It was something that would never really happen, now suddenly happening all at once. It was a contagious vibe of energy and we all caught on to the flow with exuberance. Time seemed irrelevant, transfixed by our own surge of interactivity with one another. Finally, the whole human race seemed to be collaborating.
It all started with the tick of a clock, or so they say. I am not sure, to be honest, but the version I heard was that Dr. Krone was sitting up in his attic one day and he accidentally knocked over his cup of coffee when he heard the tick of his clock amplified to a magnitude of ten times its original volume. And then it happened: time looped, or fell backwards and forwards at the same time. The subjective experience for everyone was simultaneously enriched. Every aspect of the world which can be sensed by a subject resonated through multiple prisms, as though each separate sense existed in a vacuum, pure and complete. We all felt it, too. Even the dreamers awoke in a splendor.
Personally, I collapsed, being all too personally overwhelmed to fully engage in the moment. Or, well…should I say: I tried to collapse. It was impossible. I closed my eyes and saw more. Those blazes of fire exploding in neon stars that you usually see when you close your eyes — those were now rich images of everything that I had ever seen in my entire life, superimposed, and in bizarre neon glows and bright flashes of a flickering cacophony of images. It was an irresistible experience, though, once I opened my eyes. Light seemed to reflect off of every surface as though everything was covered with pellets of water delicately arranged in tiny diamond or circle shapes. This melody filled my head; it was more than music, just a pure blare of sound: intense, smooth, and just…there. And then I thought of everything I had pondered in the last four or five years, at least, and I understood my thoughts interlacing into a grand web. Suddenly, something made perfect sense. In fact, it made so much sense that it almost killed me. For perhaps the first time in my life I felt like I had something to say for myself…to the whole world.
And then it was gone. Just that one fleeting moment, transient and precious and unforgettable. Yet, because everyone experienced it…we now all had something to connect upon, and for once not out of fear. All of these different interpretations of one common event; all of these private experiences fitted into a phenomenon which engulfed and engaged everyone equally. The individual’s voice screamed louder than a thousand voices. And we were piecing together our private revelations with an eagerness, a need…laziness no longer dominated. Apathy, the greatest pandemic the world has ever known, was obliterated completely in one second. We finally expressed the fact that we were alive, each of us representing a distinct singular force in a vastly interactive world.
Patterns began emerging faster than our minds could track them. It was intimidating and exhilarating all at once. The patterns became self-generating, or at least…so it seemed. Fear returned. Individuals retreated to isolation. I guess it was over-stimulation or something…the mind looking back exactly at itself, and it was just too much to bare. I think people really felt like they were giving up a part of this cherished human quality of “uniqueness” by seeing their every mental activity reflected in an all-encompassing pattern that was more than the sum of the parts of every individual’s greatest efforts of thought and conjecture. Perhaps humans have to compete. That was one theory. We have to assert ourselves and act in our own self-interest, or else we lose a sense of ourselves and no one knows how to exist like that. Not yet, at least. I guess you could say that perhaps the world was not ready yet for all that it experienced, and that it all happened too quickly.
When individuals started retreating back into themselves, the great pattern began eroding. It was to be expected. Those of us, those rare ones amongst the pervasive masses, who cherished the unity clung to the pattern trying to fill in the gaps by our own means. It was irrelevant, though…for the pattern was never about mental gymnastics or who had the strongest or most imaginative mind…it was about taking parts of every individual’s experience and henceforth weaving together a comprehensive web which would arrange itself into the pattern. Conducting thought experiences to try to mend the decaying pattern was a meaningless effort leading to absolutely no end, and it induced only stress and frustration. Apathy returned. Laziness spread like a virus, critically poisoning humankind’s vital spirit.
By the time the pattern was gone, few of us remembered. I was lucky. I have no idea why, for I have never really thought there to be anything particularly special about my mind. They say that it involved a willingness to remember. Or some sort of awareness beyond yourself, which I think is weird because right now I am pretty sure all I am aware of is myself. Everything else is gone, I swear. Once you see all and become united with the world as a whole, all of the previous component parts you had once known to compose the whole lose their meaning. For me, I became somewhat blinded to everything that had once been there. My senses became somewhat numb, aching from over-exertion. They say that you cannot see something if you do not know what it is, if it’s completely outside the realm of anything you have ever been exposed to before. What they don’t tell you is that the same principle works in reverse: if you see everything you never knew could exist then you can’t go back to looking at mere subparts which had once been so familiar…anymore. I was trapped.
Just when I was about to give up on everything, Josephine entered into what I conceive to be within the proximal range of my own presence. Josephine was one of the few, like me, only she remembered almost everything and in elaborate detail.
“The closest you can get from here…to that great thrill of being alive more than we ever knew we could be…is through dreaming.”
I didn’t care about dreaming. I felt like I was dreaming all the time. I wanted to wake up, not fade into a persistent dream reality forever.
Josephine sensed my hesitation. “No, you see. It’s not like traditional dreaming. You remain here –” She touched my arm and it felt like someone was whispering to every subcutaneous cell in my body, trying to awaken a dead spirit. “And project your conscious activity out. You keep it with you at all times, always dreaming while navigating about in the real world ad still remaining relatively…present…to both worlds.”
My eyebrows perked up, or some tension overcame the upper portion of my head. What the hell does it mean to be relatively present? Does that mean that I can be kind of here, but also somewhere else? Kind-of here. This is ridiculous. Am I really even thinking this way?
“In this world, you can interact with others…but no one can share in your dream experience. Everything in that experience is…essentially…created by you. Try it, dreamer.”
She put a hand over what I presume to be my face and closed my eyelids for me. When I opened them again, my perception (and perhaps my body, too) was oriented at a right angle to where I had been seeing from before. And then…I saw myself — or some version of myself — sitting next to Josephine.
A voice came from beyond my head; I think it was my voice. “Do you know where you are?” I hadn’t the faintest idea.
