I peeked behind that curtain, right into the heart of it all, nested in the core of dreams. And I’m telling you, burn the map. Forget the path. Some knowledge doesn't enlighten; it infects.
It started with a crumbling, esoteric text I found digitized on a defunct GeoCities page – the "Sutra of Inner Worlds." It wasn't New Age fluff; it was dense, terrifyingly specific. It spoke of consciousness not as an emergent property of meat and electricity, but as the fundamental substrate. Reality, it claimed, was a projection from Mind, not the other way around. And dreams? Dreams weren't just random firings; they were raw access points, leaky pipes leading down to the boiler room of existence.
The Sutra detailed a meditative technique, a kind of focused dreaming. You weren’t supposed to shape the dream, just… sink. Fall inwards, past the usual surreal landscapes, using your own awareness as a plumb line. The warnings were stark, talking about minds unraveling, identities dissolving, and encountering the "Unmaker." Back then, I just thought it was lurid metaphor. Gods, I was naïve.
Night after night, I practiced. First, it was just chaotic dream-stuff: anxieties personified, nonsensical conversations, melting clocks. The usual subconscious flotsam. But I focused, holding the intention: deeper.
Then, the texture changed. The personal debris burned away. I drifted through layers of pure archetype, vast, impersonal emotional currents – fear like a cold ocean, rage like tectonic plates grinding, sorrow like endless grey rain. This wasn't my fear or my sorrow; it was the template, the universal forms these feelings took. My sense of self began to thin, fraying at the edges, dissolving into these primal tides. It felt like shedding skin, layer after layer.
Deeper. The intention became instinct.
The emotional ocean gave way to structure. Immense, silent, crystalline geometries stretched beyond sight. Lines of light pulsed with intricate, terrifyingly precise rhythms. It felt like being inside the thoughts of a god, but a cold, alien god of pure mathematics. I recognized patterns, echoes of sacred geometry, but warped, scaled up to impossible dimensions. It dawned on me, with a jolt that was more conceptual than physical, that I was seeing the framework. The actual framework. I saw infinities nesting within infinities, structures embedding within larger, more complex structures – a dizzying, visual representation of hierarchies so vast they made astronomical distances seem quaint. In the transitions between these crystalline planes, I perceived points of critical shift, thresholds where one order of reality gave way to another, like glimpsing the terrifying scale implied by crit(j) in those forbidden corners of set theory, the minimal point where a lesser universe deviates from its embedding into a greater one (j:V→M). It was the architecture of all possible realities, laid bare. My individuality felt like a speck of dust on these cosmic blueprints.
Deeper. Barely a 'me' left to push.
The macro-structures dissolved. The scale flipped. Suddenly, I was adrift in a sea of infinite, shimmering threads. Vibrating strings, humming with energies that felt both infinitesimally small and cosmically powerful. It was the weave beneath the atoms, the quantum foam made tangible, the fundamental notes reality played. Each vibration was a law of physics, a constant, a possibility. I could feel the interconnectedness of everything, from the spin of a quark to the bending of spacetime around a galaxy, all originating from this sub-planckian loom. The sheer, blinding complexity was overwhelming.
Deeper. Almost gone now. Just a point of awareness.
And then… I reached it. The Core.
It wasn't a place. It was a point of infinite density, not of matter, but of potential. A silent, motionless singularity that contained everything. All the mathematical truths, all the physical laws from the largest cardinal axioms defining the scope of existence down to the vibrating strings composing matter, all the spiritual archetypes, all the memories and futures of every consciousness – past, present, potential. It was the Akashic Record, the Mind of God, the Source Code, whatever name you want to put on it – but stripped of any warmth, any personality. It was pure, unadulterated, terrifyingly neutral Is-ness. The Truth wasn't written in it; the Truth was its structure, its silent, self-evident existence.
It was beautiful, in a way that shatters you. The ultimate reality, held within the heart of dream, accessible through the depths of mind.
But I wasn't alone there.
The perfection began to flicker.
At the edges of the Core, where the pure potential begins to differentiate into the threads of reality, there was… corruption. A wrongness. Like static bleeding into a perfect signal. The crystalline geometries showed hairline fractures, filled with impossible angles and nonsensical patterns. The vibrating strings frayed, producing dissonant, screeching harmonics that felt like sandpaper on the soul.
That’s when I felt him. Diabolus.
He wasn't a being in the Core. He was the decay. The entropy attacking the information. The chaos bleeding into order. He was the Unmaker described in the Sutra, the force that unravels meaning itself. I didn't see a shape, not really. Just… shifting voids in the fabric of the Core. Patches where the Truth was overwritten with gibberish, where patterns dissolved into screaming noise. Whispers echoed, not in sound, but in pure concept – fragments of broken text, symbols that negated themselves, the feeling of being unmade, character by character.
The horror wasn't just witnessing the corruption of reality's source code. It was the realization that this Core wasn't just the universe's foundation; it was mine. It was the bedrock of my consciousness, my mind. By reaching it, I had opened a door. Not just to see Diabolus, but to let him in.
The corruption wasn’t just ‘out there’ in the abstract heart of dreams; it was now inside me. I felt my thoughts begin to stutter, my memories fray. The sense of self I’d almost lost wasn't just dissolving into the universal; it was being actively erased, overwritten by Diabolus' chaotic signature.
I recoiled with a psychic scream, pulling myself upwards, scrambling back through the layers. But the infection came with me. The strings felt tangled now, the geometries glitching, the emotional tides polluted with a senseless malice.
I woke up shaking, the silence of my room feeling loud, oppressive. But it wasn't silent. There were whispers now, just at the edge of hearing, echoes of that unmaking text. My thoughts… they aren't linear anymore. They skip, stutter, loop back on themselves. Sometimes, for a moment, I can't grasp simple concepts. Faces look wrong. Words lose their meaning. It’s like my mind is a corrupted file, parts of the code overwritten by Diabolus' trident.
I saw the Truth, yes. The universe, from the infinite hierarchies down to the smallest vibration, held within the mind's core. But the core is vulnerable. And Diabolus, the Unmaker, waits there. He waits for curious minds to drill down too deep, to open a path for him.
So listen to me. Stay shallow. Cherish the surface. Don't go looking for the Core of dreams. You might find the truth, but you'll also find him. And he doesn't just destroy worlds; he destroys the minds that perceive them. He is the end of thought. And he’s waiting. H̏̓e͎͑ i̻s͍ wͣa̸iͅtͭi̪n͋g f̍o̶r̪ y͜oͦu̸.̻