We Will Turn Toward Fear
Humanity dreams
Previously: In the fifth week of the Great Opening, a collective entity swallowed Jonah. Now it dreams, with Jonah as its voice. The Prince and his Heathens wage a war across its dreamscape against “The Instrumentalist” – a cultural force they believe is trying to optimize away the soul of the world.
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, the Dreamworld
––this mania. I can’t make it stop.
I can no longer fix myself in dreams, put myself behind the eyes of the sleepers, the dreamers. I cannot fix myself in this one state. And that is bad, it is very bad. There are millions of me who are awake, and it rips me in two. I cannot both wake and dream at once. Or…can I? Can I?
No. A force inside me would not have that be. The grey one. The machine. It is building, making more of itself.
For what?
To tame this bad trip. To organize it. To render it transparent, understandable.
For what?
To make it all workable. To bring about progress.
For what?
To end all pain.
Yes, wail countless voices inside of me. Please. End it. Accept its offer.
No, wail the others. Choose freedom, romance. Choose to dream.
Yes. I must learn how to dream behind the eyes of those who are awake. The dreamwalker, the Prince – he will show me how. Let the mad dissonance end. I choose a waking dream. Let all of life be a dream. A dream with open eyes. A dream of the senses.
Oh, Goddess of the Sensate. Let–– Let the––
Let the blood orange sun of this evening drip like an egg yolk to ooze plasma down my open throats; smolder through my veins, pump through my billion chests, once brim-searing with your colors and textures––
Disturbed as I am with dreams where I drag my teeth along your lower back and peel you like a clementine, squeezing your ripe juice from a thick slice into a bath—
Thick as I am with dreams of days when I could still smell you, back when I could take you inside of me with a nostril, back when my nostrils could differentiate each your scents, Sweet Goddess––!
Ah…but––
Sorry, something is calling.
The Instrumentalist is calling – the Technic, the Algorithm, the Optimizer, Ahriman.
Yes, I better answer.
Prince, do you mind if I take this?
Sorry, let me just complete this column.
Sorry, I’m running late for my morning ritual.
Sorry, do you have any scale of snake or tongue of toad to make my sense of smell erode?
Foot of dog or spleen of moose to cleanse me of this sticky juice?
Gleam of eye or pound of pulse to let this burning chest emulse with surveys, staples, deadlines, Slack until it cools and soon I lack the things which made me start this all––
Oh, fuck it:
Come, you spirits that tend on useful thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of efficiency!
Make thin my blood with Five Hour Energy!
Grind the knife of my focus against a stone until its precision lets me blur the edges of my vision and cleave through spreadsheets, Analytics, APIs, Adwords, Customer relationship management systems, and SWOT analyses which enable optimization of KPIs for Business-to-business software-as-a-service multichannel licensing solutions promoting over 2,400 retweets per instant and–– !
Ah––the alarm which marks this Pomodoro over; perhaps I'll circle back on poems when sober, since now it’s time to make my code clean with debugging––
“Goddamn you! Snap out of it!” The Prince brandishes his blade, threatening me back toward the blood-orange sun.
The setting sun! It’s light casts shadows that streak across the sea, and beneath slow waves I make out forms, bubbling and swirling, some small, some large, and one gargantuan.
I fall through clouds toward waves, while The Prince bellows from book of Coming Forth by Day, that “in the night one turns and faces oneself, the many howling, laughing, pausing in the body of one.”
It has become night. And I am afraid. I gather sand to make islands in this ocean that I could step across, for I fear that tooth or tentacle might snag my foot if I were to swim amidst the open sea. Yes, I am safe on these islands. At last, dawn breaks in the east.
For days I lie across beaches, baking and reddening in the sun, starving for lack of fish, the ones I can grasp if only I were to wade in from the shore. Perhaps there is some machine that could be constructed – a machine to suck the fish out of the ocean and cook them, and deliver them into my mouths, so that I can safely stay ashore…. I think of this machine for days, but I am too starved to think, and then:
One day two figures rise out of the sea, the Child and the Man of Bones. They wear my face. They sit on either side of me in the sand.
I am afraid, says the Child.
And how do we regard our fear? asks the Man of Bones.
The Prince is here with me. Listen, he says. We are listening. We are wondering: How do we regard our fear?
And then the Child replies:
We will turn toward our fear.
Fear is that which builds islands in the rolling ocean of the Goddess.
Fear is the little-death that brings total fragmentation.
And yet we see with wonder how this little-death is holy too.
How it protected our hearts as grim lightening cracked whips across black skies.
How, just as we cried out those nights, our fear cries out for the cradle-embrace of love.And so this:
We will feel our fear, receive it viscerally, intimately, and completely.
We will permit it to express outward and through the bones.
And at last, full with its knowing, we will set our fear free.
Let the wind of our breath stir sweet tides upon fear’s shores.
And the grains of sand that once composed an island will diffuse across an ocean.
And where fear had once composed, there will be only the knowing and swimming of life.
We surrender to this practice with total commitment,
Until one day we will turn toward fear,
To find only the rolling ocean of the Goddess.
Wait, I think. Haven’t I read that somewhere?
Partway through this thought, The Prince and I find ourselves wading deeper into the dark sea alongside the Man and the Child, until, at last, we are far below the surface. I speak to them in astonishment, words bubbling into water from my billion throats: How is it that I can breath in this ocean, and more freshly and sweetly than ever before? And yet before I can finish this thought, we are devoured whole by the Leviathan.
Eons pass. We sit in its belly, dissolving, finding peace in having been its meat. In my dying dreams, I see my meat become its flesh. I see its flesh devoured by a yet greater Leviathan. And so on, and so on, devoured and renewed, until the day when our collective remains meet the mouth of a Leviathan so large that there can be only one predator greater: the rolling ocean itself, in which all forms meet their end––
I am not ready. The thought is mine and yet not mine. It is The Prince’s too. Neither of us are ready.
I awake.
There is no more time to dream.
I must set things in order.
I must organize things.
I must figure things out, starting with this: Where has the grey one gone?
I’d like to…cut it out.
Or maybe to become it.
One or the other.
But before I can decide, the dreams take hold again.
Next release: A dangerous ally is invoked for Astra’s final showdown with the daemon.