Mortar dream

You must understand, sir, the difficulties I face in preparing this document. To state what is unusual is easy enough; it is, in fact, a trait common to your people and mine, to take note of events which take us by surprise. But to describe the very hegemony that rules every day of our lives is far harder; not to fall into the trap, of assuming that what is obvious to us must also be just as clear to you, is the danger that I must brave again and again as I compile the record that you may now, I hope, be reading. With this in mind I crave that you excuse my impudence in beginning with so bold a statement as that with which I must now furnish my narrative: I do so in order to shatter and disperse your preconceptions and my complacencies in equal measure.

We—that is to say my people—live in rooms built from the silted-down cast-offs of the dreams dreamt by you and your kind. My compatriots and I—yet we have no true country, no father- or motherland—inhabit some ten billion interconnected caverns, each of which is perpetually constructed and reconstructed by the remains of what you once imagined.

Such a brazen statement—at first glance incomprehensible (to you)—no doubt needs further explanation. Accept for now, however, that your dreams, once enlivened, do not die when you wake; rather, each continues a separate existence separate from both the dreamer and his or her recollections. For each of your world's souls (if you will forgive my rather fanciful terminology) there is a room in ours, and an occupant; this room is furnished with those corresponding dreams, and its occupant nourished and entertained with them, and together both lodgings and lodger provide the final resting-place for whatever the dreams become.

The process by which this protean stuff leaks out of your world and condenses in ours is obscure, and our scientists and philosophers (such as we have, for our accretive universe is conducive neither to science nor philosophy) have yet to agree on even a theory, let alone the precise details. Our world is barely understood as an allegory of yours, or as a more surreal mirror, that colours your events with whimsical, ornate details; rather, its very nature utterly reinterprets the slumbering imaginations of yours, transforming it into substances and objects that the dreamer could never predict—

Forgive me! Such convoluted and queer imaginings must make little sense to you. Permit me to illuminate instead with an example. I must begin by explaining that our term for an individual inhabitant of your world is "factor", a name which acknowledges the role they play in ours. Let us consider such a factor dreaming of being chased in a condemned mansion. Their pursuer wishes to do them harm, and as they run or, more frighteningly, pace behind the factor's dream-self, they wield a polished, heavy knife with sinister intent. They turn down one gloomy, slippery claustrophobic corridor after another, their legs feeling more leaden every minute. Fear clumps together into an almost tangible, sweaty clod in the pit of their stomach. Suddenly, as the hand of their enemy is on their shoulder, they wake with a start and, some moments later, they have almost entirely forgotten the sensation of being chased, that awful anticipation, the glint of their enemy's weapon.

In the mean time their counterpart, in our world, has become aware of the dream. They never perceive it directly, but rather catch peripheral glimpses, as though of a sound heard through tinnitus or of a flash seen out of the corner of an eye. Thus forewarned, they sit and wait. Before their eyes, their accommodation is presently augmented with (for example) new castors on their writing-desk; a black, drooping pelmet flutters over the top of their curtains; and the light beside their bed burns fiercely bright. Such are the fates of the respective components of the dream: the pursuit; the fear; the flashing blade.

Can you imagine an existence in our mutable, unpredictable world? Where dreams settle, condense and ultimately become concrete, only to be ground back down into dust by layers of more and more dreams? A world where one day the fabric of one's reality might flutter, billow and then suddenly change like the sheets on a bed? In such a world, society as such is impossible; politicking, punishments and governance are worthless concepts when one is largely, if erratically, provided for, and when our populace is neither fixed nor controllable by our own actions, concerted or individual. Our only firm grasp on an utterly changeable universe consists of a concerted attempt to infer the more predictable structure of yours.

To this end, a number of us have begun cataloguing the experiences that leak through into each of us of the dreams that ultimately form his personal space, at the same time as you yourself perceive them. They—or perhaps I should say we, for I must count myself among these obsessives —also attempt to compile descriptions of as many literary and cultural artefacts as our rooms are furnished with, so that we might discern common patterns that hint at their origin. Though we are confounded and bamboozled by our own physicality—our history books turn into housebricks, or our inkwells sprout spidery legs and wander off—we have nonetheless made some recent advances in our studies, and now fully comprehend such diverse aspects of your reality as shipbuilding since your recent "Industrial Refutation", many aspects of the current racial tensions in your New World countries, and how to effect the baking of porcelainware.

Yet even with the combined efforts of all our "historians," much about your world remains unclear. We do not know precisely how the people there procreate, although there is a widely-held belief that one half of your population has the ability to whisper gently and amiably into the cupped ears of the other, and thus in some way initiate gestation.

Unlike in the world that has fashioned ours, the inhabitants of ours never gestate: they are not born, and they do not die. Rather, each is first discovered—by himself, by others—wandering somewhat confused in the locality of his room. Indeed, it is by finding the occupant that we usually find the room itself, its newly-minted door normally indistinguishable from the walls of our catacombs. We shepherd the fellow to his lodgings, where he makes his home, subject to the whims of furnishing and sustenance of the connection to your world.

Eventually, his factor's mortality runs its brief course, and it becomes clear to our comrade —whether by the changing substance of his dream-accretions, or simply by a sort of instinct—that the dreamer has died; yet the process of construction continues after death, although at a vastly reduced rate. Death does not stop the dreamer from dreaming, though most of your acquaintance would no doubt presume otherwise!

For as long afterwards as anyone has cared to record (and the eldest among us, whilst these days being a good deal more addled than even the most confused of foundlings, still try to retain the most basic inventory of their surroundings) dream-experiences continue to trickle through into our realm, as rainwater and soil might collect in the dreamer's hollowed-out head. At the same time such structures, colonnades, gardens, chairs, writing-desks, kitchens, pots, pans, samovars and all the rest, as have already been put in the room: these remain for ever, and their construction begins to ossify and set in a way which is hard to describe but plain to apprehend.

So what remains to be done after the factor's apparent death is the addition and correction of small details. One of us might arrive in their otherwise completed room one day, only to receive from their dead counterpart a brief notion of tree branches waving in a fresh, spring breeze. If they were to then make an inventory of their room, they might spot bright, bejewelled eyes on the carving that has adorned their walking-stick for decades. Or, with a shiver that penetrates to his marrow, they might find themselves unable to shrug off an amorphous feeling of limitless and perpetual darkness; when, unbidden, this experience eventually fades, there might be another grape on a vine, a few more buttons on a pearled jacket, or a faint, ungraspable tinkling of bells when one turns one's head. After the apparent death of the factor, these ornamentations appear less frequently in the room as decay follows its natural course; yet they never seem to fully cease, and one will always eventually be surprised by some unostentatious novelty, placed almost lovingly in the room like flowers by a headstone.

Our world seems to exist entirely as a concreted effect of your world's intangible causes: we sit in chairs, and breathe in perfumes, and eat breads and meats, that once had fantastical and entirely other existence in your heads. It is not known whether there might be some hope of communication in the other direction: from us to you. Yet much as your hopes and desires have taken on physical if incomprehensible aspect in my world, so have my hopes of such a connection been placed in this brief document. I crave that, with the perspective granted you by both your dreaming and waking worlds, you might appreciate ours more than any of us are truly able.

Though in some ways our world appears melancholy and without direction, yet the unintentional gratitude of you and the billions of other factors permits us to study and learn. Our only tragedy is that we ourselves can never dream—to where would our dreams fly when we wake?—but we have much to console ourselves nonetheless. We spend our time fashioning miniature and baroque word-games, logic puzzles and other intellectual trivialities, which though today mean nothing and tomorrow might mean even less, are nonetheless inspired by, and built upon, what you offer us. I personally have read what I believe are many classics in your literature—cheered on Raskolnikov as he denounced the prosecutors, wept for joy at the reconciliation of Kurtz with his ageing parents and his first love—all of which have been provided, if unintentionally, by your grace.

With this in mind I offer you, my factor, some small recompense. When I have finished this brief description of all that we know and feel, I shall place it in the centre of my own room. Let it be my humble gift to you, the great architect of my beautiful accommodation; though (and this alone I know to be true, for my heart tells me so) you lie deep interred, still your sleep of earth and your dreams of soil conjure my walls, my chairs, and even the scents on the air which I breathe. Let some essential spark of you comprehend our existences and the debt of mere being which we owe you. Let all this reach you as you moulder in your grave (as we shall never do): not dead, merely dreaming.