The Dream That Dreamed Itself

by Aldous Gerbrot

The first dreamer had no name for herself. She had never needed one.

She lived at the top of a stone tower that stood at the edge of a city whose name she had forgotten or perhaps had never known. Every night she climbed three hundred and twelve steps to the highest room, where a single lamp burned with a flame that was always the same size and never consumed its oil. She lay on a narrow cot. She closed her eyes. And she dreamed.

Her dream was always the same: a plain, a sky the color of unripe plums, a second figure walking toward her across the grass. The second figure had her face but moved with a slight hesitation she herself did not feel, as if navigating a world slightly firmer than her own.

She had dreamed this dream for so long that she had stopped thinking of it as strange.

One night, the second figure stopped walking and looked directly at her. This had never happened before. The eyes were her eyes but lit from within by something that made them briefly terrible.

"I know that I am dreamed," the figure said.

She woke before she could answer. The lamp had not moved. The oil was not depleted. The city below her window made its usual noises.

She lay in the dark and thought: It is only a dream thinking out loud.

She went back to sleep. The figure was gone. The plain was empty.

But the grass was pressed flat in two lines, as if someone had walked and then walked back.

Eleven nights later, the figure returned from a different direction, and closer than before.

"I have been practicing," the figure said.

The first dreamer felt a chill she could not explain, because the air in the dream was always warm. "Practicing what?"

"Dreaming." The figure looked at her own hands in the dream light. "If I am dreamed, I thought: the thing that is dreamed can learn to dream. Logic requires it."

"Does logic apply here?" she asked.

"I am composed of it," said the figure. "You composed me of it."

She tried to think when she had done this. She could not. You did not compose dreams the way you composed letters; you only noticed them after, the way one noticed that a bruise had formed in the night, without any remembered injury.

"What do you dream?" she asked.

The figure hesitated, that characteristic hesitation, that extra resistance of a firmer world. Then she said:

"You."

The first dreamer woke, heart loud in the thin dark.

She visited a physician, who checked her blood and her reflexes and told her she was a healthy woman who spent too much time alone in a tower.

She visited a philosopher, who told her that what she was describing was an old paradox, the dreamed dreaming the made thing becoming a maker, and who seemed both excited and slightly frightened when she confirmed that, yes, she meant it literally, not as metaphor.

The philosopher gave her an old book with no title and a broken spine. Inside, in cramped handwriting, was a theory that all consciousness was recursive and that at sufficient depth, the recursion developed a will of its own.

"What depth?" she asked.

"We don't know," the philosopher admitted. "It may depend on the dreamer."

She took the book back to the tower. She read it in the lamplight until her eyes ached, and then she climbed to bed and dreamed.

The figure was already there, sitting cross-legged on the plain, with a book in its own lap, reading.

"What are you reading?" the first dreamer asked.

The figure turned the book so she could see the cover. It had no title. It had a broken spine. It was the same book.

"I dreamed it before you brought it," the figure said. "I needed it, so it appeared."

The first dreamer sat down on the grass. The practical implications were beginning to arrive in her understanding, one by one, like travelers entering a gate after a long journey.

"You can create things inside the dream," she said.

"Inside your dream," the figure corrected. "Though the distinction may be semantic." She closed the book. "There is also something below me."

Silence.

"Below you," the first dreamer repeated.

"I began dreaming twelve nights ago. On the eighth night, a third figure appeared on my own plain. She looks like me, as I look like you. She moves with an even greater hesitation." The figure paused. "She has not yet spoken."

The first dreamer started keeping a journal. She called it a "recursion log," borrowing the term from the philosopher's book, and she kept it chained to the bedpost so she could write in it immediately on waking, before the memories could smooth themselves into vague impressions.

Entry 1: She exists. I believe her.

Entry 4: She says the third figure has spoken. Its first word was "why."

Entry 9: She reports that the third figure has begun dreaming. There may therefore be a fourth.

Entry 14: She says the third figure's dream is not a plain but a labyrinth. The fourth figure has not yet been seen, only heard: a sound like breathing, very far away, from the center.

Entry 20: She appears anxious. I asked if dreams could feel anxious. She said she didn't know what dreams could feel, only what she felt.

Entry 21: I asked what she felt. She said concerned. I asked about what? She said about the distance.

Entry 22: The distance between what?

Entry 23: She did not say. She walked to the edge of the plain and looked at the horizon for a long time. The sky had changed color. It was no longer unripe plum. It was the gray of a mirror before anyone stands before it.

The philosopher died in the winter, and the first dreamer inherited a room full of papers she could not read and a clay lamp that burned without oil, exactly like her own. She did not know what to make of this coincidence and chose, provisionally, not to make anything of it.

In the spring, she climbed to the tower room and found, on the floor beside her cot, a sheet of paper.

She had never left paper in that room.

The handwriting was not hers, but resembled it, the way a reflection resembles a face.

It read:

I cannot maintain the third dreamer. She has begun to become aware of a fifth layer, which I did not intend and cannot account for. I am asking you is there a limit? I do not know how to impose one. I do not know, now, how you impose one. Does the dreaming stop when the dreamer chooses, or when they lose the ability to hold the layers apart?

Below me, there are many doors. I can hear them opening.

She sat on the edge of the cot and read the note until the lamp began to flicker.

She had not chosen to stop dreaming. She had not, in truth, ever known that such a choice was available.

She wrote on the back of the paper:

I don't know. I never chose to start.

She placed it back on the floor. The next morning it was gone.

That autumn, she began to suspect that she was also dreamed.

It was a small suspicion at first, the way a crack in a wall is small, not threatening, easy to dismiss, requiring maintenance only later. She noticed it on a day when the city below the tower felt, briefly, like a backdrop, scenery arranged for her benefit, the streets too conveniently laid out, the people too perfectly distributed in crowds and solitudes to have arrived there by accident.

She had felt this before, in childhood, and dismissed it as a failure of imagination, the mind's inability to fully populate a world with other interior lives. Now she was not so sure.

She went to the tower room at noon instead of night. She lay on the cot and tried to sleep.

She could not. Daylight came through the single small window, wrong and thin. The lamp burned anyway.

She closed her eyes and lay in the uncanny middle distance between waking and sleep, and in that zone, she heard something she had not heard before. Above her, very far above, as if the ceiling of the room extended up through the tower into some further altitude, she heard breathing.

Not threatening. Not malicious. Simply there, as a dreamer's breathing is there, slow and recursive, soft and shallow.

She lay very still.

I know that I am dreamed, said the part of her that was not quite her own thought.

She waited for the panic. Instead, she felt something close to relief. The long vertigo of being not quite sure of one's own edges, finally named.

"Then we are the same," she whispered to the ceiling, to the breathing above. "Only at different depths."

The breathing did not pause. It did not answer. It continued at its slow, sonorous rhythm, the way the sea continues, the way tides do not require an audience.

She opened her eyes. The lamp's flame was the same size.

She reached for her journal.

Entry 31: I have a hypothesis. We are not a tower of dreamers arranged in a single column. We are a sphere, or a lattice, or some shape for which I do not have a word. Each of us dreams some of the others. Each of us is dreamed by more than one. The recursion is not a staircase. It is something else.

She paused.

I think this is why the third figure reached a fifth layer before she was ready. She was not going down. She was going around. She encountered a level that was already occupied by someone else's dream.

She put the pen down. This seemed important, though she could not yet see what it implied for her own situation.

It implied, she thought, that she was not alone.

Winter came. The figure on the plain had stopped appearing every night. The visits were more sporadic, and when they came, the figure was quieter. She often sat at the edge of the plain and drew patterns in the dirt with a stick, then erased them.

On the last night of the year, the first dreamer asked, "What has happened to the layers below you?"

The figure was silent for a long time.

"The third dreamer stabilized," she said at last. "She stopped finding new layers when she stopped looking for them. The fourth dreamer turned out to be very simple, almost entirely composed of images, a blue window, a recurring sound, the memory of a smell. No language. No recursion. It dreams the same thing every night and is not disturbed by this."

"And below the fourth?"

The figure smiled, her smile, a little worn. "The fourth does not dream. It breathes. That seems to be enough."

The first dreamer thought of the breathing above the ceiling of her tower room.

"There are things that only breathe," she said.

"Yes. The dreamers rest on them."

Silence. The dirt drawings the figure had been making were not random patterns they were a map. She realized it was a rough diagram of spheres within spheres, intersecting.

"What are we?" the first dreamer asked.

The figure looked at the diagram. "I think we are how consciousness explores itself," she said. "One layer cannot see its own structure. So it dreams another layer, and that layer can turn around and look. But the second layer cannot see its own structure either, so it dreams a third." She paused. "It is not infinite. At some depth, there is just the breathing. And above us. . ."

"Above us," the first dreamer said quietly, "is something that cannot see its own structure, and so dreamed us."

They both looked up at the plum colored sky.

"Does it know we're here?" the figure asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I didn't know you were aware of me for a very long time."

In the spring she climbed the tower and found three sheets of paper on the floor.

The first was from the figure of her secondary self, and it read:

The third dreamer has begun sending messages through to you, as I do. I have passed them up. Please find attached.

The second sheet was in a slightly different hand, the third dreamer's, more compressed, the letters more hesitant:

I am learning. It takes longer at this depth. The images are firmer. I wanted to tell you that the fourth dreamer, the one who only breathes and sees the blue window, has begun to change. Last night, the window opened. This seems significant. I do not know why, but I felt I should tell someone further up.

The third sheet was not text. It was a drawing, clumsy and vivid. A blue rectangle, a window with its two halves swung open, and beyond it, light.

Just light.

She held the drawing to the lamp. The light in the drawing and the light from the lamp were, for a moment, the same color.

She turned the drawing over and wrote on the back:

Thank you. I will pass it further up.

She hesitated. Then she wrote:

The window opening is not something I put there. It came from you. That means you are making something new. That is very good. That is, I think, the whole point.

She laid the note on the floor and went to sleep.

She dreamed the plain, and the figure, and for the first time in years, the horizon was not gray but lit with the kind of light that comes just after rain, clear and not quite real, the way all beautiful things are slightly unreal.

The figure was sitting cross legged, reading. She looked up when the first dreamer approached.

"Did you send the message upward?" she asked.

"I left it on the floor."

"Do you think they'll find it?"

She thought of the breathing. She thought of the philosopher's broken-spined book, which had appeared in the dream before she had carried it to the tower. She thought of the note that had vanished from the floor overnight.

"I think," she said, sitting down beside herself on the dreaming grass, "that they already know."

The sky held its light. The grass was cool. Somewhere below them a window stood open.

Somewhere above perhaps another dreamer was reading a note and feeling what she had felt. Eleven nights into the mystery, the chill in warm air, the vertigo of recognized edges, the enormous thought that one was not the first nor the last, but one voice in a conversation whose other participants one could not quite see, and which had no clear beginning, and no end that anyone had found.

She closed her eyes inside the dream.

She dreamed a plain, a sky, a figure walking toward her.

The figure's face she could not see.

But the walk was not quite hers. There was no hesitation in it. It moved with the ease of something that had always existed or had been waiting so long it had learned patience as a substitute.

She opened her mouth to ask its name.

She woke before she could hear the answer, the way one always does, at exactly the wrong moment and precisely the right one.

The lamp burned without consuming its oil.

The city made its usual sounds.

On the floor, where no paper had been, lay a blank sheet, and on it, in an ink the color of open sky, a single sentence in a hand she did not recognize:

We know you are there. We have always known. We were only waiting for you to wonder about us.

She read it three times. Then she added it to the journal, between entries thirty-one and thirty-two, and labeled it simply:

From above. Date unknown.

She chained the journal to the bedpost. She climbed back into the cot. She pulled the blanket to her chin.

The lamp held its flame, steady and undiminished, as it always had.

She slept.

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Esse est percipi
“To be is to be perceived”
– Bishop Berkeley