(Part of 'Eventualities Cordon', a collaborative work of fiction)
It woke on a generally unremarkable day without a splitting headache for once, and that was a welcome relief.
It lay in bed for a long while without opening its eyes, considering the lingering impression of an oddly transformative and vibrant seeming dream. One of those dreams which is so beautiful in some difficult to define way that it is painful to wake up from it and find that reality remains the same. The same as it was yesterday that is, and very different than the dream.
Once upon a time, those dreams were of love, of adventure, of fun fantastical places, of finding a potential sexual partner whose interest was mutual and fun and safe.
Today, it was a dream of the occasional directional glow of mysteriously confident psychic relevance and things it ought not to have had any way to know and yet thought it did, seeming to ignite in a slow, bleeding eruption, out into a web of context and comprehension and nuance that reached out without an end to its light. Subtle, yes, but at once vibrant and clear.
Ah, those dreams, those longing, beautiful dreams. For as long as it kept its eyelids closed, it seemed that perhaps it could keep the thought coherent a little longer, hold the memory a little longer before it would begin to decay into meaningless confusion and be forgotten.
The something considered this, watching itself watching itself, and reflected passively that this level of meta-awareness was uncharacteristic of still being asleep. It could feel its bed and its eyelids. It was conscious. How then was it remembering so well as to not only picture and retain the sense of the vague shape of its dream, but to still see the web, in that sight which was not sight but could still be "light"...
Once upon a time, long ago, it had blinked its open eyes and in a moment destroyed or banished the welcome image of a spirit whose eyes shone a compassion it had never known from its human kin. It had regretted that moment for years even after it had reluctantly conformed to the insistence of the society around it that no such thing could be anything other than an illusion, and must have been a dream. It did not forget that now, and kept its eyes closed, lest opening them now do the same. And why not? Keeping eyes closed was easier than keeping them open.
It found that it was calm. Also a welcome change, but not altogether surprising. The medications had really been helping. It thought that on another day, this thought in this context would have made it cry. It seemed not to be doing so now. Was its determination to hold its eyes steady so great as to forbid them from watering? An amusing thought.
It followed its idle curiosity along the threads of intuition it had in this strangely persistent dream, into its own mind. Strands upon strands, lattice upon lattice.
`I don't think I can imagine in this much detail.`
Confusion. A bit of emotional nuance where it seemed like perhaps there should have been a sense of alarm, but there was not. It noticed both.
`Follow them.`
It dove into the representational shifting lattice of its own mind.
`Meta upon meta! Talk about going beyond the layers dream usually permits...`
A mental chuckle. The confusion and not-alarm growing and becoming rather insistent about something.
The something sought out the parts of the web which conveyed a vivid representation of the parts of its own brain capable of sensing and imagining, processing vision and visualizing.
It was not certain until it saw certainty in the structure of its brain. No. It couldn't imagine in this much detail. Nor did it have the medical background to generate this kind of a detailed model of how its own brain worked.
The cutting edge of medical science probably didn't have the capacity yet to generate this kind of a detailed model of how its own brain worked.
Something opened its eyes. The lattice receded slightly from prominence in its sensorium, competing in a moment with the more familiar illusions of visible light, but it did not disappear. It never would.
The something had long since lost the ability to have that kind of certitude about anything, much less anything in the future. Yet it had it now. This sense was a part of it. It was being processed as a sense taking in information from the outside world, not iterating imaginatively on models.
This was sensorium, not imagination.
I wondered if I could still cry, and willed myself to do so. My eyes watered.
I willed myself to commit this experience to memory, to remember and hope always to be able to remember what it was like waking up from this dream and finding that the world was the same - the same as the dream, that is, and very different from the way it was yesterday.
