It all started with a statue.
A forum post about a statue, actually, made by an art student who thought he was going crazy.
I promised you the history of Ethel from the very beginning, and this is it: a post on DreamViews from November 2004, written by a RISD student named Harlan Stone, asking if anyone else had dreamed of a statue he'd just discovered in Providence. He'd been drawing it for months from dreams. Then he walked through Burnside Park and there it was.
The statue is called the Ammonite. Or at least, that's what we call it now. I don't think it has an official name. It depicts a feminine figure emerging from an ammonite shell—one of those spiral fossils—with her arms raised and her eyes closed. Like she's just waking up. Or being born.
I've seen it in person. It's smaller than you'd expect, tucked away in a corner of the park. Most people walk right past it. But if you know what you're looking at—if you've dreamed of it—it stops you cold.
The First Post
Here's Harlan's original post. Read it. I'll wait.
What strikes me, reading it now with everything I know, is how normal it sounds. An artist having vivid dreams. A weird coincidence with a statue. He's not claiming anything supernatural—he's genuinely confused and looking for an explanation. He even welcomes the skeptics who suggest confabulation and pattern-matching.
But look at the responses. One person mentions dreaming of a white city by the sea. Another talks about the same city, independently, from across the country. And then, at the end, there's a response from someone named Anastasia_M.
Anastasia Marchenko. A graduate student at Brown, just across the river from RISD. She offers to meet with Harlan, to look at his sketchbooks and dream journals. Not to debunk—to document.
That meeting changed everything.
Who They Were
I should tell you about them, before they became who they became.
Harlan Stone was an artist. South Asian, long dark hair, always dressed in beautiful vintage clothes—rich colors, interesting patterns. He made sculptures inspired by his dreams, organized parties where people took psychedelics and listened to experimental music and tried to remember forgotten dreams. He was romantic, idealistic, a little naive. He believed in beauty and meaning and the possibility that reality was stranger than it seemed.
Anastasia Marchenko was a philosopher. Blonde, big glasses, usually wore skirts. Brilliant—like, actually brilliant, the kind of person who could hold an entire theoretical framework in her head and spot the weak points. She was working on a thesis about consciousness and altered states, reading everything from Bertrand Russell to Tibetan Buddhist texts. She was rigorous, careful, skeptical of her own conclusions. She wanted to know what was true, even if it was uncomfortable.
They were both in their early twenties. They lived a few miles apart in Providence, Rhode Island. They found each other through a forum post about a statue.
And within a year, they had proven—to themselves, at least—that shared dream realms were real.
The Experiments
After that first meeting, Harlan and Anastasia started conducting experiments. They developed protocols for testing whether information could be transmitted through shared dreams. One of them would "place" a piece of information in the dream city; the other would try to receive it.
Anastasia wrote about these experiments in December 2005. It's dry, academic, carefully hedged—she was a scientist, not a mystic. But the results she describes are remarkable. When both dreamers reached "the city," there was a statistically significant correlation between placed and received information. When they didn't reach the city, there was no correlation.
The city itself was the medium. Not just a shared dream, but a shared /place/—one that enabled communication in a way ordinary dreams couldn't.
Anastasia also mentions finding the work of Tumanov, a Soviet researcher who'd proposed the existence of "shared persistent realms" decades earlier. She was starting to build a theoretical framework. She was starting to believe this might be real.
Harlan's Parties
While Anastasia was running experiments and translating Russian texts, Harlan was doing something different. He was throwing parties.
This sounds less important, but it wasn't. Harlan's dream parties—held in his increasingly elaborate apartment, full of sculptures and installations based on his dream memories—became a gathering point for people who'd had similar experiences. If you'd dreamed of a white city by the sea and didn't know what it meant, you might find your way to one of Harlan's parties. And there you'd meet others who'd seen the same things.
Martin and Lily found each other at one of these parties. They became part of the core group. So did others who didn't end up at the Dreamfactory but who helped spread the word, helped build the community.
Anastasia thought Harlan was being unscientific—inviting strangers to get high and talk about dreams wasn't exactly controlled research. But Harlan understood something she didn't, not yet: that belief matters. That when people come together and share their experiences, something happens. The dreams get clearer. The city gets more solid. The connection strengthens.
They were both right, in their ways. And they were both wrong about things that would matter later.
The Meeting
In March 2006, another dreamer found the statue.
His name was Noel Veil. A network consultant from Boston, down in Providence for work. He saw the Ammonite in Burnside Park and recognized it immediately—he'd dreamed of it, just like Harlan had. He searched online, found Harlan's forum post, and emailed Anastasia.
They met at Harlan's apartment. Noel was overwhelmed—by the art, by the other dreamers, by the realization that he wasn't alone. They talked late into the night about dreams and consciousness and the possibility that everything they thought they knew about reality was wrong.
And the next day, Noel created the Somniaforum.
The IRC Logs
My friend—the one who gave me the forum archive—also saved some IRC logs from this period. They're fragmentary, and I'm not going to post them all, but here's a piece from the night after Noel's first visit, when he was back in Boston and setting up the forum:
Read the full IRC log from March 15, 2006
That's where the name came from. That's where everything came from.
Three people in a chat room, late at night, deciding to spiral into something new.
What's Next
In the next post, I'm going to tell you about the Somniaforum—the online community that made Ethel real. The early threads, the first maps, the debates about what was "really" happening. The moment they learned the city had a name.
But I wanted to start here, with the statue. With Harlan's forum post and Anastasia's experiments and Noel's sleepless night setting up a forum.
Because this is the seed. Everything that happened—the Dreamfactory, the migrations, the sealing, the Blackout—all of it grew from this moment. Two people meeting because of a statue. Three people deciding to build something together.
It was innocent. It was hopeful. It was the beginning.
And the Ammonite is still there, in Burnside Park. A feminine figure emerging from a spiral shell, arms raised, eyes closed. Waiting to be dreamed.
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