The Somnia Investigation

For a long time I visited Ethel every evening. I was a minor goddess of thresholds and the young girl who cared for her temple. I had friends and followers and I watched from doorways and crossroads as the city lived and breathed through me and around me. I felt a part of the city, and that the city was a part of me. I lived there from the city's earliest days until the day, one week ago, that it vanished.

If you're not an oneironaut, I probably sound mad. But this is the life I've been living for years—centuries, millennia in dream-time—ever since I found out that dream worlds are real, offering possibilities infinitely richer than here on Earth. I'm not going to try to convince you that persistent shared realms exist (maybe I'll write that post someday?), so if you don't believe in them, you can stop reading now. Or keep reading my delusional ravings, whatever you want.

For those of us who knew the way, Ethel was always there, just a short hop across the void. Now the void has eaten it, and Ethel is no more. We frequent commuters, boarding trains now missing a stop, are left with nothing but questions.

Has the city truly been destroyed? If it has, this amounts to an incalculable loss of life. We all had friends, lovers, selves who were in the city, waiting for us to return to them. We cannot return, but are they still waiting? Have they simply been cut off from Earth, the void between worlds infinitely extended, or has their existence itself been ended?

Ethel was the first known shared dream city, an extraordinarily stable place for which there is evidence spanning centuries. Its dreamers were the ones who established the now-flourishing shared dreaming community, and there is more known about it than about every other shared realm combined. So how can it, of all places, simply have vanished?

You probably know about it from the recent debates around migration, which have consumed the community and brought some unwelcome mainstream attention after several deaths were linked to it. It's bad! Don't do it! But the idea didn't come from Ethel, or not exactly... maybe you've wondered why some people have started calling it "Aethel"? Well, those people are infected by... something, we think, maybe the same something that infected Anastasia, because there was definitely something wrong with Anastasia, which I'll get into soon.

Despite its long life and extensive documentation, Ethel has had a troubled history since its online presence began in 2006. Yes, 2006—years before r/SharedDreaming existed or shared dreaming became a popular phenomenon. The original Somniaforum started it all. It was the source of many ideas and techniques that are now commonly shared among dreamers, but it shut down after less than two years, when two of its founders died in an apparent murder-suicide. It made shockwaves in the community at the time, and along with the shutdown of the forum, the shared dreaming community sort of went into hibernation for a couple of years.

I've been part of this for so long, since before there was a subreddit, and it was already crazy then. My first dream of Ethel was after reading about Anastasia's death. I admit, I saw the strange place where they lived—the Dreamfactory—and I thought it was beautiful, and I wanted to understand what had happened there. So I went deep into research mode, digging up everything I could about what had happened, which wasn't easy to find at the time. Not that it is now.

I found Anastasia's blog, and I read it for hours, learning for the first time about the metaphysics of the dream world and about her explorations of Ethel, and when I fell asleep I was there. I mean, I wasn't really (you can only enter persistent realms in REM sleep), but it felt like I was, and I woke up in the middle of the night with such an intense feeling of having been there, having been in Ethel, that I was absolutely sure it was real. I was so sure and so excited that I couldn't sleep. Instead of sleeping I read more of her blog, for hours more, before entering Ethel again.

I learned a lot over the years, and I always meant to write about it. I always thought I'd get that last little piece that made it all fit together, and then I'd truly understand Ethel, better than anyone ever has, better even than Anastasia, and then I'd write a book, and I'd lay it all out for everyone to see. I'm... not sure I'm there, but after what happened this week, I decided I need to start sharing what I know, to publicly put together the pieces, and hope that some of you can help me find the missing ones, so that we can all understand what has happened to Ethel, and stop it from happening to other worlds we love.

I shared my need to share now with one of my old Ammonite friends, one of the few who remain from the Somniaforum days, and they decided it was time for them to open up too, and to share something I had no idea still existed: a full archive of the Somniaforum, made shortly before it was shut down. I'm going to take some time to fit the earliest posts into my own understanding of what happened, and start documenting the history of Ethel from the very beginning.

At worst, this series will tell the story of Ethel from the earliest known writings until the day it vanished. But I'm hoping to do more than that. I'm hoping to understand why Ethel is different from every other realm we know of, what made it so solid and beloved and yet cursed, why since appearing online its history has been so tumultuous, and maybe even why it finally vanished from our dreams altogether.

This is the first in a series of posts about Ethel. I'm going to tell you everything I know about what happened. Comments are disabled for now.