Olympus

When we enter the dream system, we find ourselves as always in the Round Room. Based on our emotions we can become any out of eight dream ego types, which often make us forget who we were before, not that we transhumans are ever the same person for that long anyway. As our emotions change we may turn from one into the other. Different emotions are brought more into the same dream. In ours there's one of each, but after their change I can't tell who's who, and it doesn't matter: their emotions are all that make up who they are, and I can perceive them through telepathy.

Sadness makes us, as I have, become Fatua, calm Lympha, anger Fulgora, longing Vesta, fear Corus, wonder Caelus, anxiety Vulcan, and joy Tellurus. Each of us has an element that will form our dreams: my own, wood, and water, aether, fire, wind, air, metal, and earth. The men are on the white, the women on the black side of a half-full moon.

We each turn around and move into the doors behind us, leading through the labyrinth of our desires. Behind every room is another. Above each level is another, but between levels the elements spiral around, so that we can rise and fall from one to another. The levels form a circle, the highest leading back to the lowest. Each room also has a side door through which we can find each other as our emotions change, but the further from the center the larger the rooms become, until the walls can no longer be seen. We can teleport from any room to any other, but the layout helps us remember what we've dreamt and to return to it.

The first few rooms look like normal black rooms, but the further we move outward, the deeper we move into our own unconscious. It's a suggestion that's become stronger the more we repeated it, as we've done whenever we dream, until it became a reality to us.

With nothing but sensory noise for me to focus on in the first few rooms, it begins to take on form. When it seems to move like a fluid, I know it's time to open the second door, past which it could turn into anything. Over the next few rooms the fluid begins to evolve. In the second room, it's turned into plankton, in the third room into corals, and in the fourth room into a jungle.

By now the walls have disappeared from view, and the next door could be anywhere. This is as far as we usually get. None of us has ever found out where the fifth door is. At some point we've all gone through it without knowing how, but whenever we return to where we last found it it is gone. There doesn't seem to be any pattern in where it appears, and we never know where we'll find it next. If I am to move deeper into my unconscious, I'm to seek throughout its every darkest recess. I can import any perception ever recorded into my own, but we're here to find new states of perception that have never been on record.

Everything seems possible, yet somehow I still feel trapped without knowing why. The canopy is utterly dark, not even starlight reaching through, but I find myself at a stream below just a sliver of open sky. I take my first step from the threshold onto the unseen ground, and my feet sink into moss. I stand still, and let them sink deeper into mud beneath. Snakes coil around my feet and bite into my heels. When I try to move, they hold on like roots. I loosen them and make them support my feet while I walk in the mud. In the stream, they rise out of the ground, and I walk on their head to the tree on the other side.

I transform into a leopard by importing its body image, and climb into its branches. At the end of its furthest branch, I transform into a capuchin while keeping the leopard's night vision, and swing from branch to branch.

A path forms below the trees I swing through. I become human again and  walk down it to find where my unconscious leads me, but it just keeps going straight on. When I become restless, the passage begins to turn, after every turn another. Then the passage ends, and I realize my unconscious isn't trying to lead me in a physical path, but in a spiritual one. I'm moving on the right path when I move off it.

I move into the underbrush with closed eyes to feel the plants brush my skin, and begin to let myself float ever so slightly with each step. Just then, as I listen closely to the chirping of the insects, I hear a voice among them, and a crash shakes the sky and ground at once.

Opening my eyes I see a ghostly light through the trees, like an ignis fatuus. I walk towards it, past fallen trees into a clearing where they stood, and in the middle of the moonlit smoke stands Fulgora, goddess of lightning.

She's trying to disentangle herself from the vines, but they just keep coming. She doesn't see that they're growing out of her jacket. I help her take it off.

"So this is your dream? What do you like about this place?"

The vines are still reaching around them, grabbing onto her ankles. I chuckle. "They like you," I say. She waves her hand, vaporizing them with radiation.

"Just try not to tear the whole place down."

"It could do with a little pruning," she says, looking around like an animal that just found itself in a trap.

"How did you get here, anyway?"

"My world burst apart when I tried to reshape it. I fell through the cracks."

"I rest my case. I'm going to have to ask you to refrain from bombarding me with asteroids."

She seems about to fly back up through the sky, but then shrugs.

"I guess I've had enough of that. But this is a bit too claustrophobic for me, too." She looks around, then jumps from stem to stem to the top, where she looks out over the canopy. She somersaults back into the clearing, landing on her haunches.

"This way," she says, clearing a passage into the forest not unlike the one I walked down earlier, which must have been an early sign of her coming. At the end of the passage, she brushes away some fallen branches to reveal the sea beyond.

"Good to be in the open again," Fulgora says, as we start walking in the sand. So far the only symbol in the dream has been a very simple one, the opposition between creation and destruction.

"I feel like there's something we're missing in our search," I say. She just looks at me, waiting for me to go on.

"As humans we may have been more repressed, but that also meant that their unconscious was a wilderness that they left untouched. Now, we've cultivated it so much that it feels more like a park. Our dreams seemed far more full of meaning."

"At least," she says, "they were trying to be. Dreams are just our mind trying out everything it can. But it's true that our unconscious can try out many more things at once than our conscious can. That's why we need to balance between conscious and unconscious, and that's what we're doing when we are wakeful during a dream."

"But are we, really? We've been creating an entire system to direct our dreams. Maybe it's good to start with that, if only to choose a way to go, but at some point we have to lose our way to find another, and to do that, we need to go beyond all walls. I think that's the only reason we've never seen the fifth door, because it's probably not even in a wall, perhaps not a real door at all."

"So you're saying the hypnosis doesn't work?" Her energy feels more angry than before. All our work was based on the assumption that it does.

"Only up to a point, but our goal is to move beyond it. It's like a space catapult. We can keep around in its circle, but at some point we've gotten as much speed from it as we can and need to move off it. Hypnosis can only set us into launch, not into our trajectory."

I realize that we're suddenly walking over the waves, even though it still feels like we're walking on sand. The paradox gives us a wave of vertigo which makes me laugh. Fulgora tries to resist, only to topple over, but she doesn't hit the waves. Whatever plane we're walking on is tilting over, and we fall, except that we seem to fall upward as the shore moves ever farther away from us. Gravity feels as if it's turned upside down. It feels more free than flying, almost manic. We should be rising into the next level right now, but we don't.

We move ever farther away until we see the ring of Olympus, our dream city, spin away from us as fast as if it were a passing spaceship. All worlds we ever knew are in there, and now they seem forever out of reach. But there are no stars in the background, only sensory noise. The whole universe is our fifth room, and the door is just the opening where the fourth wall should be.

"What happens now?" Fulgora asks, sounding and feeling frightened. She takes hold of my hand. The infinite nothing seems to swim back and forth, seeming in turns so close as to be right in front of us and so far as to be nowhere at all.

"This shouldn't be too hard for you," I say. "Your element right now is aether, the stuff of stars and space. Plasma, if you will."

"I was never actually that far away." She closes her eyes. "I'm not really here," she reminds herself, and laughs nervously.

"You're not anywhere," I say. "That was our whole suggestion, that our dreams were somewhere. It makes it seem more real. But the only place you really are is in your own mind."

"So what happens now?"

"I don't know. Whatever it is, just let it happen."

Colors begin to bleed out of the nothing like sap from a tree. The sap freezes, then bursts to spray dust like meteors in all directions. As they come closer, I see the grains are covered with thistles within thistles, irising open as we come closer. As I float closer I find no surface amid the spikes to hold on to, and painfully collide into them before pushing myself off again. But the gravity calls me back, and I know that whatever this thing is, for some reason I need to enter it. I close my eyes and brace for impact, but none comes. When I open my eyes again, I see that the grain has grown larger, and this time, I find a surface to stand on. I tell Fulgura teleport to my location, when I see some of the other pollen grains light up.

"Stop! Without the pollen there won't be anything left but space again. They're a world trying to create itself."

"What kind of world?" she says from beside me, startling me. "This feels like a very dark corner of your mind."

"Who says it's not as much your mind as mine?"

"I wouldn't come up with this," she says, looking up.

"Neither would I. It looks like something that came out of both our minds: asteroid seeds! Perhaps it's a symbol of panspermia. I wonder what life will emerge from it."

"I'm talking about how empty it is out there, and how small we are," she says, still looking up, and this time I follow her look. From here the spines seem as tall as trees, but their lack of texture makes it clear that they're still microscopic. I haven't thought about it that way. Perhaps the pollen hadn't become larger but we've become smaller. Is that what my unconscious is trying to tell me, how small we become when we've transcended all limits?

"We need to go deeper. I'm beginning to wonder about the meaning of all this. This is dreaming as I remember it."

"You make it sound like it was really better."

"It wasn't. I rarely remembered my dreams at all, and that's something we've changed. But when I did, they were mysterious. It made me feel like there was some deeper meaning to my life."

As we look around we see pores in the skin of the grain, but they're much too small to fit through. When I bend down over one, I feel a warm draft from within.

Fulgura grabs my shoulder. "Look up." Without a sound, another grain has floated towards our own, one of its open thistles facing towards us. When it's about to crash down on us, its spines twine into that of our own, slowly stopping its course. Then, the spines begin to fall on those next to each other until they've reached a full circle, irising the thistle shut around us. For a moment it seems the spines are about to crush us, but as the ground slackens it subsides beneath us, sending us tumbling into an opening in the center. A red glow comes from within.

We fall through a network of widening tubes into a huge spherical chamber in the center, only to fly past it through the wider tubes on the other side until we fall back again. With every fall we lose more momentum, soon falling back and forth around each other in the center. The veins in the skin of the chamber that fill it with light begin to pulse more and more rapidly, once for every time we fall.

"I'm surprised you haven't broken this thing apart yet," I think to Fulgura.

"I will very soon. I think the seed represents us, and we will break forth from it."

As we fall into each other we embrace, and where my flesh touches hers it becomes so hot that we melt together. A tremor spreads within and our bodies and beyond, and as the seed bursts open, we change form, and briefly turn into every god and goddess until we can no longer identify ourselves. We have the same dream ego now, but our duality has made us androgynous. Without a real body, this is who we are now. But several people cannot fit in one, and in the excess we feel the need to reach beyond ourselves.

The sixth door? No, we're long past that. This is where we reach beyond time and space. Hadn't we so finely integrated our dreaming and wakeful conscious, we'd never be able to make sense of the perceptions we're experiencing, and our sanity would disintegrate. We've wandered deep into unknown territory, the kind that has thus far always left any of any psychonaut with amnesia. I'd check our neurometric, weren't it that to make sense of it I'd have to override my conscious, but we must be in the upper level 5 state by now.

The seeds have linked together into a sphere around us, slowly opening as they come closer. For a moment its surface is perfect, then it begins to fold together as it implodes. The folds flow all around the surface like waves. As they deepen they wind inwards, until we can no longer see the troughs beyond the crests.

At the center, they whirl together into a sphere around us, and below and above us whirlwinds begin to form which suck us into a vortex, stretching us until we become the vortex, turning in turns inside and outside ourselves, moving in place, in motion yet still. Within, our sensorium breaks down and tries to take on every possible sensation in a single synthesthesia, turning into a fractal of people, animals and elements all interlocking as they sing and dance in a single wavelike motion. Our entire universe has been compressed into a singularity of information, ready to be not just reborn, but, this time, created.