Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-32802129-20190802094520

Last night, I had a dream.

It’s an unremarkable statement, one that would hardly illicit a raised eyebrow from a loved one. It’s a statement that you could make aloud on a subway train, and no one would even look up from their phones to discern the source. If you knew where we were going, however, it would be the most remarkable thing ever said. It would change the fabric of our very being.

You see, there was a time when everything was normal. People went about their daily lives, culture thrived, and humanity prospered. Before Nothing happened, fear was confined to small pockets of humanity; places where people feared wars and famine, places where people feared the Climate Change Emergency, places where people feared for their freedoms and privacy. Fear was never meant to be experienced by a whole species, where every fibre of every being coursed with pure and unbridled terror. It was meant to be locked away; left to fester in the darkest and most hidden recesses of the mind, unable to ooze through the cracks and totally paralyse our existence. Given the circumstance, it wasn’t remarkable that our entire species fell to its knees. The remarkable thing is what broke the entire human race, piece by piece. It wasn’t nuclear war, or an irreversible increase in global temperature. It was what happened when we went to sleep.

Nobody seems to be able to pinpoint when exactly the Last One happened. Dreaming is complicated, and our memories of each one ephemeral. As the tendrils of sleep slip loose from our minds, so too do the abstract fragments of our dreams, to be forever lost in the archives of our brains. It was hard for anyone to discern the difference between waking with those fragments drifting from conscious thought, and waking without having dreamed at all.

For the first few days of the Nothing, nobody acknowledged its existence. Daily routines continued unchanged, the people un-phased by what they thought was their own anomaly. Nobody spoke of not dreaming, and the Nothing continued without a name. It might have been a week, or even two, before the first murmurs started about something being wrong. Maybe it started in a psychologist’s office; maybe it started among a group of friends. Whatever the source, the murmurs exploded into shockwaves that tore through the entire global community. Nobody, anywhere in the world, was dreaming anymore.

It’s hard to explain exactly what the Nothing is. Once widely acknowledged, it morphed from simply a lack of awareness of dreaming, into a very distinguishable lack of anything. Once asleep, we would spend hours in total darkness, with no stimulus of any kind. There was no noise in this place, no physical sensation, just a complete and utter lack of perception. We didn’t feel in this place either, which is probably what was most striking. There was no fear, no foreboding, no anger. There wasn’t even boredom in the Nothing. It was like being adrift on an endless sea, which exerted no force on the body yet somehow held us in place. It felt confined in the sense that we were forced to be there, yet infinite and indistinct. There was simply no way of knowing how large this space we occupied was, nor whether it had boundaries of any form. There wasn’t even a desire to know these things nor explain them, as there was no way to feel anything at all. It simply was, and despite the slightest sense that Nothing is not where we should be when we sleep, nobody could exactly place why it was that we should be concerned.

In the waking world, the effects of Nothing were profound and wide reaching. Initially, there was an unwillingness to openly discuss Nothing, as if by meeting the undistinguishable with ignorance, the problem would subtly slide away as a perplexing chapter of human history. The unwillingness began to slowly waver, as the period since the Last One extended from days into weeks, and weeks into months. Some tried to explain it, some tried to ignore it, but all slowly fell victim to the utter annihilation of our psyche triggered by something so simple yet intangible.

The cracks started to show as the first populations began desperately trying to stay awake, unable to quantify what it was about the Nothing that they feared, yet unable to face another night of its confinement. Intentional insomnia led to a complete social collapse, as average citizens turned to recreational drugs, electro shock therapy, and self-harm to try in vain to stave off the embrace of sleep.

It was amazing, in a most profoundly confronting sense, to witness just how readily the human condition could be destroyed. The removal of such a simple aspect of our daily routine, one rarely acknowledged to others, and one that was barely understood by the greatest minds in existence, was enough to drive the entire human collective to the brink of oblivion.

I recall sweating profusely, every muscle fibre screaming out for the sweet embrace of sleep, and driving the switchblade into the pallid flesh of my arm. I remember screaming in agony, yet refusing to shut my eyes to cope with the pain in fear that when I opened them again, I would be in the Nothing. I remember people I went to school with, successful people, shooting themselves in the face at point blank range as a last effort to escape the clutches of what happened when they accepted the inevitability of sleep.

It was, quite simply, a genocide. Whatever the Nothing was, whatever it represented, was erasing the human race piece by piece. The institutions that stood against it, looking for answers to explain our predicament, all fell just the same way as the average person. Nobody could escape the clutches of sleep, and once they succumbed, nobody could escape the Nothing.

I remember, before the Fall, that NASA even probed the darkest recesses of known space, looking for anything that could be doing this to our species. I don’t know if they expected to find anything, and I don’t think they did before there was nobody left to search, and nobody functioning at a high enough level to care.

It was just at the brink of the total failure of our species that I had my First One. It wasn’t a dream in the sense of the Ones before, but it certainly wasn’t the Nothing. It was Somewhere, totally devoid of any sense of orientation or actual place, yet definitely Somewhere. It is impossible to describe, but this version of Nothing had a feel to it, like its location in space or time was definite and defined. The complete blackness prevailed, the total lack of stimulus reigned, yet in this place there was feeling. In this place was fear.

I knew immediately that I was alone in this Somewhere experience. There was no explosion of noise over the airwaves from whoever was left, no acknowledgement that our predicament had undergone a quantum shift overnight. There was no recognition that anyone, anywhere, had dreamt anything at all. I was being shown something, for some reason, that had profound impact on the longevity of our species, and it terrified me. I was our last dreamer.

I began to miss the Nothing as I experienced time and time again the pure fear of Somewhere. There was never any light, never any physical contact with anything, yet something was getting closer. There was a distinguishable pulsing in the blackness, that my senses appeared able to discern against the nothingness, kind of like how our eyes adjust to an almost pitch black room. The pulsing grew in intensity constantly, so slowly that you could almost be mistaken and believe you were imagining the shift in frequency and amplitude. The most discernible shift in the pulsing from Somewhere was the difference between each time I experienced the glory of waking up to our ruined world, and each time I accepted the torturous grasp of rest. Something was getting closer.

The intensity of the foreboding brought with the pulsing defies explanation; it was like my very soul was being eviscerated by the thought of what complex power could exert this total control over our psyche. Was this God? Was He wreaking His awful vengeance on His failed creations? Was this something far worse than God, some omnipotent force flaying the consciousness of everything it encountered? Every atom of my existence, every synapse in my brain, and every fragment of my mind screamed out, begged for the release of death. I could not face the unfathomable reality of the Architect of Nothing, yet I could not face the uncertainty of whether death would escape this merciless fate.

I cannot dictate what happened when the Architect arrived, nor whether It ever did, and I don’t know if I was around for the terrible culmination of It’s crusade against the human consciousness. I can’t explain how at some point, it dissected and re assembled the fabric of time as we know it, and I certainly can’t explain how at some point, I ended up waking up here.

What I do know is that I didn’t have a dream last night. Did you? 