It had a name. Everything does, after all.
But nobody who worked there used it. It was just some meaningless string of important but vague sounding buzzwords like “experimental” and “multi-phasic” and “dimensional” that the people who worked their heard once during their orientation then promptly forgot all about as they got on with their jobs.
Most of the time, they just called it The Facility.
It was as good a name as any. And nobody wanted to take on the daunting task of trying to encapsulate exactly what they did there in a more fitting title anyhow.
What they did there was The Dreamer.
That was the name given to the bizarre creature – basically a sentient energy field – that lay at the heart of the Facility physically and the heart of everything that went on there on a slightly more metaphorical level.
It had first been discovered Way back in 1956 by a trio of scientists experimenting with novel types of energy fields in order to test the limits of their equipment.
At first it was just some anomalous readings on the extreme end of their instruments. But they were young and playful and energetic so they decided to recalibrate their devices and explore further.
From that point on, their world changed radically on a almost daily basis.
First, by taking detailed measurements of the field densities of the phenomenon, they were able to make the startling deduction that the phenomenon was absolutely massive in size, occupying a roughly spherical section of dense granite at least twenty kilometers in radius deep under Mount Husband in Oregon.
The next revelation came after the first primitive Facility was constructed at the foot of the mountain. Located in a series of aluminum Quonset huts, the living was rugged but the results made everyone involved forget all about their rough living situation.
For one thing, this energy field was clearly alive.
There was no other explanation for how structured and orderly its functions appeared to be. Various forms of energy (mostly EM) flowed around within the bounds of the phenomenon in a way highly analogous to the circulation of fluids in a living creature, and these pulses were far too densely organized to be anything other than information.
So not only was it alive, it had thoughts, or something like them.
The next great revelation should not have come as a surprise to the team of youthful and enthusiastic young scientists, but it did.
Chalk it up to the wide-eyed heedless enthusiasm of the young.
The revelation was that these shifting electromagnetic fields had a profound and at times disastrous effect on the human mind.
At first, it manifested as dreams which rapidly grew in vividness and intensity to the point where they started seeming more real than waking life.
Then the waking hallucinations began, individual and transient at first, but soon becoming brutally strong group visions that caused full, psychotic breaks from reality that could last as long as six hours.
The fact that almost all of them survived this period with their sanity intact was all due to a skeleton crew of engineers who figured out how to shield the scientists from the effects of the phenomenon during their rare islands of lucidity.
This was the impetus for the new, official (but very top secret) Facility, with its state of the art redundant layers of shielding and almost as many layers of security.
After the crisis had passed, more psychologists and parapsychologists were brought on in order to collect as many first hand accounts of these hallucinatory journeys as possible in order to see if there were any patterns to their “trips”.
One soon emerged : all subjects described their experiences as “dreams”. “But, ” they would then add, “not my own dreams”.
The dreams were too alien and alienating to be anything even remotely human, or at least something the human mind could apprehend.
That left only one possibilities : these “dreams” came from the phenomenon itself.
Hence it being dubbed The Dreamer, a name which lasted through the intervening decades, even after the original “dreamers” were long gone.
Thus ends part one of this chronicle. Part two will come when I have the energy.
More after the break.
Not so good
Feeling pretty shitty right now. Hoping some hydration will help.
I waoke up from an evening nap when my alarm went off on my tablet at 8:02 pm. And I knew I didn’t feel good but I thought it was just the usual waking up blahs.
Then I ended up sitting on the edge of my bed for what felt like a long time. Pretty sure it was at least twenty minutes, maybe more.
And like I have described in this space before, this is not unheard of for me. I go through periods where I end up stranded on the shore of my reality like that on a fairly regular basis. Nothing specifically wrong but for some reason I can’t motivate myself to get up so I just sit there, in neutral, for a while.
That’s why I didn’t know I was ill until I finally started to get up and felt this enormous heaviness resisting my every move.
Aw shit. That’s not good.
I managed to go get my food and come back, but now I have no appetite. I am hoping the hydration will help with that too because I can’t go skipping meals without a damned good reason, like say, being deathly ill.
And I am maimingly ill at best.
At least I have nowhere to go till Wound Care on Friday. That gives me one and a half days (at present) to get over whatever this is, or end up having to once more cancel a trip to Wound Care due to being too sick to go.
It makes sense to do so but always feels slightly ironic. Too sick to do the health thing.
Well my appetite seems to be waking up, thank Dog. Gonna be weird to blog THEN eat, but what the hell, I will just watch some YouTube.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.