THAT DAY

For years I've put off illustrating my epic dream Bike Odyssey, or, Arabella's Artifact because it just looked too hard, but I finally realized its long preface--the Bike Odyssey itself--needs not cityscapes (which I'm terrible at) but portraits (where I'm just blah). And if I don't try to capture the Odyssey and the dream it provoked, no one else can go into my dream and capture it for me. It's mediocre me, or no one at all!

So, after years of dithering, I sit down to sketch.

In the evening I read Frieren, a manga starring a quiet, reserved elf mage years after the quest that made her famous. Her long lifespan keeps her aloof, slow to commit... and slower to realize she's lonely.

Watch a bizarre old British movie, Kind Hearts and Coronets. An amoral antihero kills off all the heirs in line ahead of him to a fortune. Alec Guinness plays all his victims, getting bumped off in role after role, popping up unquenchably in a game of murderous whack-a-mole...

THAT NIGHT...

I'm reading a picture book about a team of four heroes on a quest, like Frieren. It has four sections, each centered on one figure--still narrated in third person, but the focus strongly shifts. I read it, then fall asleep and dream-within-dream that...

I'm in the book. Each of the four parts is now FIRST person. I AM each of the four, in sequence. Confusing scenes!

ONE: An oak wood, open, with scattered figures sleeping by some trunks--never more than three in a clump, but it's a big wood; the numbers add up. I know it's an army come to take territory. Looks primitive, Civil War era at the latest.

TWO: a canal nearby. A woman in our invasion force says "that barge has to go"--I reluctantly concede that from her viewpoint it would, as it could be used to move troops or weapons against her side. But I know that the barge (was it the Betty or Betsy?) is owned by a friend. I volunteer to find her and get her to sail it out of the zone of contention. A bit risky, but if they stay it's certain to be scuttled.

THREE: a woman in this wood/canal war explains her historical theory to me. "The collection of images of an era is always about the same size, no matter if it's vivid or dull, important or not." She explains that they may, in old times, be paintings in a museum, or newspaper photos, or maybe just cartoons--not realistic. But the number of them, aside from quality, is curiously conserved. Limited by the era?

Her theory sounds crazy--way more cameras now! Or does she mean our images of an era are limited by our capacity, our attention? Now that seems more plausible...

FOUR: now I'm on the deck of a big ferryboat or liner. A man wants to show off some special effects and inventions--some his, some by other teams.

First, a small flying machine circles our ship. Not a plane; no wings or propellers. Looks rather like a wi-fi booster--a box with antennas.

Then a big conventional plane--lumbering, slow, four props, rather like a WW2 bomber. This plane nearly hits the little flying-machine, wheels round us, climbs high up, drops a bomb, then dives--racing the bomb toward the water, and... crashes itself! Suicide's not the invention, though.

The bomb is. It hits the water and sinks. A few heartbeats. FLASH! A terrible white glow. A mushroom cloud looms over us. Not Hiroshima-size, but the radius of destruction's a couple hundred yards. Our ship rocks and shudders, but stays afloat. That was too big for chemical weapons; had to be a tactical nuke.

And this is just a demonstration of the invention! By this enthusiastic madman and his suicidal friends...

I close the book. These four chapters, now that I look back on them, are paired. The two "I"s, in #1 & #2, were not composed of regular matter! The world was then wispy, quantum, tentative. The first me was just a Bose-Einstein condensate--a little cloud. The second me was solider, but just a yellow shapeless blob, called Witch's Butter.

The second pair of me, 3 & 4, are ordinary matter, much more solid. But they too are bright yellow...

I wake. Get up and find yellow acrylic and try to paint Me #3 and Me #4. My surface, though, is rough and busy--a cardboard box with wide ribs and corbeled panels, tall and thin--some already painted by two others. One's a girl I like. She painted an image on one side but leaving the leftmost few inches blank--10 cm at most. I paint these yellow, as a background for my "self" portraits as #3 & 4. The paint goes on strangely, beading up and darkening into lines of orange drops, like unpopped corn threaded on a beaded curtain. I don't see how or why the previous yellow beaded up and darkened, and feel like I should let it be, I'll just make a mess, but I slap another layer of fresh yellow over it, hoping this one'll stick.

I wake again. That last scene was a dream too! Dream 5, I guess.

I'm baffled. I'm a Bose-Einstein condensate? I'm Witch's Butter? I'm bright yellow?

What'll I be next? A canary dentist, a buttercup with amnesia, a lemon howling under the moon?

Better go buy more yellow paint.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Four heroes on a quest: from Frieren, the story of an elf years after the quest that made her famous; full of flashbacks.
• Woods, small groups, viewpoint-shifts:
  1. Those woods and soldiers felt like the [American] Civil War.
  2. In Frieren, a wizard school sets up exam in the woods; teams of three must fight monsters
  3. In Kind Hearts & Coronets, the estate he wants has a wood defended with gamekeepers & mantraps.
• Water, boats, Betty, Betsy:
  1. The Magician's Daughter by H.G. Parry. The Wizards' Council attacks Biddy on her home islet.
  2. Kind Hearts & Coronets. His first two murders are a couple in a boat--the girl isn't even an heir in his way; he just doesn't bother to get the true heir alone.
• B&W scene: surprised to find Kind Hearts & Coronets, a major 1949 film with big stars, isn't color. I underestimated Britain's postwar poverty.
• WW2 plane, suicidal pilots, bomb, huge explosion: on the news! Hull of a WW2 destroyer found; kamikaze plane hit, then a missile; ship blown apart. Then the Japanese strafed the helpless survivors. WORSE than my dream...
• Mad inventors:
  1. In Frieren, the wizard-wannabes, some reckless, some even cruel--but less cruel, or at least less organized cruelty, than WW2.
  2. I am something of a mad scientist. I had to be. Ill most of my life, with unhelpful to downright harmful doctors, I had to figure out my own solutions to problems. And I did. But it's left me... stoic. Even drastic.
• Cloud looms: dark dense clouds today.
  
• Bose-Einstein condensates: Scientific American had an article on laser stimulation of such clouds, but the researchers could barely write--all jargon. Mad scientists unaware we outsiders need terms defined. Popularizers can dumb it down, but they do aim for clarity.
• Witch's Butter: a real thing too. Fungi fruiting bodies and traveling slime molds are a bit like a Bose-Einstein condensates: cells individual, yet cooperate to form a unified entity... for a while. Not quite single OR plural.
• Yellow acrylic: thought I'd run low & needed to buy some, but next day when I check, find a whole tube of yellow I missed! Was the whole dream extravaganza just prompting me to check before wasting a trip? Or was it hinting I have other resources I don't see?
• Individual or a collective? Well... literal. As an autistic I do feel quite scattered, more a committee than a single creature. Not like dissociative disorder (multiple personality) with its memory-gaps, but not quite unified either. Tentative.
  Though it does seem like I slowly have been... solidifying.

I think the dream is saying more--proposing a model of our minds that allows a sixth sense but predicts it's intermittent at best. People are like cells in a Witch's Butter conglomeration, or particles in a Bose-Einstein condensate; they coordinate on a quantum level, neither quite individuals nor one big entity. It takes discipline to calm your own chatter so you can sense others--just as cooling a cloud to near-zero is needed to bring out the quantum links masked by thermal motion. Few of us manage it awake--but dreams often lull the conscious enough so entangled lo-fi signals leak in...

It's always amused me that physicists claim to see particles and even small clouds of particles entangling--communicating instantaneously, as if one--yet when large, argumentative clouds of particles, like my sister & I, do exactly the same thing, we're tarred as... well, witches. Buttered or not.

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