Dream Magic: Awakenings (20 page)

After they walked away, Master Joe got to his feet slowly, feigning the pains of old age.

"Here?" Eric asked.

"A little farther, over by that tree."

Eric, Rose and Lucy waited idly. Groups of kids trickled in for the event, and Maeve signaled them not to get any closer.

"I still don't understand what it is he will do," Eric said.

"Well... let's try it this way. Between who you were and who you will be, a healer can assist choosing the reality of that person. This is called a 'blessing'. Kids nowadays call it a 'buff' - don't ask me why. Curses work similarly, on the other end of the spectrum. What Joe's going to do is a major ritual for blessing the land."

"Or, it's like the elemental attunements, but instead of attuning to a particular element in a shallow dive, he's attuning to the whole realm in a depth where he can dream it all anew."

"Look, it's starting," Rose said.

When Master Joe finished his silly 'oh-my-old-bones' routine, he stretched out and raised his hands to the sky. He was chanting or singing something, but Eric couldn't quite make out the words or the melody.

What little fog there was dissipated, and the sun shined its light more brightly than before. More and more of the sky came apart to let the rays through.

The light danced around Master Joe's fingers, lit up his hands, and slowly enveloped his whole body. The chanting stopped, and Master Joe stood motionless, basking in the sunlight.
A sight to behold...

Commencing the next stage of the ritual, Master Joe lowered himself down to one knee and placed both hands on the ground. The light was no longer a glimmer, but an intense beam between heaven and earth, with Master Joe as a conduit in the center.

Eric could hear the chanting now, but its melody was unlike anything he ever heard before. His brain struggled to comprehend it, but gave up soon, as Eric's mind too filled with the light of this melody.

A tear ran down Eric's cheek, but he couldn't look away.

The base of the beam-pillar widened, and the light propagated through the ground. When it reached the patch of earth under Eric's feet, he felt a slight tremor. The chanting stopped, but the influx of light didn't - the light weaved and cut through the ground in all directions, which, due to the multidimensional nature of Dream Camp, were many.

Master Joe unrobed,
- Is he wearing something beneath? -
but Eric could barely make out shapes because of all the blinding brightness.

Eric could no longer see the sun in the sky. Whether it has descended to earth or was simply outshined by Master Joe, Eric couldn't tell.

Master Joe spread his arms sideways, and that was the last Eric saw of Master Joe's human form.

The song in his head started again, and a shockwave of feelings hit Eric. He recalled his first time waking up in Dream Camp and the impressions all that exquisite detail and vividness left on him. This experience became magnified thousandfold.
One more way to die.

Everything was changing, including Eric, and his mind was torn between giving into this feeling washing over the whole realm, and remaining Eric within the bounds of sanity.

The intensity of change allowed no time for a conscious choice. Most of what made Eric Eric went out with the shockwave of motion and change, and he felt himself light up like a miniature sun, his rays touching others who were going through the same transformation.

When the waves of light came back from the skies and the ground, the part of him that resisted the change clung to a feeling of déjà vu and the memory related to it.

The first time Eric met Master Joe, he saw him hammering on an old TV set stuck between channels. Now, Eric realized that scene was no more than a veil protecting him from the powerful unknown. Indeed, the whole realm with Eric in it felt like between channels - the waves and motion and light opening up fractal pathways of power, enabling Eric to be himself in ways he never thought of or experienced before.

Having now established a measure of understanding amongst the uncontrolled overstanding, Eric willed the ego-image of his human form into existence. His Sight condensed into sight, and his skin marked the boundary between close and distant touches.
It makes much more sense now.
Eric wiggled his hands, just to assure him of being there.

With his awakenings ended for a cycle, Eric inspected his surroundings. A radiant sun back high in the sky, and underneath, Master Joe's white robes on the ground marked the place where he probably wasn't.

Eric looked at Rose and Lucy. They had the same distant stare he presumably had, and he decided to let them take as much time as they needed. He noticed others too, standing motionless.

Eric turned away, seeking out the differences between this realm and its previous iteration. The snow was gone. It hasn't simply melted away, but disappeared without trace, taking with it the bareness of trees and the winter cold. The benign clouds and rhythmical weather patterns hid and bridged a sky less elemental than the last. The ground below was quiet, but not silent; worms and other simple organisms worked to keep it fertile.

Life breeds life.

The number of layers of life multiplied, masking the more distant and less obvious loose ends of the realm. Eric heard the chirp of birds, and sensed other small animals bustling about. It wasn't just grass and trees anymore; many of the plants from the garden warehouse spread across the land, blooming.

Eric welcomed the realm, and was welcomed back.

* * *

When Eric woke up in his bed, tears flowed down his cheeks. He felt joy, because he never saw such beauty before. Sadness, too, was overwhelming, because he felt he will never again experience such beauty in his life.

Too few observers, and your reality isn't objective enough. Too many observers, and the identities merge together, collapsing the wavefunction beyond repair. Get it just right, and your reality might maintain some coherence.

[Teleporter's addendum: There's no need to operate at such high level to extract usefulness from this concept. Sidestep, and stretch yourself briefly - teleportation is your easy-going, everyday friend. Note, 'subspace' and 'hyperspace' are ugly words.]

- Stability, Dreamer's Handbook

Eric rammed into the door.

Thankfully, his thick forehead absorbed most of the impact, and before his nose would flatten painfully against the grainy surface of the door, leaving a mark of snot and blood, the rolling-lock mechanism gave way to the pressure and Eric tumbled through the open doorframe.

"Next!" Annie yelled.

Eric stood up, dusted off, and closed the door behind him. While he walked back to the end of the line, other students repeated the process.

"Teleportation is about pushing and pulling distance, fixed points and frames of reference. Some of you might remember, I talked about self-distances in telepathy class. The theory is the same, we just use it differently."

Typical Annie; making us do things before explaining what it actually is we're supposed to do.
Eric chuckled.
She probably forgot.

"The blink is the easiest of teleportations and requires only minor displacement within. It has a short range, and what you lack in understanding or finesse, you can make up for in willpower. It often occurs naturally, as a subconscious response to a higher stress situation. This training takes advantage of that fact. It's like riding a bicycle; once you learn it will come naturally."

The doorframe stood erect in the middle of a field of green grass, placed there by Annie solely for the purposes of this exercise - there was no wall or anything. Bashing through the door wasn't particularly painful, but it was uncomfortable and awkward.
At least her classes are not boring, I'll give her that.

Winter went away as fast as it came, and spring blossomed again. Eric suspected it would be less perpetual than before. He had gotten used to the new realm teeming with life - it felt as natural as shifting one dream into another - but every now and then Eric would spot a minor detail, which would send him contemplating and admiring the beauty and complexity of it all; be it a bug, the dance of a rustling leaf, or a smile that expressed a new feeling.

When it was his turn again, Eric sprinted into the door - same result.

"The world around you is the framework of your existence. You awareness is pointlike within it, at the location you currently are. Your awareness will be pointlike at your desired location as well. All you have to do is raise your awareness, affix the framework, and condense your awareness just a tiny bit farther away."

"Like this." Annie extended her hand, and for a moment, she appeared to be holding hands with herself as she blinked just two steps away. "The degree to which you are able to temporarily enlarge your awareness, yet still hold yourself together, determines the blinkable distance."

I can do it. I just have to concentrate.
Eric knew mentally that his human shape was present in a dream only because his habit willed it there. Surely, willing it to be on the other side of the door shouldn't be too difficult. Yet, it was clear to Eric that knowing something in one's head and actually making use of that knowledge are two different things.

After repeatedly bashing his head into the door, Eric noticed that, just for a fraction of a second, his mind behaved differently from the moment before impact until the moment just after. Derailed, shocked, or just a in a state of greater receptiveness - but certainly different. After a few more repetitions, it felt like that one moment was composed of three: some of his thoughts went ahead, anticipating the consequences of impact, some braced for it, ready to process the signals, and some lagged behind, clinging to a previous location and state of mind, about to imprint the future with the past.

Progress was slow, but Eric's introspective disentangling of thoughts got more refined. In his mind, he leaned on the farthermost thought and its feel of space - like when shifting balance from one leg to the other - and let the lagging thoughts snap towards it, skipping the in-between.

Eric tumbled on the grass. He got to his feet, dusted off, and turned to close the door behind him. Much to his amazement, the door remained closed. "What- how..."

"You did it; well done. Move on to the second exercise," Annie said. "Next!"

Eric slowly walked in the direction Annie signaled. Trying to convince himself that he indeed succeeded blinking through the door was time-consuming. He wasn't sure how he did it, but he had to accept that he did.

The site of the next exercise was nothing more than a huge, long slab of rock. Its sides were almost rectangular, and only one side was polished flat. From afar it looked like the rock was placed at the end of a short, red-graveled running track, but upon closer inspection, the gravel was in fact red-bladed, trimmed grass.

Rose was already there, along with a couple of students. One after the other, they sprinted into the flat face of the rock.

"Hey," Eric said.

"Hey," Rose replied.

While the previous exercise was inconvenient, this one seemed outright painful. Eric didn't let that faze him.
Falling and splattering on the ground, or sprinting and splattering on a rock wall - makes no difference.

He heard Annie's voice from close by.

"With the standard 'port, the situation is reversed. The distance here is large, often far outside of view, but still within the same realm. The only requirement is that you have a very clear view of that location in your mind's eye."

"Since the world is quite different between the two locations, this time the fixed point has to be your own awareness while the framework changes around it. So, you let the world move while you stand still. This is a partial folding of space-time, in which all your relevant relations are transferred to the goal location."

"Large blinks or teleports within viewing distance we call jumps. Which method you'll use in this exercise is up to you."

Eric forced himself to relax. He stretched a few muscles, took a deep breath, and ran head-first into the wall.

It was pretty much what he expected: painful. But, he didn't lose consciousness, and the damage wasn't so severe that he would have to rematerialize. Eric collected himself. His nose felt strange and crooked. He grabbed, twisted it, and after a hurtful crackling of bones, the nose was back as it's supposed to be. What blood dripped off, he willed away.

Not too keen to mindlessly repeat this experience, he sought to apply his earlier insights while waiting his turn to come around.

The next few times he subconsciously sabotaged his own efforts - he either ran too slow, trying to avoid the pain, or too fast, trying to prove himself needlessly and missing the moment.

When he did manage to collect his focus and disentangle himself as before, the wall felt less firm and more rubbery, bouncing him back rather than halting him outright.

He kept trying to make that moment longer and cover a greater distance, but the slab was just too long.

Others were not faring better either, but that was no comfort to Eric.
Teleportation is such a versatile skill - I have to learn it!

The next time around, he made a mental misstep: his lagging self entered the rock too, but his anticipating self wasn't anywhere near the end and he couldn't snap back to safety. Panic engulfed his mind as he realized he became stuck in the rock. His fear had weight and it was crushing him. Instinctively, he tried to inhale but couldn't, and he exhaled instead.

Last breath,
he thought, before panic overcame him and reduced what remained to pure instinct.

...there was an action of breathing in, and Eric regained some control. His mind told him it was impossible to breathe rock, but he was doing exactly that, in whatever half-state he existed. It felt like breathing water, except much more arduous; imparting pain through his fear and into his awareness.