The Somnia Investigation

I've been putting off writing this post.

Not because the material is difficult—though it is. Because this is the part where I have to talk about Charlotte, and Charlotte is the one who helped me understand what happened after everything fell apart. She's my source for most of what I know about the early days. Writing about her feels different than writing about the others.

But her work is essential to understanding Ethel. She's the one who figured out how the city worked—not just the geography, but the society. The culture. The religion. She approached it like fieldwork, and what she found shaped everything that came after.

The Anthropologist

Charlotte was studying anthropology at UMass Amherst when she found the Somniaforum. She'd been dreaming of Ethel for years—the white buildings, the sea, the sense of a complete world with its own rules—but she'd never had a framework for understanding it.

The forum gave her that framework. And her training gave the forum something it desperately needed: methodology.

Her thread on ethnographic methodology laid out an approach that now seems obvious but wasn't at the time. Don't just explore—observe. Don't just wander—document. Treat the inhabitants as informants, not scenery. Ask questions. Record answers. Look for patterns.

She designed weekly surveys. Standard questions that multiple dreamers could ask during their visits, then report back. What year is it? What festival is approaching? Who governs this district? What do people do for work? Where do they worship?

The responses were messy—dreams are messy—but patterns emerged.

The Shape of Ethelian Society

Ethel wasn't just a collection of beautiful buildings. It was a functioning society with hierarchies, institutions, traditions.

Charlotte identified several social strata:

The common citizens lived in the residential districts, worked in the markets and workshops, celebrated the festivals. They were the most willing to talk, though they often seemed confused by questions about the larger structure of their world. They knew their neighborhoods, their trades, their families. The bigger picture was someone else's concern.

The merchants and artisans occupied a middle tier—more worldly, more traveled within the city, more aware of how different districts connected. They knew about the festivals in detail, could name the years, understood the trade routes that connected Ethel to places "across the Folded Ocean."

Then there were the robed figures.

The Church

Everyone who visited Ethel noticed them—tall figures in flowing robes, moving purposefully through the central district, entering and exiting the great buildings, seemingly absorbed in incomprehensible business. They wore masks or hoods that obscured their faces. They never stopped to chat.

Charlotte called them "the Church," though that wasn't quite right. It was more like a governing religious institution—part temple, part bureaucracy, part something else entirely. They seemed to run things. The great buildings in the central plaza were theirs. The rituals were theirs. The laws, such as they were, emanated from them.

Her thread documenting observations of the Church is one of the most detailed records we have of Ethelian governance. What she found was frustrating: a structure that was clearly important, clearly powerful, and almost completely opaque to outsiders.

The robed figures wouldn't speak to dreamers. Not rudely—they simply didn't acknowledge questions, as if the dreamers weren't quite real enough to merit response. Lower-ranking Church members—attendants, acolytes, the people who maintained the temples—would sometimes answer basic questions, but they seemed genuinely unable to explain what the higher figures did or why.

Charlotte theorized that the Church had multiple functions: religious (maintaining the temples, performing rituals), governmental (setting laws, mediating disputes), and something else—something connected to the structure of Ethel itself. The way they moved through the city suggested they were maintaining it, tending to it, like gardeners caring for an enormous living thing.

She was right about that last part. But it would take a long time before anyone understood what it meant.

The Map

By late spring, Charlotte had compiled enough data to attempt something ambitious: a comprehensive map of Ethel.

Not just a sketch of landmarks—we had plenty of those. A real map, with districts labeled, major buildings identified, trade routes marked, even rough population estimates. An attempt to capture the city as a whole.

She posted the first version in early June. It was beautiful and frustrating in equal measure.

The central district was clear. Everyone agreed on the plaza, the fountain, the library-cathedral, the government buildings, the statue of the Ammonite. The paths leading up the mountain were consistent. The coastal areas made sense.

But as the map moved outward, it became increasingly tentative. Dotted lines for uncertain boundaries. Question marks where districts might or might not connect. Areas marked "unstable" or "varies by era" because different dreamers reported completely different geography.

The edges of Ethel were more dream than city. The closer you got to the center, the more solid things became. The closer you got to the periphery, the more likely you were to slip out of Ethel entirely and into your own private dreamscape.

Charlotte's map was the first attempt to capture this gradient—the way Ethel faded from solidity into imagination. It showed not just where things were, but how real they were.

The Festivals, Revisited

Part of what made the map possible was Charlotte's work on the calendar.

I talked about festivals in the last post—how they served as temporal landmarks for navigation. But Charlotte's research went deeper. She documented dozens of festivals, traced their relationships, tried to understand the underlying structure.

Ethelian festivals weren't just celebrations. They were /events/—moments when the world itself changed. The Festival of Molten Light, with its falling colors. The Festival of the Living Sea, when creatures emerged from the ocean. The Festival of Veils, when the boundaries between districts became permeable and you could walk from one end of the city to the other without crossing the usual barriers.

The Church seemed to cause the festivals, or at least to enable them. Rituals preceded each one. Preparations. Invocations. And the robed figures were always present, watching, occasionally intervening when things went wrong.

Charlotte theorized that festivals were maintenance cycles—moments when the dream energy that sustained Ethel was renewed or redirected. The Church's rituals weren't worship; they were infrastructure work. They were keeping the city alive.

The Difficulty of Return

After the ecstatic meeting at the Festival of the Living Sea, everyone assumed group visits would become routine. They'd solved the time problem. They knew how to navigate. They were synchronized.

They were wrong.

The thread documenting their first follow-up attempt tells the story. Five of the seven tried to meet again—same festival, same location, same preparation. Only three made it. The other two ended up in different eras, or slipped out of Ethel entirely, or simply couldn't find the others despite being in the right place.

More attempts followed. More partial successes. More frustrations. Sometimes four would connect and two would miss. Sometimes pairs would find each other but not the larger group. Once, everyone made it to the same time and place, but could only maintain the shared state for a few minutes before drifting apart.

The Festival of the Living Sea had worked because everything aligned perfectly—high synchronization from months of intense conversation, a distinctive temporal target, and maybe just luck. Replicating that alignment was harder than anyone expected.

Charlotte analyzed the patterns. She identified factors that seemed to help: recent communication, emotional intensity, shared focus on specific details. She found that pairs who'd spent time together in person—not just online—had better results.

That last observation would prove crucial.

The Realization

By July, a consensus was forming: online communication wasn't enough. Forum posts and IRC chats could build some synchronization, but not the deep attunement that made group dreaming work reliably.

Harlan and Anastasia could meet in Ethel almost every night. They lived together, spent every waking hour in each other's company, knew each other's minds intimately. Their synchronization was total.

Martin and Lily, the other couple, had similar success. They were inseparable, finishing each other's sentences, dreaming the same dreams.

But the larger group—the seven who had stood together at the Festival of the Living Sea—couldn't maintain that level of connection across the distances of their separate lives. Noel was in Boston. Charlotte was in Amherst. Oscar was still in California, planning to relocate but not yet arrived. The others were in Providence, but even that wasn't close enough.

If they wanted to explore Ethel together—really together, as a synchronized group—they needed to be physically present. Living together. Building the kind of deep familiarity that only comes from constant proximity.

They needed a place.

What's Next

The next post is going to be about what happened when they found one. A factory in Olneyville. A vision of what they could become. The beginning of the Dreamfactory.

And the documents that Julia brought with her—Zielinski's archives, Tumanov's unpublished manuscript—that would change everything they thought they understood about Ethel.

Comments are disabled. Part 5 coming soon.