The Somnia Investigation

I've spent the last week reading through the Somniaforum archive. All of it. Every thread, every comment, every heated debate about whether any of this was real. It's been overwhelming—not just the volume of material, but the feeling of watching something begin. Watching people figure out, piece by piece, that they weren't crazy.

The forum went live on March 16, 2006, the day after that IRC conversation I showed you in the last post. Noel's welcome post laid out the ground rules: document everything, stay skeptical, respect disagreement, no new age woo. They were trying to do science, even if it was weird science.

Within a week, dozens of people had signed up. Within a month, hundreds.

The Three Boards

The Somniaforum had a simple structure: three boards for three aspects of dream exploration.

Somnia was for the city itself. Dream reports, mapping attempts, theories about what they were seeing. This was where most of the action was—pages and pages of people describing their visits, comparing notes, arguing about what was consistent and what wasn't.

Resonance was for shared dreaming experiments. Could two dreamers actually meet in the same dream? Could they pass information that neither knew beforehand? This board got more structured over time as Anastasia developed protocols for testing.

Lucidity was for techniques. How to remember dreams, how to become lucid, how to control where you went. If you were new to dream exploration, this was where you started.

I'm going to focus on the Somnia board in this post, because that's where the shape of Ethel first emerged.

First Impressions

The thread Harlan started to collect dream reports is still one of the most fascinating things in the archive. Reading it is like watching a photograph slowly develop—the image getting clearer with each new account.

People described the same things. The white buildings cascading down a mountainside. The sea that seemed alive, watching. A central plaza with colossal structures and robed figures moving purposefully between them. The statue of the Ammonite in a smaller square.

But they also described things I hadn't seen before. Charlotte—who would become one of the seven—talked about a market district with narrow streets and glowing goods. Martin mentioned tunnels, entrances scattered around the city leading down into darkness. Others described a library-cathedral with curved walls and unreadable texts, a fountain with water that flowed in spirals, smaller temples up the mountain where people left offerings at shrines.

The details accumulated. And the more details there were, the more the overlaps became undeniable. These people weren't just dreaming of "a white city by the sea." They were dreaming of the same white city by the sea.

The Mapping Project

Noel started a systematic mapping effort almost immediately. The central district thread shows how methodical they tried to be—recording not just what they saw, but what they weren't sure about. The uncertainties mattered as much as the certainties.

What emerged was something like a consensus geography. The center was stable: the plaza, the fountain, the great buildings, the statue. But as you moved outward, things got fuzzier. The market district shifted between visits. The residential areas were inconsistent. Some people could explore the coastal cliffs; others found themselves slipping into ordinary dreams before they got there.

dreamweaver_94 posted dozens of sketches—you can still see them in the archive, hasty pencil drawings of buildings and streets and the distinctive curved architecture. Looking at them now is strange, because I recognize these places. I've walked these streets. But I didn't know, reading those early threads, that the sketches were accurate. I didn't know that the city was real.

They didn't know either. That's the thing I keep coming back to. They were arguing, debating, trying to figure out if they were documenting something that existed or creating something through their documentation. They couldn't be sure.

The Reality Debate

Anastasia's thread on the nature of the city is one of the most important documents in the archive. She lays out four possibilities:

• Pure coincidence—pattern-matching on common archetypes
• Shared archetype—a Jungian collective unconscious made geographical
• Collective construction—building the city together through shared expectations
• Genuine shared location—a real place that exists independently

Her conclusion? Probably some combination of 3 and 4. The city might have independent existence, but their documentation was also shaping it, reinforcing it, maybe even expanding it.

This was radical. It suggested that what they were doing /mattered/—that the forum wasn't just recording Ethel but actively creating it. That their collective belief was giving the city weight.

I think she was right. I think the Somniaforum is part of why Ethel became so solid, so persistent, so much realer than other dream realms. Hundreds of people, documenting the same place, believing in it together. That belief had power.

But it also meant they were responsible for what they created. And they didn't fully understand what that meant.

The Films of Zielinski

One of the strangest moments in the archive comes in early April, when Noel posts about the films of Janusz Zielinski.

Zielinski was a Polish-American filmmaker who made surrealist experimental films in the 1970s. Obscure stuff—you had to track it down through collector forums and VHS dealers. But Noel found three of his films, and what he found in them shocked everyone.

The city was in the films. Their city. White buildings on a mountainside. The spiral fountain. The library-cathedral. The statue of the Ammonite.

In "Passages" (1977), there were even tunnels—underground corridors that shifted and changed, and a figure watching from the darkness. Oscar, who would later become one of the seven, said he'd seen that figure too. In his dreams. Before he'd ever seen the film.

This was independent confirmation. Zielinski had been dreaming of the city in the 1970s, maybe earlier. He'd made films about it. He'd left a record.

In a 1979 interview, he said his films were "documents of a real place, not fantasies." The interviewer thought he was being pretentious. But the Ammonites knew better.

The city wasn't something they'd invented in 2006. It had been there all along, waiting for someone to find it.

The Name

For weeks, they'd been calling it "the city" or "the dream city" or just "that place." It was Charlotte who finally asked the obvious question: what do the inhabitants call it?

She'd been approaching the dreams like fieldwork, interviewing the people she encountered, trying to understand their culture. Most of them ignored her or seemed confused by her questions—as if asking what they called "here" was nonsensical. But some talked.

The name she heard most often, in formal contexts, sounded like "Eth-el" or "Ae-thel."

Ethel.

The moment I read that thread, I felt something shift. Not just recognition—I'd known the name for years—but something like weight. Like the word itself was heavy with meaning.

Charlotte proposed they start using it officially, and everyone agreed. From that point on, in the forum and in their dreams, the city had a name.

What This Changed

Naming the city did something. The dreamers reported that their visits got clearer after they started consciously thinking "Ethel" as they fell asleep. The geography became more consistent. The inhabitants seemed more willing to interact.

Anastasia theorized that names have power in dream logic—that knowing something's true name strengthens your connection to it. By learning Ethel's name and using it together, they were binding themselves more tightly to the city.

I think she was right. But I also think they were binding the city more tightly to them. The relationship went both ways.

This is what made Ethel special. Not just that people dreamed of it—people dream of shared places all the time, though they don't usually know it. What made Ethel special was that dreamers found each other and talked about it and documented everything. They created a community around the city, and that community gave the city weight it couldn't have had otherwise.

The Somniaforum was only six weeks old when they learned Ethel's name. But in those six weeks, they'd laid the foundation for everything that came after.

What's Next

The next post is going to be about what happened when they tried to meet each other in Ethel—not just dream of the same place separately, but actually stand in the same plaza, see each other, communicate. The experiments Anastasia designed. The pairs that succeeded and the pairs that failed. The discovery that changed everything: that time in Ethel didn't work the way they'd expected.

But I wanted to stop here first, with the early forum. With people sharing their dreams and drawing their maps and arguing about what was real. With Zielinski's films proving that the city was old, older than any of them. With Charlotte learning the name that everyone would use for years to come.

Because this was still the innocent part. The part where they were just explorers, trying to understand something beautiful and strange.

What came next was more complicated.

Comments are disabled. Part 3 coming soon.