The Current Trial
I’m dreaming. At least I think I am. I am have amnesia again, which always makes it difficult to reality-orient. Yet I know it’s happening again, which means that this is not my primary reality. Unless I’m caught in a loop in which I believe I have amnesia, but in fact there was nothing to forget because the loop is all there is.
So my work day begins. I have a routine now. I check the backs of my hands. I try to remember my street address. I try a mental math calculation. A failure of any of these tests means I’m dreaming. I know that I’ll wake up in some banal existence in an English-speaking country. But not all my dreams are in English, so I’m not sure. The only place I can actually remember waking up is my dorm room here at the school. And this school is anything but banal.
The dream guides are senior dreamers with phenomenal insight into the true nature of reality, which they seemingly expose through irreal phenomena or conduct to mind-bending dreamscapes. They speak sparingly. They are not emotionless, but they are extremely mindful of their every gesture and word.
I don’t remember how I transitioned from lone dreamer to student among other students, but since then, my dream life has been this one thing. We are taught, and we are tested.
Yet in this state of awareness, I am beset with amnesia or false memories of my waking life. I sometimes dream that I awake, but I am some other person. My appearance here is not stable. I can be any age, gender, and ethnicity. I am not sure who I am, other than the student who passed/failed the last test. However, I’m not sure anything else matters. I’m not sure I would want any other life. I wonder whether my waking life is real, or just another dream from which I awake and seemingly forget as the day’s business imposes itself.
Right now, it looks like I and my teammates are in some kind of post-apocalyptic scene with one shiny magical building as our goal. We’re ducking behind abandoned equipment under heavy fire and trying to maneuver our way closer. The solution to the puzzle must involve the building because the building has a center that is somehow changing. My guess it that it’s hyper-dimensional because we are constantly exposed to new facets of the same thing.
The last test had to do with a four-dimensional gyroscope. It filled the space of a room and was swinging around crazily. Just as your hand disappears behind a held book in the third dimension, parts of the gyroscope disappeared into a fourth. Our task was to cross the room. My teammates and I (there are three men and one woman) managed to get on the thing and were taken for a dizzying ride. Motion in the fourth dimension doesn’t feel like motion, rather, the room folds in on itself and re-exposes some new view of itself. Therein lay the challenge. The goal was to exit in the same 3D perspective as we had entered. After considerable disorientation and fumbling, we managed to crawl across the careening surfaces and get off in the right perspective. And all of us. We hadn’t lost a single member in another perspective. We were elated. The dream guides said nothing, but I believe they were secretly pleased.
What hubris we had, evaporated maybe somewhere after the tenth iteration of the current exercise. I don’t know which iteration we are on now. Past fifty. I have the impression of performing the same test for hours on end, in multiple sessions, and now I’ve lost track of how long we’ve been at it, and worse, I’ve lost track of failed tactics that we’ve tried before, and I’m worried that we should be repeating them. I’m worried that we’re going to be here a long, long time.
I know that if I’m killed, the simulation will reset, and I’ll find myself a hundred meters rearward with my teammates. We’ll use hand signals to organize a new approach. Yet I truly dread dying. It’s not like a video game. It hurts. Despite all logic, I feel the same fear and dread and hopelessness as if it were the last time. I can only imagine that the dream guides set it up this way. But to what end? To keep us from fooling around?
Maybe we’re supposed to link minds so that we get a tactical overview? Maybe we can use the fourth dimension to get into the building from another perspective? Maybe the goal is just to get us inured to dying, because I truly cannot see a solution to this puzzle.
The woman has dived behind a transport palette to my left. In the last trial, she took a high-calibre round in the chest, which left a gaping wound. She died instantly. The time before that, she was struck in the neck. It didn’t kill her immediately. I think she either choked to death or drowned in her own blood.
We see another comrade go down. She is grim and resolute. She is trapped in this same dreadful loop as I am, but we have never spoken about it or hugged or complained. There was never any time for that.
I wonder if she is amnesiac, like me, which serves only to heighten my dread of dying. I don’t remember anything to wake up to, and frankly, I’ve become uncertain as to whether I have ever awakened. Perhaps someone awakens, remembering my trials, like someone watching a film. Maybe I’ll still be here. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember. Someone will wake up, believing he had a dream, but in fact, he’d only peered into my on-going life.
I wonder if the dreamer up there ever wonders about his own existence. Is he/she being dreamed by a yet higher consciousness? Does he struggle with amnesia of his waking life? Will his death be painful, but not fatal? I wonder, does he accept his trials? He must have trials. What is existence without trials?
I turn to the woman to signal that I will lay suppressive fire. It’s time to move.