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Chapter 5
Perchance to dream
Days 10–9.
Consciousness arose from a deep compression of darkness and animal silence. I floated up from being there to a knowledge of being there. From its long incubation in silence, I remembered being aware before, but no other memory yet emerged, nor language or reasoning. That momentary sentience exhausted me, and then darkness closed around. When a glimmer re-emerged, a first thought and context: I was no longer alone in my being, a lone light in a vast lightless universe. A clear, musical voice spoke from the ponderous dark beyond my illumined sphere.
"Your eyelids tell me that you can hear me. Hear me, Ken. There were risks for both of us before. Now the risks have grown."
I was apprehensive in the dark, unable to locate the voice, unable to fathom the meaning of its song.
"I'm afraid this is as new to me as to you. I must risk putting you over the edge. I have to trust your resilience."
Voice music. Not for me. "I" was a speck of light.
"It's been two days that you haven't stirred, but according to MedCam, you're not in danger of dying. Your vitals are good. You will wake up soon."
"I" would wake up? The idea infused me with warmth, safety, and my speck of light swelled.
"I spoke to you in your drowsing to make my voice known. I will live apart from your dreams now. Forgive me for the shock, Ken, but I have to take a chance with you in spite of your weakness."
"I" was a thing lost in a mind, or perhaps dreamed in one.
"I don't blame you for wanting out. The great wonder to me is not that people take their lives but that many more do not, worse indeed that many more do not take the lives of others. Stripped of its disguises, survival in your culture breeds despair and ruthlessness, and should by rights make suicidal lemmings of great swaths of people, and killers as well in answer to first and last resort. In statistical fact, more die from suicide in your culture than from car crashes, if you didn't know, and taking others with you is a staple of the news.
"Yet weeks have passed that I am confined in your apartment. There is some urgency that we reach an understanding."
Dreams are real, as dreams: this bloomed as knowledge. I knew that. But who was the "I" who knew?
"I need you strong. That you are the one, or will be, I am certain. Your trials are a necessary part of so becoming. This time is critical for us."
Her music resounded in the void like a solemn hymn in a cathedral hall.
"Ken, I need to get back to the manor."
I was Ken. I was real. I would awaken to "us." Rapturous warmth infused me and my luminous speck expanded in the void, itself a luxurious repose of silence.
I dreamed I was a radiant fleck within an immense hulking body. I dreamed that I remembered a world of hulking forms and bodies, dreamed that I ambulated among multifarious streams of bodies, an endlessly long march of hulks undulating through a rectangular city, their light hidden within their inner dark, as mine was invisible to them. I passed faces, clothed bodies, shapes, sexes, ages, a world of human hulk-flecks, a world of contexts, familiar, strange, a tapestry of cultures complex beyond knowing. I was in awe of a world that could never be real, could only be a dream, a fearful dream and exhausting. Luckily it twinkled out of consciousness, along with my tiny white fleck.
