A Dream of the Cosmos

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. The closest anyone had gotten to space was through controlled dreaming, but you cannot speak in a dream. All of their recollections were hazy: not totally unusual, but unusual enough to constitute a running theory as to why all lucid dreams about the cosmos could not be recalled accurately. All that could be applied were the rules that applied to all lucid dreams (also known as dreamwalking): the ability to influence dreams, the ability to maintain physical cognition, but the principal rule was the voicelessness of the self.

Louise slumped into her chair, away from the telescope. The observatory allowed astronomers to view the night sky, that they might uncover the secrets of the universe, but she was sceptical; they needed to be up there among the stars themselves. To ascend humanity to the next level, humanity needed to ascend from their meagre planet – their irrelevant fragment of the universe – and expand their influence through entire galaxies. That was ascension: not looking at the sky barely above the dirt, but action.

Tonight, there were perfect viewing conditions. With not a cloud in sight, the tapestry of the universe was laid bare for all to witness should they have the inclination to look up. It was both exquisite and haunting; each of those tiny white dots was a star, each housing their own solar systems with however many planets and moons and asteroids, comets, meteors. What were they like? Were they just like her planet? Or would they be beyond her comprehension, illogical beyond what she knew? Would she be disappointed? Would anything else be out there? So many questions that could not be answered from the walls of the university.

She knew in her heart of hearts that the answers she sought were a lifetime away, that she would not be alive to view the next stage of human evolution. Technology was advancing too slowly; they hadn’t even come close to a way to communicate reliably over distance, let alone how to reach space. And that was ignoring the complications being in space would bring up – would it be burning? Freezing? How would it affect the body? Could you breathe in space? There were too many unknowns and there was far too much politics, too many outside factors, too many stakeholders for science to advance at the rate she desired.

Sighing, she brushed her pessimism aside and stood for the first time in hours. A massive full-body stretch was accompanied by a damning yawn, at which point she conceded that sleep might not be such a bad idea. She planned on attempting to dreamwalk again. So far there had been very little success – the university forced all scholars regardless of profession to partake in oneirology to some degree - but astronomy was her priority. She wiped the exhaustion from her face, donned her robe and stepped outside – straight into torrential rain.

“What the hell…?” she muttered, hastily donning her hood before dashing across the cobbles. The sky was clear just a couple of minutes beforehand, yet the rainclouds had swathed the stars in their murk in the time it took her to get to the door from her seat.

“There’s no way that’s a natural occurrence, surely not.”

She made it to the other side of the courtyard, taking shelter under the doorframe for the dormitories. Removing her hood, she pinched her brow and sighed, slumping against the cold stone as she caught her breath. What did it matter if it started raining out of nowhere? It was just rain. She wasn’t a meteorologist, but some freak rainstorm probably had a rational scientific explanation.

Once she had finished chiding herself for getting so worked up over some “bloody rain”, she made her way into the empty lobby, crossing the tiles to climb the staircase to her room. She yawned loudly at the top, then gripped the banister suddenly as a new wave of fatigue washed over her body. She screwed her eyes shut for a few moments, letting the initial hit of exhaustion wear off before she began moving again.

“Hello Louise.”

Her eyes shot open and she stumbled backwards, falling over in the process.

“Bloody hell Ada!” she whispered through gritted teeth; “What the devil was that for? You nearly gave me a damn heart attack!”

Lit by a single candle, she seemed to stare straight through her. A hoarse croak responded:

“Give me your hand;” she extended her bony fingers towards her.

Louise studied the skeletal woman looming over her, the initial frustrations transforming into a light unease. Ada prided herself on her fluency in oneirology; she often came across as conceited and condescending, with a particular resentment towards Louise’s passing interest with dreams in favour of astronomy. Tonight was different; her one visible eye seemed hazed like a trance, the other was hidden behind her hair. Her tentative reception and offer of help was utterly bizarre given their history. It did nothing to alleviate the rising discomfort Louise felt.

“No, I’ve got it.” This situation may be strange, but she would not allow herself to accept any form of help from this wretched woman. At the brief point of contact as she swatted Ada’s hand away, Louise was shot through with a harsh chill spreading through her body. She wrapped her robe closer to her, but quickly forgot about it as her colleague began to speak:

“Louise, have you been dreaming?”

“Not particularly, I’ve been star-gazing.”

“I’ve been dreaming often as of late. I’ve come to an epiphany.”

“Is that so?” Louise raised an eyebrow; “This ought to be good.”

“You will learn of my epiphany Louise; you will open your mind and surrender your body to the truth, the terrible truth. Out there! Very soon, all shall become clear; you will struggle and fail and rise again with dreadful knowledge in tow. The price for ascension is high, but you will pay that toll. You will be the first to embark!”

Louise stood perfectly still and utterly baffled. She expected some condescending nonsense about some trivial dream she had, not this unnerving lecture about total jargon. This grandiose speech was a far cry from her usual reserved arrogance; it seemed tinged with a sort of fanatic madness. Her visible eye was almost bulging out of its socket, a pale foam was forming at the corners of her mouth.

She did not have the faintest idea what on earth Ada was talking about, but to step off the back foot she asserted herself.

“Um… that’s great Ada. Look, I’d love to keep this ‘conversation’ going, but I’ve been awake for nearly four days and I think I’m going hysterical. So please, save your ramblings for some other time.” She turned to move away before adding, “Or better yet, someone else-”

Upon turning back, Ada had swept her hair from her face briefly, an evil grin adorning her face.

What Louise saw sent her into a panic; she started clambering up the next flight of stairs, panting from exertion and terror.

Ada called out after her in a mania; “No! You don’t understand, you’re a pioneer! An architect! An innovator, lifting our rotten species out of the filth and into the heavens! You… are perfect!”

The crescendo of her demented blathering ended with a piercing shriek reverberating after Louise until it surged through her entirely, leaving a stinging iciness to linger throughout her body. She slammed her door shut, locked it behind her, then fell against the door.

She stayed like this for quite some time, finding company only in the adrenaline fading from her blood, the cold rushing to replace it. As her breathlessness receded, she listened intently out into the hall for any sign of Ada but was greeted with a deathly quiet.

Her mind was racing; something had happened to Ada, something unnatural, something strange. Her other eye – the covered one – was unexplainable. So many colours, so many shapes, bright and dark, vibrant and dull. It behaved independently to her human eye…

Louise clutched her head in her hands; she was going mad. ‘Human’ eye? As if to say it wasn’t human, that it was somehow alien – how preposterous. She began interrogating her lucidity; what she saw can’t have been real, it can’t have. Surely some delusion from her sleepless research. Was Ada even there? Was she talking to someone else? Was anyone even there? Had she been wasting her time the last few days? And what about the words she was saying? She recalled some freakish mentions of some kind of forbidden knowledge. ‘Ascension’? ‘The terrible truth’? What the hell did that mean? It was so jarring against Ada’s typical refined self-seriousness: this zealousness, this conviction was unlike anything she had ever experienced.

“I’m utterly mad,” she managed. Her heart sank at the sound of her voice, irrevocable proof that she was conscious. The confirmation was almost worse; this was a fallacy she was experiencing in reality.

“Oh god oh god oh god…”

She stood up and lurched across her tiny room to her window, thrust the latch up and vomited onto the street below. Oddly, Louise felt comfort from the visceral feelings the action evoked, grounding her into reality at last. Fatigued beyond belief, she fell to her knees and draped her arms across the window into the frosty night. She looked up through drooping vision, inspecting the stars. She picked out certain constellations: the stag, the mountain, the eye, the lake…

The realisation dawned like a doom. It was heavy downpour just a few minutes ago; those clouds were nowhere in sight, not even far away. There should be no stars, there should be clouds. But there was not; there was no evidence it had rained, the steeples and spires and rooftops and towers that made up the skyline contained no evidence it had even drizzled. Louise groaned at this discovery, destroyed by her inability to discern reality. She began consoling herself, wrapping herself in her arms, only to find her robe was still damp from her courtyard dash.

Louise despaired.

In an impassioned fit, she began clawing at her desk, scratching at her dream records, breaking her telescope, shattering her thermometer, swatting at her research. Glass bit into her palms, chemicals stained her clothes, but her frenzy numbed the pain. She eventually seized what she was after – a small tin of pellets – and guzzled the remaining pills in a fervour.

As quickly as this outburst began, it was just as swiftly replaced by a soft silence. Louise’s thoughts raged uselessly against the blanketing serenity the medicine provided. Her head lolled forward, allowing her to view her hands; punctured with glass and painted in rivers of red. She knew they hurt, but she was being taken further from consciousness by the second and could not feel them. She was grateful that her condition was not favourable; she would be asleep for quite some time in a yawning void of nothingness instead of being assailed by dreams. She gently slid down the cool tiles, her vision fast fading as she accepted the welcoming embrace of oblivion.

___

Space was cold.

That was her first thought upon ‘awakening’. A sea of stars swam above her head, tantalisingly close. A craggy surface cushioned her body, which she quickly deduced as an asteroid.

She attempted to scream as loudly as possible, but she remained voiceless, confirming her suspicions. She had successfully dream walked without the correct conditions or even through intention; an incredibly rare occurrence even for seasoned dreamwalkers.

She was in space!

The thought hit her like a hammer. Very few people since Professor Lucille, Founder of Dreamwalking, had ever managed to cross the boundary into space. Yet here she was, she was sure of it. A pioneer for the ages, having achieved what others devoted their entire lives to by complete accident. Euphoria flooded her body and she wore elation on her face. This was all she had ever wanted; the crux of her research – the limitations of technology – had been utterly vanquished by pure chance. She sat up, a silenced chuckle rocking her body, and inspected the speckled canvas she was now a part of. What lay before her was the opportunity of a lifetime.

The feeling of total autonomy within a dream was a bizarre sensation, not too dissimilar to a ventriloquist and their puppet. Louise stood up, revelling in the novelty of how space rushed her senses. A raw coldness swept through her skin, although the sensation was more refreshing than aggressive. The rock she resided on was incredibly rugged, abrasive to the touch but brittle.

Her asteroid was tiny, no bigger than her room, and despite its ugliness, its deformity, its austerity, she found herself oddly attached. It was her vessel for viewing the stars, sailing on through an ocean of discovery; the crudest barge embarking on the most pivotal journey in human history.

Time stretched, convulsed, and warped to where it had no meaning. Floating undisturbed through the void, Louise bore witness to all manner of extraordinary vistas: magnificent in scale, the weird and the strange, beautiful beyond comprehension, unknowably alien. She beheld azure planets sheeted with ghostly pale veils and tiny verdant planets prolific with strange flora. She saw moons ravaged by meteorites and others that were polished smooth to an almost blinding reflectivity. She observed soft amber comets streaking into limbo, leaving a blazing reminder of their path before fading into obscurity.

She travelled further, being assailed by new sights over and over again. Luminous nebulas hung in vibrant kaleidoscopes. Radiant constellations of countless stars coalesced into swirling whirlpools of light and colour. Innumerable stars passed her by: dwarf stars, imposing giga-stars, blood stars flickering faintly, ice stars with grey sheens, brilliant yellow stars, enchanting sapphire stars, blinding white stars.

Louise perched on her ship, drinking deep the undisclosed sights of the universe. Etched in her mind and branded on her heart were the visions of all she had seen, both great and small. It was almost too much to process; the bombardment of information and visual stimuli was accumulating itself in her brain. She cradled her head in her palms, smiling despite the tremendous influx of cosmic knowledge assailing her brain. Her comprehension of the things she beheld had elevated her erudition to new heights. With this information, she could become an innovator for a new age, casting aside those that would impede the advancements of the human race. She would be the one to create huge strides within technological evolution; she would be the one to break free of the binding shackles and create the means to reach the heavens.

“Ah, finally.”

Louise bolted upright to be greeted by a lightless abyss. The gleaming radiance of the stars was gone, devoured by an oppressive darkness. Clinging to the asteroid, she wildly peered into the gloom: eyes wide, fingers clenched.

“Oh Louise, don’t be afraid. We’ve been waiting for you.” The voice was a raspy boom, rolling through Louise, each word instilling a new wave of fear. She couldn’t discern where it was coming from; every direction housed the sound and invaded her head. Her breath hastened, her heart thumped rapidly, her thoughts scattered.

“Louise…” the voice drawled. A spindly, humanoid figure had appeared at the edge of her rock, causing her to scramble backwards in terror. It stood unnaturally still, with gaunt cheeks and a chalky complexion. Its hair was swept back to reveal an unnerving grin of human teeth, above which hung two black cavities where its eyes should be.

It extended a fleshless, outstretched hand towards her before it spoke the familiar words: “Give me your hand.”

Her eyes widened in disbelief, “Ada?”

At the sound of her voice, the figure was ripped into the void and vanished from sight. Louise lay horrified: the air snatched from her lungs, nausea rocked her body, her sight reeled in shock. Immense pain built in her forehead; a searing, white-hot brand of fear and knowledge. All the emotions she experienced viewing that thing had been superseded by one paralysing thought.

She had spoken.

It shouldn’t be possible, it was proven to be impossible. Yet it had happened, unquestionably. She rocked her body, failing to console herself, failing to think. She had no explanations; she was completely out of her depth. The pressure in her head was growing stronger, to the point where she could no longer keep it quiet. She began sobbing, babbling about “stars” and “eyes”, her chest heaving as she clutched her head in agony. There were no thoughts, each one eviscerated at conception. Voices started speaking all around her: hoarse croaks, young exclamations, nasally whispers, brutish shouts. It built into a crescendo of chaos and pain, no words to be made out amidst the tumultuous frenzy, all directed at her.

The abyss had become adorned with eyes, all with a piercing gaze directed at Louise in her delirium. The voices grew louder and louder, pounding away at her head relentlessly, seeking answers to questions she could not hear. Her eyes bulged, her head coated in agony.

The chorus was silenced, leaving one raspy voice behind.

“Give me your hand.”

Alone in the vacuum of space, she screamed.