Mind over Matter 22/06 Sorrel's metaphysics of consciousness

“In the dream … we have the source of all metaphysic. Without the dream, men would never have been incited to an analysis of the world. Even the distinction between soul and body is wholly due to the primitive conception of the dream, as also the hypothesis of the embodied soul, whence the development of all superstition, and also, probably, the belief in god. ‘The dead still live: for they appear to the living in dreams.”
Friedrich Nietzsche



One the second day of her training at the House, Sorrel was taken barefoot through one of the gardens to a high walled palace with few windows and one wooden door. The masked guard left her and strode back up the winding path through the strange waving plants.

She set her hands on the door and it popped open.

A long stone corridor lead off in front of her and her feet padded along it until she came to a wide hall where a short, smiling gnome sat on a low chair.

“Welcome,” the gnome said.

“My name is Sorrel Darkfire,” she informed him.

“You are bold for a youngling,” the gnome nodded wisely. “Great anger I sense in you.”

The gnome frowned, reached for a book and flicked through it. “Sorry, I sense great anger in you… I’m still learning common. The sentence constructs are slightly different.”

“I don’t think I’m angry,” Sorrel scratched her head.

“What of your dreams?”

“I don’t know. Can they be angry?”

“It is common for new recruits to miss their families and dream of past lives. You are of the House now.”

“I do not dream.”

“This cannot be true, and you are here to learn lucid dreaming, the art of taking control of your dreams. It is a great defence against nostalgia, certain creatures and, who knows, perhaps you will need to enter a targets dreams in the future.”

“How likely is that?” Sorrel scoffed.

“It is uncertain. As in, I don’t know. But once you can control matter in dreams… well, you can move on with your education and stop smart mouthing a simple gnome whose old enough to be your father.”

--

Velania’s heart was important to Sorrel in a way few hearts were. When she asked for help at some point in the near future, Sorrel essentially spent the next few days tailing her. It wasn’t too hard. The convoys started leaving Daring Heights the day after their conversation on the ramparts and the street were filled with noise, chaos and barely supressed panic. Sorrel watch Velania move through the terrified throngs, a pool of calm, helping soothe troubled faces and mend damaged limbs.

Sorrel marvelled at her peace and patience – but also at the relatively orderly emptying of the city. Sorrel had lost track of the number of city walls she’d defended or breached, but the civilians were always caught by surprise and suffered for it. Whatever happened when the dragons came, the dead would be soldiers not children.

When the message finally came, Sorrel was heavily disguised and loading up one of the last of the vintners’ wagons, surreptitiously filling her waterskin from an unexpected barrel of the legendarily rare Jasmarim’s Shadow whilst keeping Velania in view. As a result, the telepathic call-out barely had to travel 15 feet, and definitely not the half an hour distance Velania had expected. Sorrel thought she’d better hang around behind the Temple of Selûne for bit so as not to freak Velania out. She was almost betrayed by the message – Velania’s message had been ‘have you heard of the moon?’ Sorrel nearly laughed out loud.

--

Velania had called on Laurel, Glint and Zola, the paladin whose complex internal dialogue both fascinated and terrified Sorrel.

“How have you been since Hell?” Sorrel sounded as causal as she could, trying not to bring up Zola’s slaughter of her lover and the months of torment the battle against Shar’s servants had caused her.

“I’m OK,” Zola smiled, a little sadly.

Sorrel wanted to reach out to her, to ask if she could help, to make some connection with this warrior who had risked so much but when she opened her mouth all that came out was; “Good. Good, good, good. Good.”

What was the matter with her?

Aurelia, who Sorrel was beginning to realise only ever appeared when incredibly weird and dangerous things were about to happen, hurried them to a disguised portal, stretched their bodies through pan dimensional space and time, hurried them down a dark, damp stone tunnel so bland as to be almost certainly fake and through a pair of magical doors before they were standing by Coll’s catatonic form, in a wide room with a series of podiums, each with a sort of tiara resting on them.

“This,” Aurelia indicated the collection of leads, circlets and podiums. “Is a device, potentially temperamental, which will send you into Coll’s mind.”

“What are we looking for?” Velania’s face was white, and her eyes weren’t moving from Coll’s.

“We’re hoping you’ll know when you see it,” Aurelia seemed a little sheepish.

“So, we’re going in not knowing what’s going on to try to fix something we don’t understand,” Laurel ventured.

Aurelia thought that through, then nodded. “Sounds about right.”

“Will the mind react to us?” Glint asked, and Sorrel remembered the genasi had form in brain invasion.

“Hopefully in a good way,” Aurelia smiled weakly. “Hopefully Coll will open doors. It should react well not badly.”

“Glint,” Sorrel hesitated then asked. “If it reacts badly, what’s it going to be like? Just to help, you know, prep.”

“Terrible, disturbing… one of the most terrifying and unpleasant experiences of your life,” Glint replied. “Imagine an enemy that can see into your worst nightmares and throw your darkest fears at you as a weapon. Is that helpful?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Sorrel clapped Glint on the back. “Good talk. Right, let’s go.”

And they plugged in.

---

Sorrel’s first shock was when she discovered her mask was missing. And her hood. And…

She looked down.

Oh.



She was 16 again. The girl who turned up at the House filled with fury and fear.

She looked around at the others. Only Velania seemed similarly affected. Glint, conversely, seemed like a demon lord.

Interesting.

And then the space they were in took up all her attention.

This is what it would be like, she thought, if you materialised in space just after the world had been destroyed. Debris flying everywhere. No fixed structures. Just a void where cobblestones and broken walls crashed into each other in absolute silence.



Sorrel turned to Glint for guidance and saw him frowning with concentration. Gradually, one brick at a time, a walkway appeared in front of them.

Sorrel looked down at her body and remembered the day after she arrived at the House, a day this body shouldn’t remember – the way the strange gnome taught her lucid dreaming… the ability to control the narrative of dreams.

Try not to think too hard about it, the gnome had warned. If you try to apply any context to what you’re doing you’ll either lose the moment or lose your mind.

She felt context forcing its way in. She was in the body of the girl who hadn’t yet been told the things she currently remembered. Stop this. Get a grip.

Ahead of her Velania called out Coll’s name, enshrouded a cobble in holy light and hurled it into the void. Insane angles loomed over them. The fragments of alien buildings with proportions and dimensions that seemed impossible, spinning wildly around them, vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws.

“This is not architecture I know from the Dawnlands,” Glint’s voice shattered the maddening silence. “It may be Netherese, or it may be fashioned by Coll’s mind or perhaps we are in the mind of Gadenthor itself.”

Laurel cried out. They had seen Coll, they cried, just briefly and then he was pulled away. “He’s trapped by something,” they said.

Zola leaped forward, hurtling from piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs to needle-like spires, and Sorrel jumped after her. The others followed clumsily in their wake until all had reached the spot Coll had vanished.

Suddenly, Sorrel heard Velania gasp. She followed her gaze saw Coll floating in space, secured by glowing chains with a figure in front of him, ethereal wings beating the void, hands moving through the ritual movements of a spell.

Whilst the gnome was teaching her, he made her sleep with a bow beneath her pillow. He taught her to know it was there, even as the monsters of her mind tormented her. She learned to hold its sturdy wood, draw back its string and loose shafts into the nightmares that threatened her. And so now, she did the only thing she knew – she loosed arrows at the creature that threatened her sister’s love.

They struck its shoulder. It turned and hurled a javelin of pure light at her. Then Glint spoke some words of power and she saw it arc and write as lances of white anger shot from the genasi’s mind.

The creature buckled and vanished. The chains evaporated. Coll smiled. The walls began to rise and reform into buildings and streets all around him. Sorrel found the ground they were standing on rising and twisting into a wall and they crashed to the ground as Coll turned to face other figures in unfamiliar attire - long dark grey and blue robes – moving rapidly around him and talking as if in code - ‘we are activating the engine,’ ‘the capacitators are charged.’

A window opened in front of them in the hard stone wall, the rock folding away in impossible directions and they saw into room with the robed figures around a stone dais speaking urgently – “we are going to activate the city,” “we have completed all the checks,” “flick the switch.”

Gadenthor shuddered beneath them, and Sorrel knew it was the first time. Coll was at peace, calm with a wide smile as he faded away and floated into the walls leaving just the silence.

Forget the context, Sorrel repeated to herself. Just move and watch and kill if you have to.

--

They ran through what was now clearly a brand new Gadenthor, everything freshly minted as if carved just yesterday. But they were searching blindly and running out of time. They would be pulled out after an hour, and they were no nearer saving Coll or solving this puzzle.

Velania cried out as she saw a void up ahead – whatever they had killed hadn’t been enough to heal all the city and some 500 feet ahead the slabs of stone wheeled and crashed together in silence, just like the maelstrom they’d arrived in. But it wasn’t that Velania was calling out to. Coll was there again, struggling against a large red claw which hauled him back into the darkness.

Velania leaped out into the void and Sorrel followed her. Beneath them, something large, red and scaly is writhing in the darkness.

She recalled the manifesting of lucid dream warrior style and tried to summon something new. A cup. She smiled as one appeared in her hand, then pictured a quiver full of dragon slaying arrows.

A shower of small silver arrows cascaded down on her head.

Zola looked at her quizzically.

“It’s manifesting,” she explained. “Dreams are infinite. If you can control them, you can create anything. Only… I seem to have summoned my first set of teenage arrows by mistake.”

“Instead of creating let’s try changing," Glint suggested. "Let’s think of dragons as something harmless.”

“Like the Stay Puft Marshmallow man?” Sorrel thought back to midnight feasts.

“Or we could think it away by not thinking about dragons,” Zola suggested.

All Sorrel could think about now was dragons.

“Look, like this,” Glint’s hands deftly conjured up the illusion of a tiny dragon. They all stared at this image and did their level best to stay focused as a vast and angry red dragon burst up from the gloom holding Coll in one enormous claw and opening its vast maw to incinerate them when slowly the power of their imagination began shrinking it down and down until it was no larger than a horse.

Furious, the beast hurled Coll into a wall which suddenly sprouted earth and brick limbs, entangling him in its grinding stone. The dragon shuddered and became a tall, cloaked figure with a flaming sword that it raised to bring down on Coll’s trapped form.

Sorrel was already hauling back her bow string when Glint flung a shimmering magical shield between Coll and the flaming blade. Before the sword could bounce off this defence, Sorrel’s three arrows had torn into the creature’s head and neck, killing it instantly.

Sorrel thanked the goddess for keeping her aim true in Velania’s service and watched her beautiful sister as she took two trembling steps towards Coll as the city crashed back into shape.

--

Suddenly they were passing through a room filled with figures discussing merging their minds to make the city smarter and faster, then another with those same figures now sporting strange crowns that interconnected into a web of light and power.

Sorrel looked at these bodies from the distant past, their brains all wired together into some central system, just as the party’s bodies were, she supposed, arranged in a circle right now with their brains wired into Coll’s central system.

For a second she had a dizzying vision of other brains overseeing the party’s brains, all linked by wires into some other network. And then their brains linked to others and on and on in infinite regressions until it became impossible to understand where reality ended, and dreams began.

And Coll vanished as she’d known he would. The city was not complete. The story remained untold. Whatever this dream was, it was not done with them yet.

--

“Let’s think about this" Glint said carefully. “We're rebuilding Gadenthor. Might we be helping the githyanki?"

“Or…” Sorrel ventured. “What if we’re thinking about this in entirely the wrong way? Suppose the self-organisation theory of memory is at work and the process of unconscious information redistribution is being focussed through arbitrary perception of threat?”

“These creatures are hurting Coll and I’m going to stop them,” Velania cried.

“Or that,” Sorrel nodded.

Zola strode forward. “I know that’s a dome over there and I think I’ve grasped this manifesting business so let’s get to work.”

She drew her sword and let a road unfurl in front of her winding towards what Sorrel could now see was something like a dome floating in the void. Although it was both more and less than a dome. It was, she realised, the centre of this version of the city, the nucleus of whatever the hell it was that was going on. She was inclined to share Glint’s concern. This felt too much like a game – like they were tools of some larger power drawing them towards some inevitable point.



The gnome, she remembered, believed in free action but had no conception of free-will, as a self-determining power that moral agents somehow possess. Instead, he argued, moral freedom lies in the ability of agents to form desires that are consonant with their needs and personal circumstances. In which case, her choices could be determined by something as random as the roll of the dice. Something gnawed at the edge of her consciousness, a strange picture of…

But then Zola reached the dome and said, gloomily, “there’s no door.. wait… boom! Door to order. Let’s kick it.”

And she did.

--

The three cloaked figures – one green, one silver, one black – were so busy torturing Coll who writhed in chains in a large column of light that they didn’t bother to turn and see who had just blasted a hole in their wall.

“By the power vested in me as a temporarily deputised enforcer of the Daring Heights council I demand you unhand that man and return to whichever imagined reality you were manifested!” Glint cried.

Nothing.

Laurel frowned hard, but nothing happened. “Manifesting isn’t as easy as it looks,” they said.

Zola tried. Nothing.

Then Glint stepped forward again. “I will try,” he said.

A voice echoed in Sorrel’s mind – the gnome, infuriated at another failure of hers. “Do or not do. There is no ‘try’.”

“For fuck’s sake, shorty,” Sorrel had cuffed him. “It’s hard enough believing in myself without you giving me all this shit.”

She wouldn’t leave Glint alone with his struggle. She grabbed him, stared into his eyes and willed her belief onto him. “Come on Glint, you’ve got the biggest brain of all of us. You can do this. Blow those chains to smither…” she stopped, alarmed as Glint’s head blazed into life and shattered the chains around Coll.

Green and black spun around and stared at the party from within their hoods. Silver started muttering some sort of spell, attempting to regain control of Coll.

Sorrel sent arrows thudding into Silver’s back, but it didn’t flinch.

Zola moved swiftly forwards and shouted a challenge as she drew her twin blades Castor and Pollux. Sorrel couldn’t be sure, but the paladin seemed to change, as if possessed by the moon.

Laurel muttered a spell, but nothing seemed to be working.

Sorrel was fitting another arrow to her bowstring when three daggers sank into her flesh. She staggered briefly, but caught sight of Velania crying Coll’s name as she rushed forward.

Behind her, Glint flamed again, and bolts of fire shot from his fingers. This was a whole new genasi, Sorrel observed, then sent arrows crackling with arcane lightning flying into the Silver cloak.

The figure staggered, the cloak slipped and Velania stood there.

Sorrel felt sick. Her knees buckled and she was about to cry out when Velania stepped towards the falling Velania.

Sorrel groaned. Fucking dreams. Her least favourite battleground. Combat was tough enough without the actual environment playing smug little tricks on you.

Zola carved up the Black cloak with a studied casual grace, making such short work of it that she was still half way through her attacking kata when it fell to the ground.

Then Coll stepped forward and Velania screamed.

“Where is he?”

“Where is who?” the voice that came from Coll sounded… dead, cold.

“My Coll,”

“In Interrogation Room One in the City-State of Gadenthor,” the thing replied.

“So where are we?”

“This is a… simulation, I think you would call it, although as I am Gadenthor it is more than that. You could say it is the essence of the city. I am Xeron, the neural matrix.”

“Who was… why was I attacking you?” Velania sounded desperate.

“Parts of the magister’s subconscious were fighting me,” Xeron said. “It is complicated. The magister was defending himself with the creatures he held most dear… I think that is the way to say it. You are Velania, I believe.”

"So, if you're complete, can you control Gadenthor?" Sorrel’s mind was grinding through gears.

"I have the full access to the entire database but manual override is only possible in the Central Control Panel."

"But Coll's controlling Gadenthor from interrogation room one, no?" Sorrel was getting there she could feel it.

"No, I can do it through the manual override at the Central Control Panel."

“So you need to be physically in Gadenthor?” Glint asked.

“I will explain,” Xeron said and they were suddenly back in the secret chamber, their heads wired to Coll, who stood up.

“The city knows where I am,” Xeron spoke through Coll’s mouth. “It is coming. It will be here in one week.”

Sorrel looked hard at Xeron, wondering - did we do the right thing?

The problem is in the conception of the dream as much as the understanding of the correct course of action, she admitted to herself. The question is whether consciousness is present or not in deep sleep.

The gnome told her that one must contemplate the dream, and reflect on how it is or is not similar to real life, since both are illusions. There is said to be a relationship between dreaming, on the one hand, and the gross and subtle levels of the body, on the other. But it is also said that there is such a thing as a “special dream state.” In that state, the “special dream body” is created from the mind and from vital energy within the body.

This special dream body is able to dissociate entirely from the gross physical body and travel elsewhere. Could this have been the essence of Coll’s journey?

She turned to Glint to find she was alone.

The others were clattering down the passage, discussing the preparations for war in the time they had left.

Words came unbidden to her as she stood alone.

I wandered through a house of many rooms.
It grew darker and darker,
Until, at last, I could only find my way
By passing my fingers along the wall.
Suddenly my hand shot through an open window,
And the thorn of a rose I could not see
Pricked it so sharply
That I cried aloud.

I dug a grave under an oak-tree.
With infinite care, I stamped my spade
Into the heavy grass.
The sod sucked it,
And I drew it out with effort,
Watching the steel run liquid in the moonlight
As it came clear.
I stooped, and dug, and never turned,
For behind me,
On the dried leaves,
My own face lay like a white pebble,
Waiting.