The following could be classified as fiction.
I’ve been precious with my fiction, and haven’t shared it here until now.
But maybe this isn’t fiction, really.
In my sleep, I dream. In that dream, I create.
I Weave my dreamworld for everyone, and hope that they will come. I work on it my entire life, honing disjointed sections and inserting intricacies. Here I saw a tree, and upon that tree a leaf that did not match the others. I replaced it with a violet flower that was the only of its kind.
The end results are expansive fields, arcane forests, towering mountains trailing glittering waterfalls. Stars that shine during the day and sing at night in soft hymns. Their songs tell the story of a man who painted for himself a daughter. She crawled out of the canvas and became his. But she was still made of paint and he guarded her as it rained. In my dream, you hear this. If you stand and listen for a moment.
I listen to it alone. As no one is ever there.
Only the self-absorbed never visit the dreams of others.
But when I go to these worlds, I am assaulted by noise. Aggressive demands for attention tear at my will to focus. Graphic sex flaunts itself in my face. Loud cities run traffic overhead and bear down upon pedestrians, who laugh as flying cars pass through them and gain a sensory thrill from near-death.
The violent venture into shooting ranges in which they are allowed to do harm. Grinning against recoil as they pull the trigger of an automatic rifle and aim everywhere. Everyone they kill wakes up, and deep bloodlust is sated.
I reach an intersection, in this particular dream. On one side are the screamers. Those who jump into the dreams of others to share the merits of their own, drawing crowds away like parasites. On another are the orgies. To my right are the reshapers, given permission to mold this dream for themselves but never doing a good job of it. Behind me are those angry, bloodthirsty shooters.
I fall into a crouch, staring at the pink and black slivers that make up the ground. My hand touches it and feels…nothing. No texture. No temperature. The detail simply is not there. My father would be furious at this heresy to all that he taught me.
“The best Weaver is Kalim,” a confident young voice pipes up.
I look up at them, curious. They sit on a white shape that is going to be a bench, but has not been filled in yet. A young man and a young woman.
“No. By far the best Weaver is Jutniss,” the young woman says. “The way she features clouds is amazing.”
Jutniss’s clouds are composites of various cotton textures that she’s memorized. They don’t look like clouds. They don’t even look gaseous. This could be a stylistic choice, but it clashes with other aspects of her dream that are purposefully as realistic as possible.
“I hate her clouds,” I whisper before I stop myself.
Their conversation stops. They both heard me.
“See, they agree,” the young man says. “It’s Kalim, right, the best Dream Weaver?”
I have already started. I swore to myself I wouldn’t do this, but I see curiosity in his bright eyes. I look away. I do not want to see how I tear him down.
“Kalim’s artificial humans only have five facial expressions, even though in reality there are six core emotions and a variety of combinations between them. This makes his dream soulless. Calling his people robotic gives them too much credit.”
“I like his people,” the young woman says. “They look cool. I just don’t like that he has gorillas in his jungles.”
“There are gorillas in jungles,” the young man says. “That’s where they live.”
“I just don’t like gorillas,” she shrugs. “Jutniss doesn’t have them. Nice clouds, no gorillas. I don’t know why I’m not there now.”
I take a deep breath. I almost stop myself. I cannot.
“Jutniss forgot a wide variety of animals across different biomes. This is a problem when she has committed herself so much to realism, and when she wants to depict the food chain. Certain animals spontaneously disappear when their population grows too large, in her dream, because there is nothing to eat them. She has not gone back and fixed it. She just keeps adding new biomes.”
“Okay, dude,” the girl rolls her eyes. “We all have our opinions. Make your own dream.”
“I did.”
“Well, I’ve never heard of it.”
It’d be arrogant to tell them that mine is better, and that my father’s was better than mine by far. Still it is not his name they call out, or even know.
I say, “No. You haven’t. You’re right.”
At this point, I feel like a grotesque imposter. In the ensuing silence, I leave before the conversation continue.
I spend all night making sure that the lines on an iridescent ladybug’s wing curve without disturbing the prismatic sheen they give off under sunlight. When I am finished, I let dozens of them crawl across me. They all take off at once, the sun’s reflection flashing off them in bursts of rainbow light.
I shout out, “Gorgeous!” loud enough to produce an echo from the snowy purple mountains. I pretend, for one second, that the echo is the voice of another.
I look around myself. The fields stretch on, deceptively empty for all their detail. The most prominent objects are a few grazing buffalo herds.
I transform one of the buffalo.
She becomes a naked woman, licking her lips. Eager for someone to touch her. She begins to do obscene things with her body. The details have not been ironed out, but her breasts, her hips, her buttocks, are large. Disproportionate to her waist. She is moaning on the ground.
They’ll come for this. They will. I won’t be alone.
My stomach trembles. I wave my hand. All at once she is a buffalo again. I wonder what my father would think, and I am more disgusted with myself than before.
I no longer feel proud of my ladybugs. I will return tomorrow with fresh eyes.
The next night I see a festering thing at a corner of my field. I did not build it, not intentionally. It is a pulsating mass of red, purple, and violet. Tangles of thick veins swell out of the ground, curve into each other, and then invade the soil again. They expunge a jet of foul-smelling fluid.
I wave my hand to remove it. A residue remains.
But this is not the end.
There are dark streaks in the waterfalls, churning in oily bile at its bottom. I remove this, and still there is more. The vines’ sickly purple webs over the mountains’ soft violet haze. A dirt that smells like rancid death blows on the wind. Once I have removed it all, I return to where I started. The first tangle is already replenishing itself.
Somehow I’ve done this. No one else has power here.
But why does it matter, if my dream is poisoned? Who is going to see it? I tried for years. But this place is so quiet, and so many around it are loud.
I need advice.
My mother attends murder mystery dreams every night. I enter to see a corpse that was never alive on the floor of a mansion’s dining hall. There is blood, but it only exists to be a clue. It splays out from the left side of the man’s skull, and this is an indication of how he was struck.
Older men and women strategize with each other over wine, examining the body and plucking from a plate of hors d’oeuvres. One especially arrogant mustachioed man has gone as far as wearing a deerstalker cap. My mother wears a black hat with a birdcage veil over her face.
“Oh, hello, sweetie,” she says upon seeing me. She looks to the others. “This is my child.”
“Hello mother,” I say.
“Oh you must stop speaking in that stilted way!” She rolls her eyes. The wineglass in her hand sloshes as her head darts to the others. “They get it from their father.”
“Mother, may I speak to you?”
She sighs. “I’ll be right back, ladies and gents.”
My mother pulls herself from the table with arthritic trepidation. In dreams, she still shows her age. I do not know why she chooses this.
“What is it, sweetie?” she asks, as we walk through the mansion. “Actually, here, one second.”
She pulls a lever and a bookcase slides out to reveal a door. We enter a small chamber with two couches facing each other, separated by a coffee table.
“I always thought this secret room was a cozy space.” She sits.
“Mother, my dreams are turning toxic.” I sit across from her.
“Oh your father got that way, before he stopped Weaving.” She looks into her wine. “He got all bitter, and it showed up in the dream. It’s not just an art, you know. It’s you. You must control those impulses and focus on what makes you happy.”
I avoid talking to my father about serious things. It’s never gone well. So I ask her, “why did he stop Weaving?”
She shakes her head as if this is all just harmless nonsense. Silly toys for silly boys. “It became painful for him. All that work and no reward. They say to do it for your own joy, but he used to say that was hogwash. Who would build this beautiful dream just to be alone in it? Not your Father. He was lonely in those maze cities he designed. I told him what I’m telling you, let it go. You can make dreams for yourself, or you can make dreams for other people. And when you make the things that you want, don’t be surprised when people don’t flock to them.”
“But what if it’s beautiful?” I ask before I can stop myself, feeling like a fool. “What if I just want someone else to say that they think that? Not just me.”
“Well what even is beautiful?” She shrugs. “Is watching some man get his head caved in and figuring it out beautiful? No, but I do it every night.”
I look around me. I pull a candle off the wall and run my hand over the flame. Through it.
“Look at this,” I say. “Whoever designed this chamber didn’t put any heat in this candle. That’s not subjective. It’s a cut corner.”
“Some people don’t want warm candles,” she says. “It distracts from the murders we’re solving.”
“But even then: a dream can be bad. And if a dream can be bad, then another one can be good. It’s possible that it’s good but people haven’t appreciated it, yet. It has more work put into it. Or thought. Or meaning. Or…or something.” I run a hand through my hair. “Something real.”
“Oh sweetie,” she frowns at me. “Dreams aren’t real. And however anyone feels about them is how good they are. Isn’t that freeing?”
I think of the hours spent working on the ladybug wing for no one to ever see. I think of the two teenagers on the lazy bench stand-in praising the mediocre talents of Jutniss and Kalim. If they could just recognize it, I had once told myself, they would see something undeniably more beautiful than what they had ever seen before. And they would know it.
But they haven’t seen it. They won’t. And even if they did, my dream is no better than any other.
“No,” I whisper into my hands. “It’s not freeing at all.”
“Yes, well, your father felt the same way. So he closed his off.”
“I thought he destroyed it.”
“Oh, of course not! He loved it too much! I thought you knew this.”
“Mom, he never says anything to me.”
She smiles. “Well, now I’m mom. Good. If you’re curious, I can get you in. He gave me the key.”
I examine the fake and powerless wineglass in her hand. This is a lucid offer.
“Okay,” I say. “Get me in.”
I wander through gray mazes lit by vivid moon-like orbs. Serpents with the texture of jellyfish writhe overhead. Above that is the topside of another maze. My father constructed a slight curve to the floor as the traveler goes west. Before you know it, you are not only above where you started, but looking up at the ground that you were once walking on. Gravity has been adjusted to accommodate this. The process of making each inch of incline feel like flat flooring must have been painstaking.
I turn past elaborate art pieces, some of which are portals leading into other mini-dreams. Others are short films that repeat three times until suddenly, on the fourth, some small detail changes. They can be watched for hours, and by the end they will be radically different scenes.
No one wanted this, I try to remind myself. Do not imitate this. Do not take inspiration. This is what no one wanted.
I think again of the violent sensory aggression in the popular dreams, and its substitution for actual quality. If quality is even real. Why do I believe in objective beauty when I can’t even prove the values that designate it as beautiful?
I turn a corner and am greeted by those familiar vile tangles. They grow along the wall, and are more advanced than mine, writhing before me. Noxious yellow eyes look out of them, blinking intermittently and not in unison. All at once, the vines open to reveal a great mouth. A red and purple man covered in fluid falls out of it in a fetal curl. He gasps out his first breath and stumbles to a crouch, an umbilical cord running from the mouth to his abdomen. He has no eyes, nose, or mouth, but the vague indents of them. An audible scream forces its way through his pores as he lurches toward me.
I back off and hit the wall. His cord pulls taut and he snaps back to the cluster he emerged from, hands still reaching out, fat fingers grasping. I know nothing in the dream can harm me. Still I shiver.
I navigate my way through the rest of the maze. From now on, I am careful to avoid dead ends. I follow the path that my father led me through on his shoulders, pointing at all his creative flourishes as I laughed. It is when I see the beautiful twin fountains hanging over each other and exchanging water in a space of null gravity that I remember that it’s too late. I’ve always been inspired by this. I will never let that go.
Past this is a terraced circle with steadily de-escalating ringlets. At its core is a hole surrounding a globe.
And my father there, looking upon it.
“Hello?” I ask.
He turns back to me, his eyes watery in his grizzled face.
“My child,” he forces out a smile. “This place was locked to you, as well as everyone.”
In the waking world, he speaks of so many things. He’ll talk at length about the weather, sports, politics. Never this.
“Are you still building it?” I ask him.
“No.” He turns back to the globe. “I’m just looking. Fishing for some sort of pride.”
I examine the globe. It shows continents amid oceans, but it does not resemble our world. It is entirely his own.
“I thought you just built the maze.” I do not mean to whisper.
“No.” He chuckles. “That was finished when you were a child. And even then I had started big chunks of this. It’s a planet. The size of Earth. I filled in other pieces of it, before I gave up. Entire fields are left blank, or there are plain white spaces when you go through the wrong doors. So much that could still be done.”
“But you won’t do it.” I sit next to him.
He shakes his head.
“It’s becoming corrupted, your dream,” I say. “Worse than mine.”
“Ah. Yes, well that’s the bitterness. You love what you create like a child.” He smiles at me, stopping just short of a wink. “And all you want is for that love to be valid. You want it to do well. And when it doesn’t, it’s so easy to hate the whole world. Or yourself. Or…”
He breaks off. The silence is long.
“Well, the hate is there.” His voice trembles. “I suppose there’s no healthy way to direct it.”
“Why do you stay here?” I ask.
“It’s the only thing that keeps the corruption at bay,” he says. “Going to other dreams just invites comparisons, envy for those who sold themselves better. Or who succeeded because they had their finger on the pulse of some trend. Or were just lucky.”
I stare at the massive globe, chunks of which he has not filled it. What’s there is still a monumental achievement.
“Your mother doesn’t even want to come here,” he says. “She loves her murder mystery dream.”
“She says there’s no difference between that and this, really. As far as quality. It’s just personal preference.”
He examines me. “Do you agree?”
I look him in the eye for several seconds before I decide to be honest. “No. But why does she believe that?”
“Because it’s too complicated.” He clenches his fingers. “A good boat doesn’t sink. A good house stays up. A good car drives without breaking down. What does a good dream do?”
I try to answer, but I can’t.
“I did it.” He points at the globe. “This represents my craft at the apex of everything I’ve ever wanted from it. I cannot imagine improvement. And still, no one came. It will be forgotten after I’m gone. I hoped for some objective force to recognize the value of this. But there is nothing. Only a void of silence.”
I examine this old man. His inability to compromise. But…no, what room is there for compromise? He could become one of the Screamers, shamelessly peddling his Dream. But that would take away from the time spent working on it. And now he is old, too old to learn.
I am not as old as him.
I can’t erase my own inspiration. But I can reflect upon the emptiness in his eyes. The lack of joy that all this has brought him. I can remember the thing that shambled toward me, and the visceral disgust it evoked. A corruption overtaking him.
I am not trapped like him. I can do differently. And looking upon the fruits of his frustrated labor, I realize that I should.
“Thank you, dad,” I say. “This has been helpful.”
“It has?” he asks.
“It has.”
I allow myself to wake up.
The next night, I add to my dream.
The cities are remarkably easy to build. They aren’t as intricate as my fields or forests, my waterfall draped mountains. They are bland digital towers, walls, and floors without detail.
I offer them to people who know what they want and have been given this before. They praise my towers for their simplicity.
As the weeks go by, some of them leave the cities. They explore my world. They find the things that I have left for them. Those beautiful details. Some never see it. Some say that my dream is terrible and is, in fact, worse than the dreams of Kalim and Jutniss.
Some nights, I sit atop my favorite waterfall-laced mountain, looking down on the juxtaposing cities and forests, and think of how there is now ugliness marring the surface of my dream. I try to find the same purity of purpose in myself, but cannot. The sacrifice has been meaningful.
Instead of designing these cities, I could have perfected a passion project, but this is fine. This will be my compromise. Some will see my tarnished but intact vision, and appreciate it.
During the day, my father does not speak to me of his dreams.
Far from here and inaccessible, there is a beautiful maze floating in the aether. Not in real space, but in a stubborn old man’s head. For all the darkness overtaking it, it is pure. Sublime in a way that only the best dreams can be. He wanders this maze every night, shaking his head at the occasional spreading corruption. But when he looks into the mirror in the morning, he knows that he is still true to himself. Uncompromised.
For whatever that is worth.
Your imagination and writing is incredible!