Dream

Why is someone else's dream retold never as interesting to the listeners as it was the first time around? I think it's because so often dreams capture in a moment—a few words or a brief scene—a whole set of assumptions, knowledge that only the dreamer has in the dream. If the dreamer is good at remembering these assumptions, they can be painstakingly explicated—but then the impact of the punchline is so anticlimactic.

So there's so much that is crystallized in the look on the girl's face when she says to me “but you’re fully human.”

But then how to explain, in great detail, how in this dream world there are hybrid humans, their broken parts replaced with virtual parts indistinguishable from real ones, or more creatively (but more obviously) with animal prostheses and even more abstract things. But there are also full humans, and the Slip is this virtual reality kind of place (but somehow it also looks like Urban Outfitters with T.S. Eliot droning on) where you take the prosthetic parts of your self, leaving the flesh and blood behind, so any death you experience in the Slip is only a partial death because the prosthetic parts can be regenerated. Full humans don’t go into the Slip because whatever they take in there is their real life.

And I, suddenly finding myself in this world, have somehow expressed without knowing it or without meaning to the desire to enter the Slip. And I can’t turn back.