The Somnia Investigation

The Somniaforum had three boards. By April 2006, the Somnia board was filling up with dream reports, maps, and debates about what they were experiencing. The Lucidity board helped newcomers develop their skills. But it was the Resonance board where the real experiments happened.

Could two people actually meet in the same dream? Not just dream of the same place separately—that was established. But could they stand in the same plaza, see each other, communicate? Pass information that neither of them knew beforehand?

Anastasia designed the protocols. She was rigorous, scientific, determined to rule out coincidence and confabulation. What she found would change everything.

The Dream Trials

Anastasia had already proven something remarkable with Harlan: they could share dreams. During their private experiments in late 2005, they'd developed techniques for passing information through the dreamworld—specific details, messages, things that only one of them knew. Their success rate was startlingly high.

But that was just two people. Lovers, at that. Maybe their close emotional bond explained the connection. Maybe it was coincidence or subtle cues they were unconsciously sharing.

To prove shared dreaming was real, Anastasia needed to expand the experiment.

The call for participants went out in early April. The protocol was simple in concept, complex in execution. Participants would be sorted into pairs. Each pair would attempt to share dreams, passing information that only one partner knew. Anastasia would serve as the control—receiving private communications from each participant, confirming or denying their claims.

I've read all the threads from this period. The painstaking documentation. The excitement. The failures and the successes. What strikes me now is how careful they were. They weren't just dreamers having interesting experiences—they were trying to do science.

The Pairs

Seventeen pairs formed over the course of April and May. Most participants were forum regulars who had documented multiple visits to Ethel. Each pair had their own thread to record attempts and results.

The outcomes varied dramatically.

Some pairs never got anywhere. They dreamed, they tried to meet, they woke with only the vaguest sense that maybe something had happened. Two pairs dropped out within the first two weeks, frustrated.

Other pairs had moderate success. Occasional matches. A shared image here, a transmitted word there. Enough to be intriguing, not enough to be conclusive.

And then there were the successful pairs.

Harlan and Anastasia, of course, continued their perfect record. They'd been doing this for months. Every attempt worked. They could find each other in Ethel, exchange specific information, and confirm it afterward. The only question was whether their success was replicable by others.

It was. Martin and Lily—a couple who had found each other at one of Harlan's dream parties—achieved nearly the same level of consistency. They'd known each other for months, were deeply in love, and slept in the same bed most nights. When they entered Ethel, they could find each other almost immediately.

The third high-success pair was more surprising: Noel and Oscar. They weren't lovers—just friends who worked together occasionally, who'd spent hours chatting online about dreams and consciousness. But their success rate rivaled the couples. They could meet in Ethel, explore together, pass messages with remarkable accuracy.

The Pattern

Anastasia's analysis thread is one of the most important documents in the archive. Reading it now, knowing what came after, I see her mind working toward something crucial.

She had all this data. Seventeen pairs, varying success rates, detailed dream reports. And there was a pattern:

The pairs who succeeded were the ones who knew each other well.

Not just knew about each other—/knew/ each other. Had spent time together, awake and dreaming. Had talked for hours about their inner lives, their fears, their hopes. Had some quality of connection that went deeper than casual acquaintance.

The couples made sense—intimacy creates that kind of knowing. But Noel and Oscar? They'd never met in person. Their entire relationship was online: forum posts, IRC chats, late-night conversations about the nature of reality.

Yet those conversations had been deep. Intense. The kind where you reveal things you don't tell anyone else. And somehow, that created a bridge.

Anastasia called it "synchronization." The successful pairs weren't just trying to dream together—their minds were already attuned to each other. They'd built shared mental architecture through their waking relationship, and that architecture persisted into dreams.

This would matter enormously later. But first, there was another problem to solve.

The Time Problem

Here's something strange: even the successful pairs couldn't meet in Ethel consistently.

Harlan and Anastasia could share dreams reliably. They could pass information, confirm it afterward, prove they'd been in the same mental space. But when they specifically tried to meet /in Ethel/—to find each other in the dream city—it often failed.

They'd both visit Ethel on the same night. They'd both go to the central plaza. They'd wake and compare notes. And they'd realize they'd never encountered each other.

The same plaza. The same fountain. But somehow, no contact.

The thread where they tried to figure this out is fascinating to read. Hypothesis after hypothesis, rejected one by one. Maybe they weren't really in the same Ethel. Maybe the city was too big to find each other by chance. Maybe their synchronization broke down in the specific environment of the city.

It was Charlotte who found the answer.

She'd been conducting her ethnographic surveys—asking Ethelians about their world, trying to understand its history and culture. And she kept encountering something confusing: historical inconsistency.

Different interviews placed events in different sequences. The "festival last year" for one inhabitant was "the festival twenty years ago" for another. A shop that one person said had just opened, another remembered from childhood. The timeline didn't match.

Charlotte posed the question: what if visits to Ethel don't all go to the same when?

Time and Geography

The city's geography covered not only space, but time.

That was the insight that changed everything. When dreamers visited Ethel, they weren't just arriving at different locations—they were arriving at different periods. Charlotte's interview with the shrine keeper who remembered a festival might have happened during one era; Harlan's visit to the same shrine might have been centuries earlier or later.

This explained why meeting was so difficult. Two dreamers could both visit the central plaza on the same night, but end up there at different points in Ethel's history, never crossing paths. They might as well have been visiting different cities.

It also explained some of the inconsistencies in the mapping project. Why the outer districts were so unstable. Why the same street could look different on different visits. Not just dream-fuzziness, but actual historical change—buildings that hadn't been built yet, or had already crumbled, depending on when you arrived.

This was both a problem and an opportunity. If they could learn to control when they visited, they could coordinate. They could agree on a specific time, navigate there, and finally meet in Ethel itself.

But how do you navigate to a specific time in a world whose calendar you don't understand?

The Festivals

Dates proved impossible. The Ethelians seemed to name their years rather than number them—the Year of Longing, the Year of Amber Light, the Year of the Speaking Sea. The dreamers couldn't decipher the system of months and days, if there even was one.

But there was something that worked: festivals.

Ethel had festivals. Annual celebrations marked by specific events, memorable names, vivid phenomena that stuck in the mind even after waking. If you could remember a festival well enough—what it was called, what it looked like, what happened during it—you could sometimes navigate there.

The dreamers began collecting festivals like landmarks. Charlotte compiled descriptions from her interviews. Others added what they'd witnessed during visits. Slowly, a calendar of sorts emerged. Not dates, but events. Not years, but named eras.

The Festival of Molten Light was one of the first they documented in detail. Multiple dreamers had witnessed it, could describe its distinctive phenomena: colorful splotches of light appearing in the nighttime sky, growing bulbous like ripe fruits, until they finally fell and rolled through the streets, illuminating everything they touched before fading.

If two dreamers could both focus on this festival—really visualize it, hold it in mind as they fell asleep—maybe they could arrive at the same when.

The First Meeting

In early June, Noel and Charlotte attempted the first deliberate meeting in Ethel.

They weren't lovers like the other successful pairs, but they'd been talking intensely—in forum threads, in IRC, in long emails about what they were experiencing. By Anastasia's theory, they should have enough synchronization to find each other if they could solve the time problem.

They chose the Festival of Molten Light in the Year of Longing—a combination that multiple dreamers had independently witnessed and documented. They prepared for days. Studied descriptions. Visualized the colored lights falling into the streets. Agreed on a meeting point: the small plaza near the shrine, where the Ammonite statue stood.

The first attempt failed. The second attempt failed. The third attempt...

Noel's dream report from that night is still in the archive. The wonder in it is almost painful to read, knowing everything that came after:

"I was in the plaza and the lights were falling. Red and gold and something that was almost green but not quite. They rolled off the roof of the shrine and I could feel them pass through me—warm but not burning, like being touched by joy.

And there was Charlotte. Standing by the statue. Looking up at the sky. I called her name and she turned and she smiled and I knew—absolutely knew—this was real. She was really there. We were in the same place at the same time, and all the doubt I'd been carrying just... dissolved."

Charlotte's report matches perfectly. Same lights. Same plaza. Same moment of recognition.

It worked.

The Seven Meet

Over the following weeks, other pairs attempted what Noel and Charlotte had accomplished. Harlan and Anastasia met at the same festival, then again at others. Martin and Lily found each other at the coastal temple during something called the Festival of Tides. Oscar and Noel met twice more, mapping the sensation of synchronized arrival.

Then they tried larger groups. Three at a time. Four. Each meeting required careful coordination—picking the festival, visualizing it together, ensuring everyone's synchronization was strong enough.

In late July, all seven of them met in Ethel at once.

The Festival of the Living Sea. A celebration held along the coast, where the Folded Ocean came alive with fantastic forms—creatures that emerged from the water, danced and morphed and multiplied, put on a show for the revelers on shore before sinking back into the depths.

I've read everyone's dream reports from that night. They describe the same things: the luminescent shapes rising from the waves, the music that seemed to come from the water itself, the feeling of standing together—really together, all seven minds present in the same place and time—for the first time.

They'd done it. After months of experiments and failures and careful documentation, they had proven they could meet in a shared dream. Not just visit the same place, but be there together, communicating, experiencing, aware of each other's presence.

It was the culmination of everything the forum had been working toward. And it was the beginning of something much more dangerous.

What They Discovered

The group meeting revealed something the paired meetings hadn't. When all seven of them were present together in Ethel, the experience was different. More vivid. More stable. More real.

In ordinary shared dreams—even successful ones—there was always a fragility. The dream could collapse. You could slip out of the shared space into your own private dreamworld. The edges were fuzzy, uncertain.

But with all seven present, dreaming together, synchronized... the fuzziness disappeared. Ethel became solid as stone. They could stay for hours without drifting. The detail was extraordinary—they could read the writing on signs, count the petals on flowers, taste the salt in the air.

Something about their combined presence amplified everything. Their synchronization didn't just add together—it multiplied.

Anastasia theorized that belief was a kind of energy in the dreamworld. One dreamer visiting Ethel brought a small amount of reality-weight. Seven dreamers, synchronized and focused, brought exponentially more. They weren't just observing the city—they were reinforcing it, making it more solid through the force of their combined attention.

This would have profound consequences. The more time they spent together in Ethel, the more real it became. The more real it became, the more they could affect it.

But that night, all they felt was joy. They'd found each other across the void between minds. They'd proven that consciousness could bridge distances that physics said were absolute. They were pioneers, standing on new ground together.

The rest of the summer would bring them even closer. And then, everything would start to go wrong.

What's Next

The next post is going to be about what they found in Ethel. Not just the geography and the festivals, but the society—the culture, the religion, the mysterious robed figures who seemed to govern everything. Charlotte's work. The anthropology of a dream.

And the frustrating realization that their ecstatic meeting was harder to repeat than they'd hoped.

Comments are disabled. Part 4 coming soon.