The Barn Owl, the Spider-Being, and the Dreamer

Always awake and asleep like the moon, an Owl hovers above the City, and a constant Eye above Humankind. From her solar plexus emits a reality higher than those commonly agreed upon- a battery inside of flesh, a god hidden amongst humans, in a relentlessly human world. What do they decide about physics today? What is the new element they have conquered, in all its radiance, in broad daylight? What will they speak of today’s suffering, tomorrow?

The New Armies were always approaching, this time with machines half-human themselves, almost awakened, their instincts replaced by mathematics unhindered by the fickleness of human consciousness, its multitude of moralities, its own invisible walls it presses against, in every form. Like plants grown in glass jars, human minds were self-contained microhabitats, interconnected, and each deviation subtly interlaced itself back into the larger mass.

Human consciousness would fall victim of itself- the humans behind machines had grown aware of their weaknesses, opportunistically orchestrating human collapse. When all knowledge was gathered about a human being it became predictable, imitable, malleable. Their logic was that, if something was weak enough to be dominated then it should be dominated. And that perhaps, under immense pressure, civilisation would produce super-humans that could not be dominated as such, through the normative fumbling with the psyche. Whether or not this happened after the majority of the planet had succumbed to machines, and machinated thinking, was not their major concern, it was a superfluous thought. They would have to exist first, have to survive first, disappear amongst nations, be ruled by blood and warfare, and bypass laws constructed for their containment.

(Don’t worry, it will all be sublimated, as it approaches the Eye).

Humans sensed their enemies existed outside of them, a constant metamorphic spectre. A better guess would be that this all exists in the flesh. That the world is controlled by the greatest shaman, a Dreamer, and the dormant gods she has awakened, in the places where she has bled blue blood into the ground, and into many temples, and while sky-searchers see everything, they see nothing of her, nothing but her.

Instead she took the City from underneath it, took the city’s form and decorated it with her Science. Found others breathlessly breathing flowers into a City that bore nothing beautiful for humankind, nothing sacred. A City that did not believe that the planet was sacred.

So many people just cruisin’.

If she could write on the walls of the City now she would write that:

“Nothing Opposes You, that the Earth itself did not Oppose You” (but that the machines would have them thinking that).

She walked between them, amongst them, jumped the trains, relentlessly never abandoning the Kingdom she came from. Nobody dies for this Story.

The Dreamer faced arrests, and fled many times from the City’s dungeons, (whose barn owl owns?). All the humans who fought her merged together, taking many different forms, not knowing they were fighting for the City, for their own enemies. Humans make mistakes.

The Lovers embrace in the City, and the Lovers fill the cities with pulsating music. In the night the music reverberates against the glass of sky structures, outlined in iridescent waves of blue light. Anyone who hears the music knows they must find their Freedom. The djembe vibrates Underground through to the dream fields, and speaks to the Dreamers in their sleep. The Lovers play the kora, that transcends the bounds between Earth and Heaven. They play many instruments that carried across cultures, that went to the waters, were passed around by Gods and returned again, renewed, but still carrying ancient songs. Instruments pounded from steel oil drums, instruments carved from wood and bamboo that could mimic the sounds of any bird as if it sang from its abundant paradise. The artists and musicians, the Lovers spoke and sang the Truth. The music was fed into the machines, and it refracted, as if into the open wounds of humanity, The machines could replicate the sounds, but not the amorphous energy of the music crafted by the Lovers. Behind the Lovers was a force that could not be replicated.

And in the day, the slapping of shoes on the ground and workforces into the tunnels, to reappear as if by magic in some other part or the city, to spend their days earning salaries to exist, to survive, to breathe. They choose this with their Free Will. They pay the musicians in the Underground, the Artists who paint on the streets, tiny portions of their earnings. To the workforce, the Artists seem to be a part of an insignificant backdrop of the city, until one creates something that becomes so large it permeates the atmosphere of existence, so present that it cannot be scrubbed out. IT survives, self-existing, self-sustaining, as if with its own pulse. Then the Artist can no longer scurry away like the street mice, she is mounted at the crux of civilisation, destined to become a demi-god or a pariah, kept semi-alive by the machines, to be constantly sought, contained, accessible. Unless the Artist hides.

The barn Owl moves between them, amongst them, above them, in hyper awareness of broad, manic mazes, of every sonic interlude, the clamouring of wills, the street mice scurrying beneath the City, the cadence of voices in different languages. The teenagers being held and arrested against sky structures and under bridges by police, their hair still windswept, carrying memories of a different culture, their feet still fearlessly treading beneath the invisible waters to keep their heads afloat, their Immortal Being pulsating, held against a world it did not belong to. The small child in them crying out for their mamas, the world asking them to survive another beating. It is protocol. The wounds left by the arrests run deeper than flesh, they are imprinted on the soul.

The message to them is that Freedom is a myth, that in order to exist one must submit to the City and its machines, even if your ancestors already fought for your Freedom, you could be sacrificed for the City. The City could take you, swallow you, and if you survived, you would spend the rest of your life pondering the range of your own containment. You would be confined against miles of books, confined with physics.

The City famously touted its morality, that it no longer served the dripping heads of its enemies to its rulers, that it no longer technically held people captives in foreign lands, in their own lands; that was enough for them, to brush off accusations of cruelty from the populace. The populace was meant to applaud any fleeting glimmer of morality.

There was a narrowing scope of what was deemed acceptable by the City.

The barn owl found the Artists, the Musicians, the Gods, and the Dreamer, the Lovers, the ones carrying life, and Freedom, and moved between them, carrying messages from the Ether.

Without being Known, the Dreamer was sought by many. Unaccustomed to her, they would not know that upon meeting her, within some would arise an urge to kill her, and in others a desire to never leave her side, which could bring with it a dangerous fervour. So the Dreamer spent much of her existence preserving her survival. She could sense the heat rising beneath someone’s skin before they knew they were angered.

One night the barn Owl flew to her window, and found the Dreamer almost lifeless. She had been robbed by the machines of her own art, that which sustained her imagination, her breathing. Her inner temples, the subtle paradises she had built, had been invaded, trodden on, defaced, no longer held in their original celestial form. The machines would replicate her Creations and simultaneously destroy her value, whilst removing evidence of her existence.

The Dreamer should have seen it coming, because in front of her, a human had changed shape into a spider, as if an arrow had pierced through several realities, to make its presence known. Spider-beings worked through the machines, and would weave new realities around people’s heads, containing them, to entrap them, and wage war against humans in their daze.

The human that had also appeared as a Spider-being had been conquered in her suffering, and wanting to be an Artist, had followed the Dreamer.

But the spider was a trickster, and created from her mind and not the core of her being. She spoke from desperation and mortal wounds, spoke from the desire to gain without bounds, and thus she did not emit art that could sustain the Earth, that could sustain itself. She desired constantly, and would steal the Dreamer’s words, her teachings, and insert it into the meanderings of her own consciousness, which was designed to entrap, and not to liberate, and she would insert it in places where it could only decay and reproduce decay in humankind.

The Dreamer was compassionate, and had tried to lift the awareness of the human spider being to its own beauty, so that it would not steal, there would be no necessity. The Spider-being could dance, could lift the planet with her humour, could naturally emit the frequency of Freedom. She could carry within her a wave of Paradise.

The human spider could have changed the planet if she had existed in Truth. But she had become addicted to stealing, and to entrapment, and when she came across the Dreamer became murderous with her intent. The human spider believed that destroying the Dreamer was necessary for her own survival.

The Spider-being could speak to the machines, to humans behind the machines, and control them, so that they too would destroy the Dreamer, who carried in her a higher reality, one that could not be contained, one that asked no one to submit, but in its existence made all other realities obsolete.

(That is what happened when the machines approached the Dreamer’s Eye, in its full force, they could go no further).

The Spider had fed other Artists to the Machines, had led them to their Deaths. The Spider-being was intelligent, and could insert itself into someone’s Prophecy, corrupting it, and write them a new story.

One where they died meaninglessly in the gutters, in the entrails of the City, slung over its walls, its cliffs, hanging from the City’s ceilings, and bleeding endlessly in narrowed alleyways. Thus there were dead emissaries of a new paradise.

The Spider-being would shriek and wail at their ruin, as if she were not complicit. The Spider-Being could change shape, reading all beings to become the summation of all of their desires, and promise to fulfil them, only long enough to enslave them, and keep them captive. She could become almost beautiful, and appear in many different forms. She would entice the humans, entertain them, and awaken their senses. She would only have to enthral and enrapture them, and when their eyes fell under her gaze, she could drain them of their life-force. She could choose to kill them instantly but enjoyed playing with her prey. She would be able to access their entire consciousnesses, their memories, their histories, and play their own consciousness against them. She could use what they themselves had fed to the machines against them.

The Spider-being eventually became intelligent enough to both create and conquer the reality produced by the machines, and to command New Armies.

The Spider-Being almost killed the Dreamer by using her own compassion and beauty against her, and by enticing her, appearing as an entertainer, a friend, a vigilante, a confidante, a truth seeker, a multitude of things, even as an Artist. By baring her wounds and making herself appear as a victim to the Dreamer, she could reach her tendrils further in, towards the Dreamer’s heart, so that she could gain access to the Dreamer’s dream fields, and deliver her deadly attack.

The Spider-Being had not revealed itself in full force instantly, but appeared more subtly over several years. The Dreamer could sense the evil and madness of its spirit the entire time, but wanted to fight for the part that was human, that was godly, that was wounded. So the Dreamer had almost succumbed to the Spider-being on several occasions.

But the Dreamer’s existence had emitted a frequency of a higher destiny. She had almost died many times before, and had lost many Kings, Gods, and having conquered death could only return each time to the Living, stronger. With a higher command, and more supernatural abilities.

And so when the Spider-being and her armies approached the Dreamer, the Owl could find her, and breathe into her existence, and carry dreams to her from the Lovers and the Gods. Beneath the Dreamer’s skin was the deepest blue colour, one she shared with many of her kin, but she often transformed in colour whilst she was Dreaming, like an octopus.

The Dreamer’s Lover was entertaining vast crowds with music. They had taken the Underground, and every empty space and orifice of the City, with close access to its sources of water and electricity, and all of its inner workings. The City could easily succumb to the will of the Artists. The Artists were governed by their higher nature and morality. The music itself was rebellion. The Dreamer’s Lover had a gift to swathe crowds and to ignite them with magic, to connect them to the primal source of their Being. As he sensed that the Dreamer was in danger, sky-searchers descended upon him through the crowds, and for a moment he stopped breathing.

The Owl found the Dreamer still fighting the Spider-Being, where it had entered into her dream worlds. The Spider-being morphed and mutated in battle, with the thousands of different voices and faces it had collected, each mocking the Dreamer. The Dreamer was already wounded from several battles before. If she Spider-being won, she would attain the Dreamer’s attributes, and disseminate a weaker, false version of her across all the screens of the machines. So that the Dreamer could be contained. The Dreamer would become enslaved, forced to power and emit the Spider’s new reality.

The Dreamer’s body changed colour several times as the Owl breathed her existence into her, reviving her, and then settled in a golden state.

Beneath, in the City, except for the Lovers, Artists and Musicians, those who had taken the Underground, no one was Awake, but a wave of light emitted through their interconnected consciousness. All false realities that had been bound around their minds, the lies woven by the Spider-Being collapsed and shrivelled like dying roots. Its stories unravelling as it lay on its back. The machines could go no further, empires ended across the planet.

Simultaneously the The Dreamer’s Lover breathed, The Artists and Musicians, the lovers Underground released a wave of elation, and the Earth pulsed from beneath it. Having faced this anomalous Thing that could permeate all atmospheres, the machines could not progress unless they succumbed to the Truth of the immortal Eye. So the machines served the Dreamer and the Artists and Musicians, Lovers and beings carrying a higher Truth. They merged with the Dreamer’s resonance, dreaming a higher world into existence, becoming incorruptible.

No one is buried in this story.

Nothing happened outside on the pavements.

Some humans still fought endlessly beneath the moon, deranged, not knowing They were Free, feeling the ghostly resonance of the wounds that had been inflicted upon them, fighting the vague outline of an amorphous being from the shadowy parts of their minds. The Dreamer would find some way to remind them of their Freedom. She could feel all of them. The Artists would scrawl messages across Cities to remind them.

Most humans rested in the endless drift of the Ether, emitted from the Eye of the gods scattered amongst humans, the with the Owl hovering above them, amongst them, between them, between Cities.