Accidental Dreamer
Copyright 1991 All rights reserved
by John-gordon Jenkins
The Formula
I manipulate letters for a living, move them around on paper so logical sequences called program statements can be run through a computer to achieve important things, like the right location for a total on the university hospital bill and the correct niche to lock a payment into. Now an administrator can say, ahhh, we are solvent, we can continue to feed and clothe our family, we can indeed spend two weeks in Florida this year. And I get to say the same things because someone was ill and now they believe they are better, or believe they are worse. Still they must pay. This is the real world after all... the world that is solid and immutable, isn't it?
I remember the maze that afflicted my heated brain that night and not so strangely it was the night after Martin Asgard asked me to do a favor for him.
We sat in the BioChem Snack Shop sipping on a warm murkiness that pretended to be coffee.
"You can do better than lock yourself in an ivory tower. Carol's a sweet, beautiful woman, but she doesn't want you to waste away because it didn't work out between you." Martin had warm, comforting eyes set in a long equine face. We met at a faculty-staff gathering over seven years before and some quirk of chemistry clicked into friendship.
I shrugged and sipped the strange black stew. "Five months out of a marriage with someone I love intensely hardly seems like a second to me Martin. We can still make it work, if she would give it a chance."
He looked away, not the distant look of contemplation on formulas and chemical bonds, it was the look of hurt for a friend. And he couldn't do much for me except be here and listen and try to distract me from my hurt. We both knew that Carol was nearing marriage with someone that fit her perfectly, or appeared to. Who knew how long anything would last anymore.
"Martin. I know it's no one’s fault. It's just the way it is. But I hurt now and it will just have to wear off in its own time."
He looked back and smiled at me, the broad, famous Asgard smile. "Ed, I have a favor to ask of you."
That was the beginning. That momentary lapse in security on Martin's part led me on journeys of immense danger and fathoms of deep perception. It catapulted me into the torn web of existence where I scrambled from thread to thread barely escaping confusion and insanity.
He put on his glasses. Now those warm eyes were large and liquid brown. They looked down at a paper he pulled from the top pocket of his lab coat. He set it on the table which moved a little bit. The table had an unbalanced leg. I put my foot on one of the metal claws to hold it firm while Martin wrote. He copied from his paper to three napkins, then handed them to me.
"There. This is a problem for you Ed. You may find it interesting. And it will help me if you would keep this ...in your head." He tapped lightly on the side of his cranium with its thinning patches of hair, barely combed into civilization.
I turned the napkins around. It all looked like a combination of Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyph. I laughed. It was just a chuckle but it was the first laugh I had since Carol left and it felt very good.
"Does this contain the meaning of life?" I chuckled again. We used to joke a lot about the meaning of life. If you can't joke about life then no jokes have any purpose at all.
"Serious now." His school-teacher pose settled lightly over him, like a veil. His back drew a little straighter and his voice became gentler and firmer. "I really have to have another location for this formula. It's not complete yet but a group of us have been working on it for months. This has an addition to it that no one else has. I came up with it last night and since you're not involved I can trust you to keep this quiet. You don't know what it means anyway. We are concerned about security and I'd like to have you memorize it for me. You have a memory like an accountants ledger."
He was serious. I nodded and folded the napkins away, looking forward to thinking about Carol again. Somehow the laugh had broken through the ice around me and it was harder to hurt, much more difficult to fix myself on loss. I actually felt cheated for a brief second, cheated of my pain.
The rest of the day was programming work and juggling the camaraderie of people in the Medical complex. They were friendly, unique and some of them genuinely concerned about me. I could feel it and felt myself grudgingly responding. Perhaps there was life after love.
At night I settled in my special room. The house was a tri-level and the lower level was a den that I fixed up with my computer, books and the most comfortable adjustable recliner I could find. With the door closed it was a sound proof chamber.
I logged on the mainframe at the University and, in graphics mode, stored Martin's odd chain of symbols in my private box. They must have all meant something because the computer and a manual on symbols helped me to recreate the formula exactly. Even my home version of the mainframe program could handle the oddest of those squiggles. Now, if I forgot the jumble, it was secure forever.
"When a web is broken it can never be rebuilt. Instead you abandon the old and build anew. With the new web, you wonder if it will break. What caused the old one to break, what tore that painstaking symmetry that experience and the history of lifetimes of web building created? So you build the next web more carefully, sure that this one will hold together. Yet it doesn't. The next web you decide you know what the weak place was. You will build this one different, uniquely strong. Again the jester of life tears the web and rebuild you must. Each time you build, more certain you know the fault, and each time it fails.
"Finally you discover that your estimate of the weakest link was wrong and the next web is a terrible shamble because it is built in complete uncertainty. Every connection in it is tentative, unsure of itself.
"Now the last web, the fragile identity shaped from pain and fear, is in shreds. In despair, you give up all the spinning ... and the dreamer awakens.
"With the dreamer the webs are spun in instants of golden steel. Now reality is the servant, the unknowing worker in the Dreamer's domain. And you become the master of your universe."
I read my handwriting, wondering what I meant when I wrote it. I was lying in bed after a good half hour memorizing Martin's formula and this was my last read for the night. The passage came out of my grief at breaking with Carol. I had written it a few days after she moved out and its' meaning for me still lay hidden.
"If there is a God, a final Top God of gods, awaken the dreamer, please. Dreamer awake." That was my prayer to the sky somewhere above my house, somewhere above a Dayton, Ohio suburb, above the United States of America, far beyond the planet Earth and its atomic structure of a solar system, reaching out past the stars of the universe that man pretends to know because he can count dots of light on sheets of film.
I felt that prayer touch someone, somewhere. There's no way to describe the feeling unless you know it for yourself. There's a click and you know the prayer, plea, begging has been registered on some monumental scroll, perhaps beyond the bounds of time. That second was the beginning of a life of adventure that I would only relinquish in those moments when I was in terror for my very existence.
The way to memorize the formula was graphically, a little different than my usual feats of number to image routines. I had to see it on the screen of my mind. What does that mean, screen of the mind? Is it some place in the brain where there is a blackboard or movie screen? Is it that secret projection room of the soul? Even after the discoveries of the next month, I still don't know. I understand the process better now. If I were doing the same securing of an image today I would start with my inner perception of the mysterious universe of the dreamer. I'll give you an exa
mple that I've used since learning that reality is not something that someone else defines for me, it is what I create for myself. This is where I go now when I am waiting for an assignment or just studying the world of dreams.
There beside the stream is my home. The air is clear yet filled with movement, the movement of feelings, ideas, and beings that travel the byways of life. In appearance this house is much like the one I live in on Earth. I am outside, in the back, in the yard, lying in a hammock. I hear a chime from the front of the house, deftly swing out of the hammock to a standing position and head for the mailbox. Hmmm, a letter from Earth.
Martin's familiar scrawl crawls across the envelope with small flourishes at the ends of words. Inside, the top sheet is a piece of notepaper with his favorite logo - I'd rather be a mutant. And under that in a