begin and end, and the names by which our town and neighborhoods are referred, even such facts may be disputable at times. But the psychological maps we project onto the land carries different information: notions about belonging and identity; perceived boundaries and borders; and areas which one senses as "known" versus the other or no man's land. In ancient maps, unknown areas aka Terra Incognita were filled imagined representatives of the mysterious and strange. Drawings of monsters and sirens depicted fears or a call to adventure.

For every LA County resident, exists a psychological overlay that meditates between the authoritative Thomas Guide and an individual's own memories, fantasies, fears and desires.