Dreamscaping

Dreamscaping

A Concept

The incessant ticking continued throughout the scape. The alignment tool clicked, the scape trembling with each inch of the outer wheel. Cars hung in mid air, frozen explosions propelling them this way and that. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound. This silence would not last much longer, for with each tick the scape came closer to alignment. But we still had some control over the dream. Someone initiated a subconscious reset. A cold wind blew into our faces, accompanied by sharp snow biting into our skin. The cars, the explosions, the mayhem were all gone, replaced by a freezing Antarctic dreamscape.

The alignment tool’s ticking continued to annoy us. That was a triviality compared to the daunting truth: we were running out of time. The wailing of the nonexistent polar winds, which sounded like distant cries, brought only more reality to the impossible scene. It was a sprawling urban environment only moments before…

Dreamscaping was a dangerous business. It was done for clients who wanted to experience the thrill of exploring an unknown world, or living a lifelong dream (literally). Lucid dreaming was popular among both the middle and upperclass populations. It allowed people to venture into entirely new existences where the laws of physics and other such uninteresting things did not apply. Even with all that flexibility, people wanted more unpredictability and more adventure than their minds could muster. That is where Dreamscapers came in. A Dreamscaper’s job was to create worlds, or Dreamscapes, that clients would later enter. The depth of the Dreamscape depended almost solely on the depth of the client’s wallet. Dreamscapers had to have a mind with the capacity to create entire worlds, entire existences, and that is why there were so few in the world.

Then of course there was the danger. Entering the minds of others did not come without its perils. There were stories of Dreamscapers getting stuck forever, the clients trapped with several minds within their own. These kinds of fears always lurked in the back of a Dreamscaper’s mind. But business was business.

Now my team and I were constructing a dream for a very high-class client. But Antarctica did not coincide with his want for an action-adventure dream set in a city, complete with the usual explosions and car chases. The complete unoriginality of many clients dumbfounded Dreamscapers. “Why can’t they do it themselves?”

Again, as long as the money came in, all was well. As far as the actual Dreamscape went, it, for some reason, began to collapse. It was a physical collapse, meaning that the physics of the dream changed. That was apparent when time stopped. Although the collapse luckily went without injury, the alignment tool keeping time frozen, we had to wipe the canvas of the dream clean. The Antarctic plains were our usual starting canvas.

Physical collapses were not too uncommon among the more middleclass Dreamscapers, but this was a high-end operation. Worlds were carefully planned, characters scripted, and physics calculated to the last numeral. Physical collapses were virtually unheard of, if not impossible. And yet the ticking showed that the neurometrical systems were improperly aligned. To scape this dream again in the remaining hour of their time would be wholly unlikely. Although an hour in the real world is about four in the dream world, it still did not seem like enough time to start from scratch. The client could destroy our entire company if he were not pleased. An Antarctic plain would probably be considered unpleasing.

So we decided to start from scratch. It was better to try and still have a chance than to do nothing and fail completely. He could have an action-adventure in Antarctica. Cities were getting boring anyways. At least he would be surprised.

We would have him dream in with a coat. A very thick coat.

2010

This is only part of a larger composition, the rest of which, as far as I can tell, has been lost.