A
dreamer dreams many things. In this case, he was merely walking from
his living room to the kitchen, and a thought struck him, and he went
AWAY for a few seconds, and a two-part dream laid itself out like a
fresco...then folded up and disappeared. He shook his head and resumed
walking to his kitchen to make coffee. Crazy, he thought. Where did
THAT come from? He looked at his watch. Another day in lockdown.
PART ONE OF THE DREAM
On May 14, 2266, the New England Journal of Medicine and Psychology published a paper titled:
WHAT IS 'A NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCE?'
A
quote: "Brain research discovers common patterns of activity across a
whole population. These patterns would be called 'normal'. Exceptions
would be classified as various categories of 'disordered thought'. It's
assumed that only 'harmonious and symmetrical' brain patterns are
positive and beneficial."
A reader commented: "This assumption is
grossly false. It's a stunted version of aesthetics. Creative force
always breaks out of these little geometries. So does every new idea.
Increasingly, Earth culture is unable to understand this."
---The
reader receives a government notice and is summoned to a hearing. He's
interviewed by a virtual AI employee of the federal Department of Stat
Research.
HOLOGRAPHIC i-FIGURE: "Are you all right during this epidemic lockdown? I see you live alone."
"Yes, I'm fine."
"We want you to enjoy yourself. Are you watching learning programs?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't like them."
"Well, we have a report on you. It indicates an output difficult to measure or interpret. What can you tell us about this?
"I don't know. I'm composing a symphony."
"A symphony? What is that?"
"It's a piece of music written for a large orchestra."
"I find no extant orchestras in the country."
"That's true. Nevertheless, I'm composing."
"Why?"
"For that day when an orchestra may come into being again."
"Your thought-impulses entered ranges we were not able to summarize."
"I suppose that means your instruments are limited."
"Your
last statement is incendiary. It suggests we are imposing a
restriction. As you well know, the science is settled on this point.
We measure and interpret thought that contributes to an overall positive
outcome, for the population at large."
"I'm aware of that, yes.
But the science rests on certain assumptions. I would call it greatest
good as a lowest common denominator."
"What do you mean?"
"You
assume a certain mindset contributes to the consensus reality you
favor. You legislate a range of thought that will produce the
consensus."
"That's a gross oversimplification."
"It
doesn't describe the algorithms you employ, but all in all I believe my
summary is correct. You're reality makers. You monitor
thought-emissions, and when you find a departure from 'combined
averages,' as you call them, you issue a citation."
"What is this symphony you're composing?"
"It's impossible to explain. It's music."
"It has a specific message?"
"No. If it did, I would write out the message and leave it at that."
"Why have we not heard of you before?"
"I was doing illustrations for the Happiness Holos."
"What happened?"
"I became bored. A machine could make those pictures. So I decided to compose music."
"The Happiness Holos are an essential social program."
"Perhaps.
They encourage people to stay on the positive side of a construct
called Positive&Negative, which as you know is a State-sponsored
theme. But what is superficially indicated by those two opposing sets
is, in fact, fuel for the fire."
"Fuel for what fire?"
"The artist can use and transform any material."
"Where did you hear such a thing?"
"Nowhere. I've experienced it many times."
"Your views are highly eccentric. I will have to consult your childhood history to understand their roots."
"I'm afraid that won't do you any good."
"Why not?"
"Because your version, the US Department of Psychology version of cause and effect, is propaganda for the masses."
"This is your idea of a joke?"
"Not at all."
"When you compose this...symphony, how do you think?"
"It's not thinking in the way you use the term."
"No? Then what do you do?"
"I invent sound."
"Preposterous."
"Large masses of sound."
"Absurd. According to what underlying pattern?"
"None. Check the Library of Structures. I doubt you'll find my activity in the catalogs."
"Only known structures and patterns are contained in the files."
"I don't invent through pattern."
"No? How then?"
"I improvise."
"And this term refers to?"
"Something done spontaneously."
"And you exceed prescribed ranges of thought in the process."
"Perhaps. I would hope so. I don't keep track."
"You're being flippant."
"I assumed you'd eventually cite me. I'm just composing music during the lockdown."
"There is no citation yet. You're an anomaly. We investigate. We consider."
"I'm afraid your and my idea of 'consider' are quite different."
"Let
me ask you this. When you are composing, do you ever believe you enter
into a realm or area that could be called 'non-material'? We've heard
such claims before."
"Not if you're referring to some fairyland.
But all thought is basically non-material. The brain registers it
after the fact. Thought, the real thing, doesn't take place in the
brain."
"You're deluded. And disordered."
"If I could simply confess to that and be on my way, I'd be a happy man."
"You
live in a society. To keep the peace and maintain the Positive,
science has discovered that thought should occur within certain
parameters."
"If you insist."
"We want to study you. It's
a great honor to be called. You could help extend the boundaries of
research...we register variation from the norm in your present
thinking."
"What present thinking?"
"What you're thinking right now."
"That was quick."
"The readouts are instantaneous...what are you doing?"
"I'm starting the fourth movement."
"Wait. What you're doing is disruptive."
"It's because of how you set your frequencies."
All
along the major esplanade, and in the lake area, and in the industrial
parks and residential high rises, virtual structures shattered like
glass.
The i-figure went dark.
A thousand holographic government buildings froze and vanished.
The composer said to no one, "I'm just composing. Well, apparently not just."
---Back in his room at the edge of the city, he said, "I suppose that's what they mean by a negative consequence."
He
sat down at his computer and turned it on. Before he went to the
composing page, he had to click on a sunburst icon and read a government
message for the day. It appeared:
"We want everyone to be happy
during the lockdown. This is very important. Because much government
function is being carried out by virtual assistants, we've encountered a
disruption in service owing to a segment of Disorder entered into our
Net. Please be patient. Repairs are underway. These are learning
experiences for us. There is always a certain amount of disordered
thought in the environment. Most of it is unintentional. We welcome
the opportunity to study such examples. As a member of the educated
class, we're sure you can appreciate the research aspect of our work.
Thank you for your patience. Food deliveries will be delayed by a factor
of...two hours. Our latest figures indicate 2,147 new epidemic cases
have been detected in your sector in the last 24 hours. Re-testing is
underway. Please place your hand on the screen now...thank you. You
may remove it. Just a moment...we're unable to process your assay at
this time. You'll receive a message indicating your viral status as
soon as the system is up and running again. End of message."
The
composer plugged a small module into the side of his computer. The
screen went red. Black letters formed: DISEQUILIBRIUM. He pressed the
send key.
The encrypted score of the first three movements of his
symphony set out on a rapidly changing zig-zag journey to a series of
caverns below cities in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, America.
A
program consisting of the synthesized instruments of a full orchestra
read the score and began to broadcast the music to small groups of
people sitting in the caverns...
PART TWO OF THE DREAM
In a government office, a Stat analyst read a note from his supervisor:
"The
pandemic is having a positive effect on mass thought-patterns. We're
seeing a significant smoothing out of trends. With major focus on
staying indoors, rapid testing, isolation, and official updates tuned to
each population group, overall harmonization is expanding."
"This
gives us more time to focus on outliers and odd departures from the
symmetrical norm. Attached you'll find a story written by a man who has
been living alone for the past 12 years. He's a former scripter for the
Department of Education series, 'I Love School.' He dropped out and
began writing fiction. This in itself would be a red flag, but the
content of his latest effort is quite problematical. Give it a read and
send me your assessment."
The analyst opened up the attachment, took several calming breaths, and dug in:
"You
want to forget about the possibility that, buried under mind control,
there is a very different human being? Suppose, for example, the psyche
is equipped to see and use language itself in a way that's foreign to
us? Suppose this language sends signals to our endocrine systems, and
our chemical and biological processes undergo a revolution?"
"Here
is what an astronaut said in a closed room in Houston when he came back
from a three-month voyage in space and emerged from his quarantine
period. Here is what he told the men at the table."
'...You see
it wasn't just a planet. It was somewhere that made no sense at all.
There were...things there, but I couldn't identify them. I couldn't put
names to them. I thought it might be a puzzle. A game. So I just
started walking. I don't know how long I walked. You tell me I've been
away for three months. All right. I can't put any sort of time stamp
on it. One thought came in on me, over and over again. I was in a
different universe. And if it was organized, I couldn't find the
pattern. So for a very long time I rejected the whole place, the whole
setup. That was my main experience. Because who would ever imagine
being in a locale where things were so strange he couldn't find a single
word to convey them to anyone else? And then, finally, I remembered
something from years ago. A play being performed by crazy actors. They
spoke in a "language" no one had ever heard of. It went on for almost
an hour. I felt very angry. A few minutes before the end, I was hit by
lightning. I suddenly understood everything they were saying. I don't
know how. And I couldn't translate it back into English. I just
understood. It was a one-time experience. And that was what it was
like, being in that universe. When I remembered this, I felt a shift. I
knew where I was. I knew what was going on. I knew that universe.
But I can't sit here and tell you what it was. That seems impossible to
you. But it's true. I'm stymied. One thing I can say. Everything I
once thought I knew about beauty...that's gone out the window. I've
realized there were certain rules embedded in my mind. Maybe
principles. Principles of harmony, symmetry, balance. Organization. I
was living according to those rules or principles all my life, in all
my choices, and now they're gone. They don't exist anymore. When they
evaporated, I was able to understand what that universe was. All at
once. On the trip home, I started to draw. You've seen my "work."
You've looked at it, and you wonder whether you can use it to decipher
what happened to me. But you can't. I was just inventing out of a
vacuum. A wonderful vacuum. I was working from nothing, a void. I'm
not asking you to understand it. I don't feel you need to. I just know
I stumbled across something. I never wanted it or looked for it.
You've told me the drawings mean nothing to you. That's fine. I didn't
do them for you. All the vast telemetry we have? The codes and
symbols and shorthand, the measurements? The markers and the baselines
and the scans? I'm not interested in them anymore. I don't have the
slightest bit of interest.'
There was silence in the room.
"Sounds like you got religion," one man said.
"I feel," the astronaut said, "like a tiger who just walked out of the zoo."
Security men stepped into the room. They had their hands on their holsters.
But the ops chief held up his hand.
"It's
all right," he said. "We're fine. This man found something. Let him
go. No one will understand him. We're protected. We're all inside the
protocol."
There is the little-known work of
philosopher/linguist Ernest Fenollosa, the author of The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium of Poetry. Fenollosa analyzed modern Chinese
words back to older pictographs that minimized nouns. Instead, these
ancient pictographs, at one time, presented a view of reality that was
far more dynamic and shifting, in which action was the main event. The
subject and object of a sentence were themselves of lesser importance,
and were related to one another by their mutual participation in that
action. "To be" verbs---is, are, am---were just dead ducks.
Irrelevant.
Suppose we had a language in which every noun was
also a verb, in the sense that it threw off rays and curves and vectors
of action and energy.
What would we have then?
We might, at the extreme, have an endless supply of dynamic universes. No potted plants.
We
would be communicating with each other in a way that instantly gave
birth to possibilities beyond current meanings embedded in our style of
speaking and writing. The implications of each word of text would jump
and leap. Instead of peeling off layers to get at the precise
definition of a word, we would automatically be proliferating it.
Language,
created by consciousness, also feeds back to it. And this feedback
informs our way of viewing reality. The structure of language becomes,
in a true sense, a monitor on what we can see and what we can't see.
What we can imagine and what we can't imagine.
It's as if a
psychologist, running one of those old inkblot tests, told the patient:
"Guess what? There's nothing wrong with you. Forget all that
nonsense. Look at these shapes and imagine anything you want to. Tell
me what you invent. Then I'll do the same. Pretty soon we'll be
speaking a different language, and we'll levitate out of this worn-out
reality..."
Let's cut out middlemen.
Instead of the
standard blots, print out all sorts of complex shapes on a page and say,
OK BOYS, THIS IS A LOST LANGUAGE. FIGURE OUT WHAT IT MEANS. WORK ON
IT.
Then if you can nudge or inspire or bribe people to do that,
they will work for a few years believing there is really something
there, something that is embedded in the shapes, and they'll dig in and
try to decode it. A few more years and they might throw in the towel
and say, "The hell with this, let's just make it up. Let's say each
shape means whatever we imagine it to mean, and each shape can change
its meaning from minute to minute."
Then they start writing to
each other with these shapes and thousands of others they make up---and
gradually, they forget about the notion that they might be crazy. After
that, glimpses and glints begin to surface in their minds. They don't
know what they are, but they feel they're de-conditioning themselves
from any language they previously knew. They're out in open water.
Their operational concept of Understanding is undergoing a revolution.
They realize how tightly they clung to their old basic notion of Meaning.
They
drop that. They discard it in the garbage, because they're fascinated
with the glints and glimpses they're getting. They want more glimpses.
They're inventing this language with no rules and no assigned
structure.
They're experiencing sensations of flying and
soaring. These sensations are feeding back into their body processes
and into their minds. The hard wiring is giving way.
You could
say they're astronauts training for a mission in which they'll encounter
an intelligence that's completely alien to Earth.
There are
analogues to what I'm discussing here. For example, microtonal music.
You tune a piano so that, altogether, 88 keys display the range of
sounds contained within just one octave of a conventional piano. Going
from the lowest note to the highest on the microtonal piano, you hear
thin slices and gradations of notes that cover, all told, no more ground
than one octave of a normal piano.
You sit at the microtonal piano and you play. And play. And play.
You listen to what you play.
At first, it's repugnant. It's not only dissonant, it's absurdly muddy.
But
after a few months of playing that piano every day, you begin to hear
something. It comes through. And the sensations it brings might remind
you of places you've been, experiences you've had. But they go
further, into a void where new sensations and meanings you can't name
are possible, are happening. Are real. Eventually, super-real.
These
sensations flood your endocrine system, and new proportions and
sequences of hormones are produced. You experience feelings you'd
forgotten or never had before.
The spectrum of feeling and thought expands.
Your whole notion of what you can experience and understand changes.
Your imagination is gearing up.
You
never seriously considered there could be seven comprehensible sounds
between any two keys on an ordinary piano. Now, you're not only hearing
them, they make sense. They convey emotion.
This would be like
saying that, between each pair of words in a sentence, there are seven
other words, and every one of them is an action verb.
When you understand that expanded and exploded sentence, you can talk to an alien from Parsec-12. He can talk to you.
After
your first conversation, when you walk out of the facility where he's
under heavy guard, ride the elevator down to the parking lot, and drive
through the gate, you look at the desert and you see things you never
saw before.
You understand why magic was hard to do. It was all
supposed to be taking place in a tight reality of unbreakable
connections. Impossible. But now those connections have snapped. The
landscape, any landscape, is much more inclusive and malleable.
You're
reminded things were this way once. And now processes in your body
open up. There is a reason for them to change. They secrete
information and energy that have been dormant for a long time. Dormant,
because there was no use for them.
The cells in your nervous
system wake up to a remarkable degree. They've been waiting for this
moment. They turn off the perverted game show called Life they've been
glued to for 40 years. They project rays in all directions. Your
physical aliveness shifts up exponentially.
Through the walls of
the holding facility behind you, you can see the alien. He's nodding at
you. Yes, he's thinking. You're on the right track.
---The stat analyst leaned back in his chair. He prepared to gather his thoughts so he could write a report for his supervisor.
The
author of the very strange piece he'd just read was obviously insane.
Anyone could understand that. But what could the government learn about
outlier thought patterns from the piece? During the comfort of the
lockdown, most people were settling in, trying to relax, turning off
their stray ideas, looking for the Positive, as the authorities had
urged. But this man, whoever he was, had gone in the opposite
direction. Why? And why had he chosen language as his jumping-off
point? He was trying to attack everything that was harmonious and
repetitive.
The analyst remembered something from his own past. A
novel he had read as a child. A sea adventure. A sailor had stepped
off his ship at a distant port and walked along a road toward a range of
hills. It was a summer afternoon.
The analyst remembered that
as the sailor walked on this road carrying his pack, a whole scene had
opened up in his child's mind, and he had put down the book. He saw
those hills and he walked up to them, too, with the sailor. He walked
ahead of the sailor and he saw a valley, and there was a city in the
valley, and very tall buildings, and people on the streets.
Among these people, he moved slowly, listening to them talk. He couldn't understand their language.
And then he could. He felt he was falling and flying at the same time.
Now,
in his office, he did a search and discovered the man who had written
the piece he was supposed to report on lived in Hartsdale, a small town
20 miles from his office.
He pinned on his federal badge, took an
elevator down to the parking lot, slipped on a mask, got in his car,
and drove out of the facility.
The roads were empty. A half-hour later, he parked at the end of a dirt road next to a small cottage.
He entered the cottage without knocking.
The rooms were empty.
Floor boards in the bedroom were stacked in a pile, and there was a hole in the floor. He saw a ladder.
He climbed down the ladder to a dark room. The floor was dirt.
He felt the walls and found a door.
He opened it. People were sitting in chairs. They glanced at him and made no moves.
There was music. They were listening to music.
He sat down in a chair. He had never heard music like this before.
It engulfed him.
He
was back in the city in the valley. He walked the streets, and he knew
this was just the beginning. It was where he went to depart from what
he had been thinking about. It was the first difference, the breaking
of a connection. Not only the absence of gravity, but the absence of
the character of gravity.
He felt quite alone and quite complete. But not isolated.
There was nothing from his past he needed to share.
And nothing about the pandemic or the lockdown.
It occurred to him there was no danger at all. No pandemic.
The whole edifice of danger and all its sub-sections were like old faded photos.
He stood still in the city.
---end of the dream---
The
man who just had this dream made his coffee in the kitchen and took it
back into the living room. Another day of lockdown. He sat down on the
couch and shook his head like duck who'd just jumped out of a pond up
on to dry land. He took a sip of coffee and turned on the news. He
felt himself relax.
He flipped from one channel to another.
"A
person over 65 who has suffered from any one of several key illnesses
must be vaccinated, as a precaution. All hospital and nursing home
employees must be vaccinated. Travelers returning from the following
locations must be vaccinated before re-entering the country..."
"Here
at Driver Two Corp, all our people take the vaccine proudly. We want
the community to know we're in the lead in compliance. We support the
Governor and his team of public health advisors. Our new contact
tracing app has built in signals telling you when you're at risk in
certain neighborhoods. Visit our Facebook page and learn more."
"Hi,
I'm Dr. Julie Meng of the CDC. I want to tell you about a man named
Carl. He refused the vaccine and infected his whole warehouse and we
had to shut down the company. Right now, Carl is on a ventilator
fighting for his life in a hospital...don't be a Carl..."
"Did
you know you can report certain people who actively refuse the vaccine?
Go to our Facebook page and learn who you can report on and why..."
"At
YYY Corp, all 32,000 of us want to salute the nation's contact tracers
who are working to keep all of us safe. We know you're out there
protecting us 24/7. So we're cutting your insurance premiums by 15
percent across the board, for the next six months, as a gesture of
thanks. Tracing leads to vaccinating, and that's what we all
need---immunity from the virus..."
"Leading our coverage this
morning, the CDC has pinpointed three areas in Utah where vaccine
refusal has climbed higher in recent weeks. Some estimates place it as
high as ten percent. A breakaway church and its pastor have been blamed
for spreading conspiracy theories. In accordance with federal
conditions under which the COVID vaccine can be mandated, one of those
areas has now been designated a 'hot spot.' Local border controls have
been set up. Two clinics are prepared to receive people who have turned
down the vaccine and are being placed in custody. We now go live to
the ER at Buchen Hospital..."
"In Houston, a group calling itself
COVID Truth has leaked a public-health list of local residents who have
so far refused to take the vaccine. Utilizing Facebook posts, 90 names
have been exposed. Of course, medical privacy is an issue, but the
majority of local citizens seem to be siding with COVID Truth..."
"Today,
three eastern states reached agreement limiting inter-state travel,
deploying a wide-ranging series of highway checkpoints, where officers
can demand certificates of immunity..."
The man heard a rising
noise. He walked over to his window and looked outside. A few blocks
away he saw crowds gathering. They were spreading out across his
neighborhood. How was that possible? He noticed they weren't wearing
masks. They were standing close together.
The dream flashed through his mind again.
Without thinking, he grabbed his jacket and went outside to join them.
An hour later, he was threading his way through thousands of people. The crowds extended all the way to downtown.
So many people were holding signs that said FREEDOM.
Could this...?
A
woman next to him was laughing. She looked at him and handed him a
pair of binoculars. He took them and looked in the direction she was
pointing.
Along the highway, thousands of motorcycle riders were coming into the city.
He took a deep breath and let it out.
"What's happening to me?" he said without thinking.
"Nothing," the woman said. "It's all over. Their organization is gone."
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