I'm reading Kitty Ferguson's Quest for a Theory of Everything, a biography of Stephen Hawking. He says his life actually improved when his illness got serious: he was given two years to live (30 years ago), so he dropped the typical Oxbridge attitude about work (easy-going to cynical, assuming one has decades), and decided to accomplish anything before he died, he had to focus. Increasing physical weakness meant strengthening his will, and the illness forced him to streamline his life into freedom from responsibilities almost all other adults have to fulfill. Even the descent from full speech to mumbles to muteness led to getting a voice synthesizer, leading to the chance to lecture again, to organize his thoughts in a new way.

Such personal insights are what the vast majority of readers probably relate to most easily, not his cosmology, which he expects us to find counter-intuitive, near-incomprehensible. So he doesn't spend too much time trying.

But for me, a shamanic dreamer, his cosmology is more than comprehensible--it's personal. As Hawking describes his view of the fine structure of spacetime, all knotted and pitted and wormholed, I'm struck how familiar it sounds. In my shamanic dreams, and increasingly in the waking world, the spacetime I live in feels just as he describes.

It's like an osmotic filter, a semi-permeable membrane. All sort of phenomena science rejected for decades--ghosts, dreamworlds, precognition and far memory, clairvoyance--all become explainable as a tuning in or a constellation of thin/faint patterns of wavicles (or other information carriers) barely detectable underneath the roar of this continuum's nearby input, like those distant radio stations you can pick up only late at night... Patterns from past or future folds, or from other continua entirely, leak through capillary wormholes.

Universe as sieve!

It's not exotic at all--his theory describes my nightly experience.

THREE WEEKS LATER

I dream I'm in a desert full of arches and cracks and loops and holes. Fun to hide and pounce in. I like it because you're never trapped: there's always a hole to duck into and leap out elsewhere.

We look human, but aren't exactly; we all can shift quickly into other forms if need be.

I fly out over the desert. I don't mean I fly a plane: I just grow wings.

Hawkwings.

I spot several women I know, who all have similar animal forms, catlike, very furry. But when they go to a nearby spacetime, where the locals all look rigidly human, and they live in towns and use lots of machines and stuff... over there, our animal forms change. The cat women come out like humans wearing tailed jumpsuits with cat masks. After their lithe, living bodies and faces back home, so sleek and expressive, clothing and masks seem bland and stiff to me. But that's the local consensus: the machine people just can't accept shapeshifting, so that's all the felinity their spacetime will accept.

Based on a print by Sarah Kahn, seen in Open Studio, San Francisco--lost the card so title & year unknown.

Not that our desert doesn't have its limitations too. We especially wonder about some paper-white ghostly humanoid forms that sometimes appear, then fade. Several different entities, by the looks of them: faces like women we used to know. But they don't seem to act like people, not even like ghosts, who mostly repeat their own obsessions like tape-loops, oblivious to us. These white forms seem more like humanoid masks for something even less aware than a ghost. Stiff as duck decoys? What are they--lures?

They worry me.

I find myself talking over the problem with a psychologist, in the hall of my parents' house, leaning up against the washing machine and dryer. Hmm... something about the white enameled metal of the machines reminds me of the white blankness of the "ghosts."

I find myself saying: "I remember entities like these white things in a story by James Tiptree. Humans, it turned out, were just gametes, and when they met beings of another world, they fused into these big whitish energy-beings, vaguely like ghosts, and apparently not intelligent. All our strivings, all our dreams, were just the tail of the spermatozoon driving us toward this mindless fertilization. Intelligence was just part of the mobile reproductive apparatus of some vast organism that might be no more spiritual than a cabbage!"

Could similar unawarenesses be intruding on our lovely quantum desert?

NEXT MORNING

• Topologically tangled desert = our spacetime's microtexture, all jags and wormholes! Portals are real--we just learn early to tune them out.
• Shapeshifters = wavicles! What we call "particles" really are slippery little weasels...
• View the desert on hawkwings = a Hawking's-eye-view of spacetime. My dream, inspired by Hawking's name, explores the idea that dreams aren't all just simulations in our heads; they (sometimes) present data coming through tiny wormholes, tuning into other real worlds (possibly alternate time-sheaves).
• Women who become smallish furry animals = an echo of my recent dream Rani, in which I wondered if I were meeting mere parts of me or independent beings--tuning in to distant stations. They seemed to find humans quite odd...
• The rigid world = the modern American consensus. Even true shapeshifters can seem fakes to an observer, because third-party expectations can interfere with the observer's construction of the world!
• The white ghosts = my dreamwriting, my journal? The dream hints they're not ghosts of the dead but just empty forms. Creepy forms. Habits?
• Therapy in my parents' home = uh-oh! Regressing back to childhood beliefs? Yet I do seem to tackle the problem of the white ghosts.
• Ghosts resemble washing machine = do I have dirty laundry? Am I whitewashing issues? Do I need to come cleeeeean? Hmmm. They may be secrets, censorship & conformity, or confessions of guilt! Pretty broad range, from secrecy to its opposite.

So I think Hawking's theory is right. For despite all the ghosts, my moment-to-moment life is a quantum life. And happy.

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