The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us that there are in fact an infinite number of universes, one for each possible combination of events. These are glimpses through fractures in the material separating our world from these other worlds. These are pictures that come in dreams, showing other places as they might be.
The Water Tree
I dreamt of a Water Tree. This tree's fruit grows to immense size, each one containing naturally purified water that the tree has collected over time.These trees grow in several types of conditions, and take advantage of heavy but infrequent rainfalls to ensure that their seeds would have water to grow when they fall.Fruits would be relatively small until a heavy rain came, at which point the trees would suck up as much extra water as they could and deposit it into the fruits. Overnight the fruit can grow many times over in size, to be larger than a man's head.
Cavern
I dreamt of a massive cavern made stone all black and grey. There was a large opening in the center of the cavern over which were placed several metal walkways with railings. This was an element from a game - an Indiana Jones game for the NES system (not in fact a real scene in this world), but made life sized and somehow containing me and other people. There were people from the office - I remember recognizing at least two of them. Basically the idea was that this was the entrance to our new underground office, and we would somehow change it regularly to be from a different retro game for nerd credit.The objective of this area was to get the walkways to fall down into the hole. This is sort of silly when you expect people to walk across the walkways to get into the office (in the game this is a trap preventing enemies from reaching you). I didn't get the impression that anyone was actually in danger though, clearly none of it was real but was rather some sort of shared simulation or augmented reality.Blaze
Transit
Closing his eyes, the wizard envisioned in his mind's eye the traveling room of the tower he desired to move to. He made a motion with his right leg like that of casually stepping off of the bottom step of a flight of stairs, and his foot came to rest a million miles from the rest of his body. He opened his eyes to find that the rest of his form had gone along for the ride. This was always somehow surprising, no matter how many times it worked.
The towers were arranged on each of many different planes of existence, each one a bright dot in the inky sea of nothingness that separates the worlds. The tower for a particular world would usually be placed at the center of its commerce and trade, a large city of the local variety. Each one was a unique experience, often set at the center of a culture and people utterly foreign even to the most traveled of the wizards, for there were millions of worlds one could travel to and few had the time or power to reach to the true depths of the transit hub's networks.
This world, however, was unlike the rest. Still newly formed, it was far before even the most primitive of its societies would arise. Why this particular place had even been granted the honor of a tower was a mystery to the wizard, but he was not one to question the choices of the Forerunners. They had come and gone long ago and did as they pleased with the Reality of Man they found sandwiched between their impossibly alien worlds. Dark and massive creatures, they had hewn the towers from the raw materials of a dark dimension of which the wizards were only now gaining a tiny sliver of a view. Seen through the clouded and dark amber of a wizard's farglass, the dimension was one of tumultuous foldings, making and unmaking, forever in an endless dance of creation and destruction. The essence of this place had been pulled into the lesser worlds and formed into whatever shape the Forerunners had desired. To a human, it took the form of a black and impossibly smooth stone, almost like metal. It was, however, able to change shape and reform itself according to the designs of its architects, leaving each tower filled with secret passages and dangerous traps for the unwelcome. The wizards had slowly learned of the mysteries of the towers, each one of them first exploring the tower of their home world. It was said that this was the same process that had been used by the first five, a group of wizards who had explored each of five of the most powerful towers on their home worlds before any other human had done so. They had unlocked the secrets of these towers and used them to travel to other worlds in the darkness. At last they had met, it would seem by chance, and formed a coalition to protect humanity from the terrors they had found within the towers and within the dark worlds that they had traveled to. Since that time, apprentices have been accepted and trained, with their final trial being the unraveling of a previously unexplored tower on a world - uninhabited or otherwise - which would then come to be known as that wizard's own tower. This often happened against the protest of whatever creatures had grown up around the tower.
This day, the wizard had traveled not to his own tower but to that of a former close confident, a wizard with which he had once been considered a great ally, perhaps even lovers. The man had betrayed the wizard's trust, and died at his own hands. Now he had come to collect a treasure he knew would be hiding nearby.
His feet had come to rest on the same dark material all towers were principally constructed of, but his eyes rested on a more spectacular site. Each wizard would remake the tower's internal images in their own taste - a hidden and unseeable world for any non-wizards, but a spectacularly rich world for those would could find it. This tower's decor was made in the form of a beach house, the wind and surf creating a pleasant sound outside the false windows set about the wizard. He tore into the house, wrenching open the magically protected ideas of doors - revealing all too real rooms beneath their facade - and found all manor of magical equipment, treasure, and strange creatures, but he did not find the thing he sought.
Frustrated, he stepped to one of the few real windows in the tower and gazed out across the world's landscape. Below him, as far as he could see, was an endless sea of a massive evergreen forest. In the far distance he could just make out a snow capped mountain ridge, extending indefinitely. It dawned on him that the traitor could have easily hidden the thing he sought amongst the forest of this world or its mountains, as there were no known intelligent beings here to interfere with the device. The prospect of searching the entire world was merely incredibly tiresome to the man, although a lesser being would have seen it as impossible.
The wizard muttered a few words and with this, conjured a servant from thin air and the ether. The servant was a squat thing in the shape of a large moss mound, with sunken eyes, and no visible limbs. It spoke in a dark and slow voice, in a tongue no human could understand, asking its master what was desired of his servant. The wizard spoke back to it in a familiar language, "Search this world for the Robe of Adam. Create what beings you must to accomplish this task. Destroy the world if you must, but find the thing and report to me immediately when you have done this."
The servant responded with its understanding of the order, and immediately slipped through the window in a strange reverse flow, as if the world had been turned upside down, and for a moment the mound had been made of water - flowing out of the window and into the sky above the tower.
Satisfied, the wizard returned to the center of the main chamber of the tower, and stepped up a step into another world. In an instant, he had vanished.
Creatures
I dreamt that I was a member of a very poor, primitive and nearly dying prehistoric society. We were regularly visited by strange flying creatures - they were half domes made of a leathery white skin with a flat bottom covered in very short bristles. On their top was a short stalk somehow used for sensory input. These creatures regularly killed some of our number, and had become part of our folk religion. I was walking through a cracked and dried-out river bed when I came upon a half dozen or so of these creatures floating a few feet above the level of my head. I noticed suddenly that there were actually two types of them. One would attack people, the other would not. They could be told apart by the shape of their stalk.I approached one of the beings which had a stalk shaped like those who attacked us and reached up to touch the side of it's dome just above the flat underbelly. The underbelly suddenly hinged down and I was drawn into the thing by some invisible force. I found myself laying / sitting on some sort of saddle / seat. All around me were glowing instruments and computer screens. There was a set of handlebars above me that could be used to move the creature - which was clearly some sort of vehicle.
Below me, although the underbelly had closed, I could see the ground - from this side the underbelly was completely transparent, probably owing to the bristles on it, which I had some sort of impression were actually capable of sensing light.
The alien creature / ship suddenly began accelerating into the sky, very quickly leaving the ground behind. I became aware of a voice of sorts - more like thoughts - saying "He will be terrified when it leaves the atmosphere." Another "voice" said, "No. He can understand. He will understand what it does. He will know what it means."
And so I did - I knew somehow that once we reached space I would still be safe although a huge part of my brain was telling me this was impossible, because I knew somehow that there was death in space and that if I were exposed to it I would die. I knew I was shielded from the effects of the uncontrollable nothing by the underbelly and some sort of invisible field surrounding the entire ship. As the ship creature left the atmosphere and began to accelerate away from the planet, I was very shaken to see the world drop below me, sinking as it seemed into endless inky waters. Then the dream ended.
Follow
Unblinking, the light stared him down in the darkness. All he wanted was rest, sleep, just a moment of silence and peace, but the light would not leave him. A tiny pin prick of bright blue light in the darkness, directed straight at him, never relenting. No matter where he went, this light would follow. There it was, after darkness fell, always still, always calm, always bright, as if it were an eye watching him.
He tried to discover the source many times, but always ended up in frustration. Always the light would go out before he discovered it's source, then reappear once he has settled back down onto his mat. No matter where he went in the desolate tunnels of the metro system, crammed with poor and sick and dying, or in the abandoned streets above, the light always followed.
Visiting Steve Jobs
A recurring dream.
It always starts the same, I'm outside of one of Steve Jobs' offices at Apple, because there's something I need to talk to him about. I have gone to see him many times, so this isn't something I'm particularly nervous about in the dream, although in real life this wold likely be terrifying.
Possibly because I am so accustomed to these meetings, there is always something strange going on outside in the hallway which I think is meant to make me uncomfortable so that I presumably feel nervous when finally going in to see him. This time it was something like they were performing autopsies on bodies connected to synthesizers, each one of which automatically played a strange tune as the autopsy was completed.
Of course I brushed this off as I knew it was just part of the "show" and went into the short hall that ran off the main hallway. To the left of this was the door to Steve's office. His assistant, a worrisome man who basically had no spine but who I cannot otherwise describe, opened the door and introduced me.
Now here is where things get a bit odd. Steve has about 120 of these offices on the campus. He uses whichever one he is closest to at the time when he needs one. The walls and floor are all beige with block construction like a public elementary school. The are all rather small, maybe 16x16, enough room for a desk and a little space to walk around - however each one has a very high ceiling, and piled right up to it, again in each one of these 120 rooms, is an unimaginable assortment of junk. bags of old clothes, Apple Is, toys, and all kinds of things that I can't recall, just piled completely to the ceiling and taking up the entire office save for the area immediately around his desk, which is always rather clean.
I asked Steve why he wouldn't just have someone throw this stuff away, and he starts talking about how it was hard for him and his wife at the beginning, how he was a poor college student, how he and his wife had to live in an elevator shaft for a year early in their marriage, and how he never got rid of things because you never know when you might not have any money left to replace something you didn't think you'd ever need again. This coming from a billionaire. It is quite surreal.
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