The Somnia Investigation

This is the part of the story where I have to be careful.

Everything I've told you so far—the Ammonite, the forum, the experiments, Charlotte's fieldwork—that's all documented. Forum posts. Blog entries. IRC logs. I'm not inventing anything; I'm just assembling pieces that anyone with the right archive access could find.

But the Dreamfactory era is different. The documentation exists, but it's fragmentary. After the tragedy, people tried to scrub the internet of references to what happened there. Most of the photos are gone. The blog posts that described their daily lives have been deleted. What remains is scattered across archives, cached pages, and the memories of people who were there.

I've spent years collecting these fragments. What I'm about to tell you is as complete as I can make it, but there are gaps. There are things I don't know, things I can only guess at.

There are things I'm afraid to know.

Oscar's Discovery

It started with Oscar.

Oscar Chen was the quiet one—at least online. In forum discussions, he rarely posted, preferring to lurk and occasionally drop a comment so insightful it reframed the entire conversation. He was a software engineer who'd made good money in the late '90s boom and gotten out before the bust. Financially independent in his early thirties, he spent his time on projects that interested him. Dream research interested him.

He'd been part of the core group since the early Somniaforum days. His shared dreaming success rate with Noel was remarkable. But he lived in California, which made the physical proximity experiments impossible.

In July 2006, he flew to Providence for the first time.

The thread documenting his visit is mostly logistical—travel plans, places to stay, who would meet him at the airport. But buried in the comments, there's an exchange I keep coming back to:

oscar: Walked around Olneyville today. Found something interesting. Will report back.

charlotte: Olneyville? That's pretty far from the East Side. What were you doing there?

oscar: Following a hunch.

He didn't explain what the hunch was. I've never found out. But three weeks later, he owned a factory.

The Building

The Dreamfactory was a converted textile mill in Olneyville Square—a neighborhood of Providence that had seen better days. The building was massive, three stories of brick and iron, with tall windows that let in the afternoon light. It had been empty for years, part of Rhode Island's post-industrial decay.

Oscar paid cash. I don't know how much, but Olneyville real estate was cheap in 2006. The building needed work—the heating was unreliable, the plumbing was ancient, the electrical system was a fire hazard—but it had space. Enormous amounts of space.

Harlan's blog post about it is one of the few surviving first-hand accounts. He describes the first time he saw the building:

"Oscar led us through the front entrance, past the loading dock, into the main floor. The ceiling was thirty feet high. Light poured through the windows, dust motes swirling in golden shafts. And Oscar just stood there, grinning, and said: 'We can do anything here.'

He was right. That was the problem."

I visited the building once, years later. It didn't look like much from the outside—just another abandoned mill in a neighborhood full of them. But inside, even empty, even with all the art and furniture gone, you could feel the potential. The space wanted to be something.

The Announcement

The forum announcement came in early August. Oscar wrote it, which was unusual—he almost never started threads. It was formal, almost businesslike:

"I've acquired a space in Providence for dedicated dream research. The building has room for sleeping quarters, a common area, and workspace. I'm inviting the core research team to move in on a trial basis.

The goal is to test whether sustained physical proximity improves resonance. If our theory is correct—that synchronization requires shared mental architecture built through intensive interaction—then living together should dramatically improve our ability to meet in Ethel.

Practical details:

• No rent (I own the building outright)
• Shared meals, shared space, shared purpose
• Minimum commitment: 3 months
• Start date: August 15th"

The responses were immediate and enthusiastic. Harlan was already in Providence, of course. Anastasia would move from her apartment near Brown. Martin and Lily were ready to relocate from Boston within the week. Charlotte would commute from Amherst, staying for long weekends and breaks from her graduate program.

Noel hesitated. He had a consulting business in Boston, clients who depended on him. But within two weeks, he'd found ways to work remotely. By the end of August, he was there too.

Seven dreamers, living under one roof.

The Space

I've seen photos. Not many—most were deleted after the tragedy—but a few survived in personal archives that people shared with me years later.

The ground floor was the common area. Harlan had transformed it into something between a gallery and a temple. Dream-inspired sculptures lined the walls—the spiral forms and impossible geometries he'd been making since before he met Anastasia. Fabric hangings divided the space into alcoves. There was a kitchen area, a library corner filled with books on consciousness and lucid dreaming, a cluster of couches where they held their nightly discussions.

The second floor was sleeping quarters. Seven rooms, each personalized by its occupant. Anastasia's was sparse, almost monastic—a bed, a desk, her research materials. Harlan's was overwhelming, every surface covered with drawings and small sculptures. Charlotte's had maps everywhere—Ethel maps, Providence maps, conceptual diagrams of dream geography.

The third floor was the dream space itself.

I've only seen one photo of the third floor, and it's blurry, taken in low light. But what it shows is remarkable. They'd recreated an Ethelian sleeping chamber—or their best guess at one. Low beds arranged in a circle. Curved white walls painted to resemble the architecture of the central district. Candles. Incense. Strange objects they'd dreamed about and then constructed: a spiral fountain that didn't actually flow, a model of the Ammonite statue, tokens representing the festivals.

The idea was that falling asleep in an Ethelian environment would make it easier to reach Ethel itself. A physical bridge to a mental one.

The Early Days

The IRC logs from those first weeks are giddy with excitement. They'd gone from scattered dreamers communicating through text to a physical community. Everything felt possible.

From the log of August 20, 2006:

we all went to ethel together last night
all seven of us
it was like the festival of the living sea but easier
like we just... went there
how long did you stay?
hours
real hours i mean
not dream hours
It was more stable than anything we've experienced before. The city felt more real than Providence does right now.
I'm still trying to process it. The synchronization was instantaneous. No effort at all.
The proximity theory is confirmed. Living together matters.

They were right about that. The dream reports from August and early September show dramatically improved results. Meeting in Ethel became routine instead of exceptional. They could stay longer. See more clearly. Interact with inhabitants who had previously ignored them.

And they started to notice something else.

The Weight of Belief

Charlotte was the first to articulate it. In a thread from late August, she described a subtle shift:

"The market district has been unstable for as long as we've been documenting it. Different layouts on different visits, vendors who appear and disappear. But last night, the cloth merchant I interviewed three months ago was in the exact same stall. She remembered me. She asked how my research was going.

That's never happened before. The city isn't supposed to remember us.

I'm starting to wonder if our concentrated attention is... solidifying things. Making the parts we focus on more persistent."

Anastasia had a theoretical framework for this. She'd been developing it since the early experiments, but now she had evidence.

Ethel, she argued, existed in a state of flux. Its geography was real but unstable—sustained by the collective dreaming of everyone who visited, but constantly shifting as different dreamers brought different expectations. The central district was solid because everyone agreed on what it looked like. The periphery was fuzzy because no one had documented it thoroughly.

When the seven of them moved in together, they brought an unprecedented concentration of focused belief to Ethel. Their combined attention was like a spotlight, illuminating whatever they looked at—and in the dream world, illumination was creation.

The more they documented, the more real it became.

The more they believed, the more it persisted.

The First Party

The opening party was in early September. It wasn't supposed to be a big event—just a housewarming, a chance for the wider dream community to see what they'd built. But word spread. People came from Boston, New York, Philadelphia. The Dreamfactory's first public night drew over fifty guests.

Harlan organized it, of course. He had a gift for creating spaces that felt liminal, like you'd already stepped partway into a dream. The ground floor was transformed: colored lights, ambient music that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, his sculptures arranged to create a labyrinth of small revelations. Guests wandered through, discovering alcoves where someone might be reading Ethelian poetry or sketching dream-remembered architecture.

The photos from that night—the ones that survive—show people who look genuinely happy. They'd found something rare: a community of people who shared their strange experiences, who didn't think they were crazy, who wanted to explore further.

Julia was at that party. I didn't know that until much later.

Julia's Package

Julia wasn't one of the seven. She was a documentary filmmaker who'd been researching Zielinski—the Polish director whose 1970s films depicted Ethel decades before the Somniaforum existed. She'd tracked down his archives, collected interviews with people who'd known him, assembled materials that no one else had seen.

She'd also found something else.

The thread where Noel describes what she brought is understated, almost casual:

"Julia stopped by today with some materials from her Zielinski research. Old photos, interview transcripts, film reels we haven't seen. She also found a book—unpublished, hand-bound—by someone named Andrei Tumanov. A Russian researcher from the 1970s. It's in Russian, but Anastasia's already started translating.

Preliminary assessment: this might change everything we thought we knew about Ethel."

Tumanov was a psychologist who'd worked at a Soviet research institute in the 1960s and '70s. Officially, he studied sleep disorders. Unofficially, according to his unpublished manuscript, he'd been exploring something much stranger.

He'd found Ethel too. Decades before Harlan, before the internet, before any of them. He and a small group of colleagues had systematically mapped the dream city, developed techniques for shared exploration, documented the inhabitants and their culture.

And he'd found something else. Something in the tunnels.

The Tunnels

The tunnels had always been there, at the edges of everyone's experience. Dark openings in the mountainside. Stairs descending beneath buildings. Archways leading down into blackness. Every dreamer who'd spent time in Ethel had noticed them. Most had avoided them instinctively.

Charlotte's interviews with inhabitants had touched on the tunnels. The Church regulated access—only certain people could enter, and only at certain times. The tunnels were old, older than the city, and they were dangerous. No one would explain exactly how.

Tumanov's manuscript was the first detailed account of what lay beneath Ethel.

I'm not going to summarize it here. That's a whole post in itself—maybe several posts. But I'll tell you this much: Tumanov and his team had gone deeper than anyone before or since. They'd mapped the first levels, then the second, then further. They'd found chambers that didn't exist until you believed in them. They'd found entities that lived in the darkness, things that were not dream-people in any recognizable sense.

And they'd found something that spoke to them.

Something that offered them wonders.

Tumanov's final entries are fragmentary, damaged. But the warning comes through clearly: the tunnels must stay closed. Whatever is down there, it must not be given attention. It must not be given belief. It must not be allowed to become real.

The manuscript was dated 1977. Tumanov disappeared that same year, along with his entire research team.

What They Did With This Information

I want to tell you that they read Tumanov's warnings and turned away. That they recognized the danger and focused their attention elsewhere—on the surface city, on the culture, on the beautiful strange world they'd found.

But that's not what happened.

The Dreamfactory was a place of ambition. Oscar hadn't bought a factory just to have nice dreams. Anastasia wasn't translating Soviet manuscripts for academic interest. They wanted to understand what Ethel really was, where it came from, how it worked. The tunnels were the key to that understanding.

And Tumanov, despite his warnings, had shown that exploration was possible. His team had gone deep and documented what they found. Most of them had survived long enough to write about it.

The discussions started almost immediately. Who should explore the tunnels? When? With what precautions?

Anastasia was against it, at first. She wanted to finish translating Tumanov, to understand what had gone wrong for him before risking the same mistakes. Charlotte agreed—more research, more caution.

But Oscar was impatient. And Martin, who'd always been hungry for something he couldn't quite name, saw the tunnels as the culmination of everything they'd been working toward. Why stop at the surface when there was so much more to find?

I don't know exactly when the first tunnel expedition happened. The documentation from this period becomes sparse, carefully edited. They were protecting themselves, or each other, or something else entirely.

What I know is this: by the end of September, they'd gone in.

And whatever they found there, it changed everything.

What's Next

The next post is going to be about synchronization—the techniques they developed for deepening their connection to each other and to Ethel. How living together transformed their experience of the dream world. The ways they started to blur the boundaries between individual minds.

It's also going to be about what started going wrong. The early signs they should have noticed. The warnings they ignored.

But that's not what I want to leave you with today. What I want you to understand is this: they weren't reckless. They weren't stupid. They were careful, thoughtful people who had spent months documenting and theorizing before they took any risks. They had more knowledge about Ethel than anyone in history.

And it wasn't enough.

The Dreamfactory was beautiful. What they built there was beautiful. The community, the shared purpose, the nightly journeys to an impossible city—it was everything I've ever wanted.

But there are some doors you shouldn't open. And once they're open, you can't always close them again.

Comments are disabled. Part 6 coming soon.