Dreams Before Dreamers

In dreams we go back to a time before time. Before we saw faces and recognized the flaws in ourselves, before the lucubration of solid bodies. When spirits reigned in a sea of mystery alone, and they weren't confined to dreaming of that sea while coiled into the tragic forms we now pass on the highways slipping into infinity where it all will end.

Harold made a symbol for everything. His stack of papers threatened to crush him. His symbol for his work was "End it All" and within it were the fractions of other symbols like "Man floats into space" and "Dogtags= individuality".

HIs project was a semiotic history of the future, and each day he would brush away the sand and compile a new set of symbols for everything that defined us, and each day he journeyed further into the truth he found himself further from it.

The inherent paradox of progress.

When it rained he would stop and laugh until the rain stopped. Dry silence at the heart of the watery roar.
He would write poems when he tired of drawing new symbols. Poems that splatter-painted everything into very small boxes of information, because he was alone.

A publisher expressed interest and put out the first volume, taking it away from him. You can't have the thing you put your love into. Harold made a symbol for that too, and housed it in a large pictogram for "Fear". "Rain turns into Snow" was only partially visible within "Everything you can see is already lost" and "Factories shipping soldiers off to War" made up nearly a million pages representing "The Limitations of Love's Geometry"

At night he would dream as the rains come. "Rain on me." His heart would rush and never heal. He would laugh in his sleep and his laugh would bounce like an echo from the future, dreaming of a laugh before time.

In dreams we go back to a time before dreaming. Before ambition or the requisite need for more. Slipping into the firmament of happiness where there is food that has been eaten and sex that has been pounded. Leather hides beat against an earthen floor. When clouds were solid and content, not so much floating across the sky amorphus but stable like ripened fruit, filled and succulent like juicy stones declaring themselves in loud voices. Not empty with promises we have today.

Yan laid stones at sunup. One stone on top of the other as the sun pulsed down, slithering his slow creation up the hollow solar throat. In the morning his senses were dull and each stone was merely a stone. Bricks, dull in their stoic stance casting sharply hemmed angles against the brilliance of the light-blue canvas. By midday the rhythm of the masonry was infectious and his body acted of its own accord in time with the narrative of the song. One rough-hewn stone, one slathering of mortar, a wall emerging where once there was none, sturdy in its stance and marching indomitable until dusk, when the stones became his spirit. The spirit of his son. One grandfather stone. One enshrined soul after another. A wall of ancesters slipping slowly up into the concave kingdom of the hereafter.

His stones were part of a temple. He was one of many and they worked for the glory of something greater than themselves. Adding stones in a line, their otherwise unpunctuated lives strung out day-by-day like the side-by-side bricks they laid, pausing for darkness and traversing the gravel roads back to simple homes where their wives and children waited.

Each day was a new stone, slathered with wet earth and pressed to the rest. He recieved small payment for his efforts. He thought of little else. He thought very little at all. One stone, and then another. THe past piling up in an ordered row of labor, towering architecture of time that never moved while the sun spun round and round.

Yan kept his head down like all the rest. The sun was dishonored by the glaring of human eyes. But at night when the sun had gone and the stones were left for another day, there were times when he would cast his eyes up past the coil of rock and stone, and the stars would shine down on him like flashing grains of sand along a distant ocean shore. Never just one star, a universe of stars. Others looked too. Who had placed those stars there? One star after another. And were they, too, slowly erecting a pyramid into the space between, a bridge toward the infinite where one day all will meet?

He dreamed of man hoisting stones along a rigging. He dreamed of so many stones they could not be lifted or heft, but simply rolled into place, until not one was left over. Until the tower stretched higher than the eye could see and still there was more space to fill. He dreamed of removing the stones from the corners of the lower foundation and carting them off to the top, unbuilding the building until the structure was built on nothing but air, floating higher and constantly stretched further in an endless recycling space, but still there was no end in sight, the higher it went the thinner the stones, and when they were one on top of the other, every stone in what was once the world left far behind, man chipped each stone in two, then in three, until a chain of sand was all that he had made, and then he spread each grain of sand apart, farther and farther until it was reaching across the sky and saw that he had made the stars.

In the morning he awoke before the sun and followed the narrow road with all the rest. Grabbing a stone he placed it lovingly among the rest, a little bit higher, and pressed it down. Then reached for another.

In dreaming we cease to be the dreamers, since before the first dreamer there was a dream. Before the chicken there was an egg, laid by the chicken which was borne of an egg in a formula that spirals back on itself until it can never end, but the formula exists. So too with dreams. Immune to gravity and time, the dreamer follows them into the dark caverns of nothingness where all interceptions of reality break apart, and yet the dream overlaps with the dreamer and he wakes, knowing no such dreamed thing can exist, and yet it does.

Julie danced with numbers. She planted them in her mind and they germinated vast equations that could explain anything and everything. As the fruit is in the seed, so too with numbers, but Julie was the neccessary intermediary. The tree uponwhich they blossomed.

She imagined graphs with an x and y axis, and the x was all ordinary numbers in succession and the y was imaginary numbers. Any point on the graph, as with any graph, connected the two axis together, only half of that point or any point was imaginary. Except for two. One was zero, and the other she could never find. It was that quest which kept her going, among many others. The point that would define the infinite. The point where sleeping birds took flight in the air or lovers came so close together that they would never be apart.

There were whole days when she would see nothing but zeros, real and imagined, in everything she did. In the row of houses along the trainride to work, in the crests of mountains in the distance and the tiny bulbs that make up each stoplight at every intersection. Maybe all the zeros together made up one enormous formula which correlated to a single point in the divine equation. Maybe if you had enough zeros you could find the crucial secret.

Julie recapped her life as a function in manifold to a set of known digits, longing for their unknown counterparts. Other mathemeticians sold their numbers to big firms with big paychecks, settling for a constant existence void without deviation. Numerals affixed sensibly to dollar signs which bettered a few and faded just as quickly into shredders and ash, a scribbled set of gibberish figures piled on the blackboard and illegible to anyone, meaningless to all. Zeros. Julie was after them and above them. A point on a mean line that curved into her dreams at night where she was a little girl at the start and being chased by a monsterous circumference, threatening to swallow everything affixed with faulty precision to the interception of angle and line.

There was perfection in her methods. She looked at integars which were real, the square root of one, the lengths of her hair in the mirror, the geography of freckles in her dying eyes, and was divided by their unique correspondence to that which was unreal. The square root of negative one, hair that was always growing even after death, and her eyes were alive. If she couldn't get it right she would do it again. Each endeavor rooted in the last, long strings of digits stretching back to the second she was born and reaching out until the day she died. Or was she thinking before she was born? Would she solve it before she was dead. Who knew how long any of this had been going on? Who knew how long it would last?

Julie twirled the numbers around in her mind, neurons firing gracefully into nuerons as the sun burns up its precious fires of gas as we spin around and around at 93 million miles away, falling symettrically into oblivion, wiling away the days and years in orbit until the inevitable collision of night that awaits us all.

As a paranthesis of routine guarded her primary functions, she watched as economies rose and fell, the train tracks slipped into the horizon, her eyes weakened and hair grew light, and the possibilities of chaos delineated themselves into the cold compositional waves of history.

Her dreams were tangential. No longer was she a woman being chased or a little girl being told to stand in a line which was only half there. She was part of a much larger numeric array, not merely a number in an equation but a fraction of a number, a divisor, multiplied with many others to equal the whole. The idea of a solid state, the exactness of cracks within an imperfect painting called Beauty. At night she would dream, and her dream would be of day, dreaming of night dreaming, of everything before it was divided into parts and knowing that one day all will come together again and be one, and be zero, and be equal.