The language we were conversing in wasn’t English, Poleepkwan, or even Latin, as I’d experienced in previous trips and dreams. What it was…I don’t know, but it was basic and yet eloquent for it, a raw transmission of words and feelings back and forth without need for words. You’d think it, the other person would just know it, without any explanation on your part. On a whim, I glanced up at my antennae--had they changed?
Yes. The small, stubby feelers of flesh were gone. In their stead were two inflexible, silver-grey radio antennae, vibrating ever so slightly with transmissions. There would be a shiver down the length of one--somehow I felt this, even though the new additions were strangely numb--and an instant later, a sentence or emotion. Oh, so that was why I had such good reception: I’d gotten an upgrade in my equipment.
“Alright, you’ve gotten the main hang of it. Now to business.” George flickered blue and green and happily gestured to the surroundings with a sweep of his analogous arm. “This…is the inside of your head. Welcome to your own mind, Olo Doorbell Lamna.”
The landscape was complex and seemed to shift slightly in my peripheral vision, fading away and dissolving into vague shapes and blurs only to spring back into sharp focus as I looked out the corner of my eye. This must be my own doing, I think, I must be forming all of this so I can understand what I’m looking at. My brain is forming the world for my mind to explore in…jeez, this blew the homunculi thought experiment out of the water.
“Give the poleepkwa in the back a cigar!” George laughed, and I realized that I must have been transmitting the entire train of thought by mistake. Ah well…
…a forest. That seemed to be the main thing here. A forest, with large trees--some “regular”, others more bizarre and alien in shape, texture, and color. Occasionally one would turn to dust and become part of the rubbery, slightly spongy ground; another, smaller tree would sprout and set to work growing. And constantly, there was the swimming of things in the corner of my vision, that strange blurriness, a pounding of blood in my head…but was that just me? Something seemed off, and suddenly I figured out what that something was.
“Wait…we’re upside down. We are upside down.” The trees were jutting out into a turquoise and mauve sky like teeth from the top jaw of some massive beast. How were we possibly holding on to the floor--er, ceiling? Any moment now we’d fall out into the wide expanse of emptiness. That kind of fall would never end!
I quickly flattened myself on the square of turf that I stood on and held on tight. Quietly I began to pray.
That was a mistake on my part; the landscape went topsy-turvy and began to twist in all directions. The turf began to shorten, leaving me less to hold on to--frantically I tightened my grip and prayed even more. This process might have continued on for a while had not everything abruptly stopped spinning. Something inside told me that it was okay to stand up now, that I wouldn’t fall out of my own head. However, I didn’t stand up, simply lying on the ground and enjoying what odd version of gravity I had inside my mind.
George again. “Get up. Get up now.” .
I oblige, and suddenly my head is covered in smoke that clings to every centimeter of my plating and wisps down into my lungs, assimilating into the blood that’s still, sort of, I think, pumping through that network of veins and arteries and making me a little bit closer to it in composition. An idea blooms, bright as a flower and just as appealing. I‘d been looking at it wrong the entire time, oh Vishnu, oh deity, this was the solution--
George drags me out of the cloud. I writhe away and try to escape into the heady mist--the idea! The idea! I knew it--I knew it and I could…I could what? What was I talking about? Odd…
“I told you to get out of that fog. You stay in there too long and there won’t be anything left in a while.”
I cough, hack out a puff of grey air. Already the rush of concept and understanding was fading, the flower dimming and wilting in on itself. In a few seconds it was gone entirely and I had no idea of what the original idea had been. Turning to George, I blinked. “What was that?”
“Pure thought, unfocused and open to anything. It can form and interact with anything here, but when it’s in a cloud like that it usually stays static.“ His plates flicked red for a moment, then lightened to tangerine. “Your inspiration.” He snorted and beat at some of it that was inching out tentatively towards us like a tentacle, driving it away. “The stuff that drives you, makes you write and draw and indulge in all manners of philosophical contemplation.”
“So…why wouldn’t I want to stay in the cloud? If I was inside there…wouldn’t I become enlightened?” There was a temptation worthy of Eve and Adam…knowing that the potential for comprehending everything there was lurked inside your mind, but being told not to actually take advantage of it. Why wouldn’t George let me stay there…wasn’t his ulterior goal to make me understand things and find the Truth?
My friend chuckled and pointed to my head. “Check out your antennae, Olo.”
I looked up. The smooth metal had corroded and melted partway, turning a blotchy rust-red. The pulses and vibrations had decreased tenfold; I could barely hear George, much less the rest of my inner world. “What--”
“The longer you spend in that mist, the more you understand, that’s true. But at the same time, it eats away at you. If you give in to inspiration too long, you’ll be corroded beyond recognition and there won’t be anything left to communicate those ideas to the rest of the world. You’ll be trapped inside your own head, without any way out or a method to contacting the outside.”
He wasn’t just talking about my mind. I remember all those thought-jags I’ve gone on before, where I don’t eat or sleep but just think and write, think and write. My escape when I was small, alone and unaware of the fact I was part of a different species then human--had I really gotten that close to oblivion? Yes, I had; I’d be completely off my rocker now if I wasn’t booted out the door. Not the benevolent crazy, either…strange, incomprehensible, rotten insanity would have been the main focus of my thoughts. Would have been my thoughts.