Julia stopped by today with some materials from her Zielinski research. I need to document what she brought because it may change everything we thought we knew about Ethel.
Who Julia Is
Julia Warren is a documentary filmmaker who's been researching Janusz Zielinski for almost a decade. She found his films in the 80s, became obsessed, tracked down everyone who knew him. She's working on a documentary about his life and work.
She found the Somniaforum through our thread about his films. After lurking for months, she came to the opening party. Today she brought what she's gathered.
The Archives
Box after box. Film reels, photographs, interview transcripts, notebooks, letters.
Some highlights:
More films: There are at least two more Zielinski films we haven't seen. Julia has the only known copies. One is entirely set in what appears to be Ethel's coastal district. The other focuses on the tunnels.
Photographs: Zielinski kept a camera by his bed. When he woke from significant dreams, he'd immediately sketch what he'd seen. Julia has dozens of these sketches. The accuracy is remarkable - places we've all visited, rendered decades before we were born.
Interviews: Julia recorded conversations with Zielinski's collaborators. Several of them report similar dream experiences. One actress says she started dreaming of "the white city" after working on his films, and never stopped.
The Book
But the most important thing Julia found is a book. Unpublished, hand-bound, in Russian.
Anastasia's already started translating. It's by a researcher named Andrei Tumanov - the same Tumanov we've found fragmentary references to in early Soviet dream literature. This appears to be his complete manuscript.
Preliminary assessment: Tumanov and his team at a Soviet research institute conducted systematic exploration of shared dream realms in the 1960s and 70s. They found Ethel - they have another name for it, something Anastasia is still working on. They mapped it. They documented its inhabitants and culture.
And they went into the tunnels.
What's In The Tunnels
I'm not going to share everything here. Some of it is disturbing. Some of it we need to understand better before we can responsibly discuss it.
But I'll say this: Tumanov's team went deeper than any of us have. They found things. Chambers that don't exist until you believe in them. Entities that are not dream-people in any recognizable sense.
And they found something that spoke to them.
The manuscript ends abruptly in 1977. Tumanov and his entire research team disappeared that year. The institute was shut down. The records were destroyed - except for this one book, which somehow made its way through collector networks to Julia.
What This Means
We're not the first. The city has been there all along. People have been finding it, exploring it, documenting it. And something in the tunnels has been waiting.
We need to discuss this. Soon.