THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELED [S!1][ROUND THREE: PORT CERIDWEN]

THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELED [S!1][ROUND THREE: PORT CERIDWEN]
RE: THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELED [S!1][ROUND THREE: PORT CERIDWEN]
Lawnton narrowed his eyes. “An inn? Is this going to be an expensive solution, Master Abstract?”

“Not if my hunch is right.” Aaron spread his arms wide. “The inn was a grand vault of dreams. A repository, I think? It should have shown up not long ago, about the same time I did.”

“There was a small incident in the bay not too recently…” Shapiro, Councillor for Currency. “An unregistered… ship... landed in the ocean and sank.”

Carefully, the wizard began to massage his temple with two extended fingers. “Damn. I was hoping… there was a certain… expert on dreams - as far as I knew, anyway. On board there, I mean.”

“There were survivors from the sinking,” Shapiro continued, “we put them up at St. Braud’s.”

“St. Braud’s?”

The councillor nodded. “A hospice, near the shore. Many fishermen and the like lose their minds in the sea. St. Braud’s takes care of them as best they can, at least until they remember who they are.”

“Could you take me there?” When Shapiro nodded, Aaron rose from his seat.

“Wait!” Lawnton stood, his bulging eyes even further narrowed in suspicion. “You’ve brought us no real progress! Why should we spend more from our coffers to keep your little shop open?”

“Well,” Aaron began, with no idea what he was going to say next. “You’re all in terrible danger. Not to mention you’ve got no precautions against this threat, and no way to deal with it when it emerges. Tell me, Councillor Lawnton, how much do you value your safety?”

He held up a hand, not waiting for an answer. “I know what your life is worth, and all the lives in this city. I have a hunch here, and I don’t know how much value I should give that,” he paused, “but I know much you should give it: a lot.”

It felt good. Brilliant. He felt alive - no, awake - for the first time in what seemed like forever. The words flowed like silver, as he wove together strands of deceit and belief into a beautiful, shared dream. He was flying from the seat of his pants, as it were, and payday was just around the corner.

“Shapiro?”


“Yes, m’sir.”

---

Mister Sandman, bring me a dream…

A half-formed figure of aphroditean beauty began to form out the mists, its corners and curves undefined and infinite, trending deep blue into the sky, as peaches and cream came bubbling from in between the golden cobblestones. White trails rose into the air and formed snow-white flesh from nothing, peach-pink suffusing the the interior, a heart beating, bearing the hydraulic load of a hundred thousand capillaries...

Aaron carved through the delusion like a knife cutting cloud, in two easy slashes of his outstretched palm. Dream-stuff came away in his hand, collecting like sand in between his closed fingers, outlining his life-lines.


Behind him, Shapiro shook his head, as if dislodging an errant fly. “M’sir… how in the world did you do that?”

“Dreams are only another lens through which to see the world.” The wizard cupped his hands together, raised them to his lips, and blew. “Strictly speaking, I didn’t do anything in the world. I just reached past the veil and brought us out from the-”

You gave me your word. Louder, this time. The intrusion on the psyche struck like a battering ram. You gave me. Your word. Your. Word.

“Your word…” Slowly, Shapiro uncurled himself from the cobblestones. “It’s getting worse. The nightmares are coming loose.”

Aaron sucked at his lip where he’d bitten it. “If my hunch is correct, a stray nightmare or two may be the least of our problems.”

“What do you think it is?”

There was a brief hesitation on Aaron’s part. Despite himself, he liked the Councillor for Currency: stoic, no-nonsense, more flexible than the fossilized, moss-encrusted old fogies around the Citadel table. But he had no idea who he could trust, or how much his trust was worth.

“I think it’s something bigger,” he began, the words tumbling slowly in his head, losing their dangerous corners and fitting together: creating a helpful truth, devoid of nearly any fact - “I think it’s something squatting on top of your Cistern, full of resentment and malice, taking on the worst parts of any nightmare it can find.”

Briefly, they were climbing an infinite ladder, which folded in on itself. Aaron leapt off the nearest rung and tore a hole in the sky, helping Shapiro back through to wakefulness.

“These fragments that we’re passing through - they’re just what’s left after all, or nearly all, the nightmare has been stripped away. They’re empty husks of half-dreamed desires, cast out while the… thing… gathers together all the worst parts it c-” He stopped, suddenly, staring down the road.


“M’sir?” Shapiro looked down the oncoming path, and started. There was a figure, which looked if it ought to be hunched, in a tattered jacket that looked as it it ought to be wet, and glistening in multiple varied colors. But the jacket was dry, and not tattered, and the figure was standing up straight in the mists. “Hello? Who’s there? Are you a dream?”

“Would I tell you if I were?”

“Is it…? Tschic!” Aaron started by exclaiming happily then began to tail off uncertainly, wondering if at any point he’d managed to fuck the art critic-shade-painter-interior decorator-pirate in the many assholes of misfortune people around him tended to end up once he was done using them, but rose back up immediately after he decided that he’d done no such thing and would fob it off as lies if it turned out he had had done such things, ending in a happy, “Is it really you?!” with only the barest quiver of the voice to indicate the complex mental process he’d just gone through. Not his best work.

That is to say, not his best work, considering he’d just realized that the worst part, the very, very, very, absolutely worst part of a dream was... waking up.


---

What is being awake, really? Let’s analyze that. The layman’s definition is that being awake is the opposite of being asleep, and vice versa. But that becomes a heterological loop - being asleep defines being awake, and being awake defines being asleep. Circular logic means no truth can be determined.

Alternatively, one can define being awake in literal terms of consciousness - that when you are awake, you are conscious, and a ‘you’ exists inside you, observing everything you do. But who then exists inside the tiny ‘you’? This turns into an infinite regression, retreating unto infinity, meaning that no truth can be determined.

Finally, you can simply declare, by fiat, the state of being awake the portion of time when your eyes are open and you walk around in the world. But this is no better than our previous attempts. Truth can be determined, but we have no clue if it is the truth, making our axiom epistemologically invalid. No truth can be determined, not really.

This is leading us to the Münchhausen trilemma - circularity, infinite regression, and axiomatic thought - which indicates that another approach must be taken if we are to understand what is true.

What should be grasped here that in the dream, simple meanings are valued over the logical.
You are awake. You are a wake. From the context of the dream, you are a continually existing, living celebration in remembrance of your life. Conversely, in the context of reality, you are a sleep - a singular nothing, disconnected and hidden.

In our hypothetical city on the border, these meanings twist, turn and cross between each other, each one making the other true.

So what is being awake?

Yes.

-- Eugenne Braud, Director of the Ceridwen Project
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Messages In This Thread
RE: THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN CANCELED [S!1][ROUND THREE: PORT CERIDWEN] - by AgentBlue - 09-17-2016, 07:19 AM
Re: AIRING SOON..... - by GBCE - 11-24-2011, 03:06 AM