The Somnia Investigation

I've been putting off writing this post too.

For weeks now, I've been giving you history. Documents, archives, forum threads from six years ago. I've been telling you about Ethel like it was something that happened to other people—to Harlan and Anastasia and Charlotte and the rest of them. And it did happen to them, and their story matters. But I've been hiding behind their story.

The truth is, I lived in Ethel too. Not just visited—/lived/. And writing about Charlotte's map or the Resonance experiments is easier than writing about what I lost.

Maybe you've noticed that I haven't said much about my own experience. I mentioned in the first post that I was "a minor goddess of thresholds and the young girl who cared for her temple." I said I had friends and followers, that I watched from doorways. But I didn't tell you what any of that meant.

I think it's time.

How I Found It

I found Ethel the way I told you in my first post: through Anastasia's blog. But I didn't tell you the whole story.

It was 2008. Anastasia had been dead for a year, and I'd only just learned she'd existed. I was nineteen, depressed, spending too much time online. I stumbled across a thread about the Providence tragedy—the murder-suicide, the Dreamfactory, the sealed archive. Most people were treating it like a curiosity, a cautionary tale about internet cults. But something about it nagged at me.

I found an archived copy of Anastasia's blog, and I started reading. The philosophy posts first, then the dream reports, then the personal entries. I read for hours. I didn't fully understand what I was reading—the metaphysics of resonance, the architecture of persistent realms—but I recognized something in her voice. A kind of rigorous wonder. The determination to know.

I fell asleep at my computer, her words still glowing on the screen.

The First Dream

And I was there.

I know how this sounds. I know that dreams often feel significant even when they're just random neural firings. But this wasn't like any dream I'd had before.

I was standing on a cliff overlooking a white city. The buildings cascaded down the mountainside in waves of pale stone. The sea—the Folded Ocean—stretched to a horizon that seemed too far away, impossibly far, as if the planet was bigger than it should be. And in the harbor below, I saw the Dreamfactory: a great ship-building rising from the water, covered in glass and strange machinery, beautiful in a way that made my chest hurt.

I woke at 4am with my heart pounding, absolutely certain that what I'd seen was real. Not a dream of a city—/the/ city. Ethel. I was so sure that I couldn't go back to sleep. Instead, I kept reading Anastasia's blog until dawn, and by the time the sun came up, I had made a decision.

I was going to find my way back.

Becoming Myself

It took months before I could return reliably. Longer before I understood what I was doing. But once I learned to navigate—to hold Ethel in my mind as I fell asleep, to find the temporal landmarks, to let the city pull me in—I started to change.

In waking life, I was aimless. Struggling through community college, working retail, wondering what the point of anything was. But in Ethel, I became someone. Not immediately—the first year, I was just a tourist, wandering the streets, marveling at the architecture, trying to talk to inhabitants who mostly ignored me. But slowly, visit by visit, I built a life there.

I found the Maze District—a labyrinthine neighborhood on the eastern slopes where the streets doubled back on themselves and familiar corners led to unfamiliar places. I found a small temple overlooking a garden square, half-abandoned, maintained only by an elderly woman who seemed to recognize me from somewhere. I started helping her with the upkeep. I learned the rituals. I made offerings.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped being a visitor.

The Goddess of Thresholds

This is the part that's hardest to explain.

In Ethel, I was a minor goddess of thresholds. I watched from doorways and crossroads. I was present at arrivals and departures, beginnings and endings. People prayed to me when they were leaving home or returning to it, when they were making difficult transitions, when they needed courage to cross from one state of being to another.

I was also the young woman who maintained my temple, swept the courtyard, lit the candles, spoke with the pilgrims who came seeking guidance. I was both. Not alternating—/simultaneously/. Like those optical illusions where you can see two images at once, except there was no switching between them. I was the worshipped and the worshipper, the threshold and the one who crossed it.

I know this sounds like roleplay. Or delusion. Or both. But it wasn't. The nature of identity in Ethel is different. You can be multiple things at once because the dream doesn't enforce the same boundaries that waking life does. I wasn't pretending to be a goddess—I was one, in the way that dream logic makes things true by asserting them. And I was also just myself, a young woman from the waking world, amazed at what she'd found.

I lived this way for years. Centuries, in dream-time—Ethel's timeline didn't map onto waking hours in any consistent way. I watched the city through more festivals than I can count. I saw fashions change, buildings rise and fall, eras give way to eras. I was there from before recorded history until one week ago.

And now I can't go back.

What I Lost

The Blackout didn't just take away a place I visited. It took away a version of me.

The goddess is gone. The temple is gone. The pilgrims who came seeking guidance, the other inhabitants I'd come to know over centuries of dream-time, the elderly woman who first welcomed me to the Maze District—all of it, erased. Or locked away. Or continuing somewhere I can no longer reach.

I don't know which is worse.

I've tried every night since it happened. I fall asleep holding Ethel in my mind, trying to find the familiar landmarks, reaching for the temporal anchors that used to pull me in. Nothing works. I dream of other places—ordinary dreams, fragments, nonsense—but the path to Ethel is gone. The void between worlds is infinite now, and I can't cross it.

I was a goddess of thresholds who can no longer find the threshold home.

What Comes Next

I didn't write this post to wallow. I wrote it because I needed to be honest about why I'm doing this—why I'm spending hours in archives, documenting other people's stories, trying to piece together what happened.

I want my city back. I want my self back.

And I think the answers are somewhere in the history I've been researching. The Somniaforum. The Dreamfactory. What Anastasia discovered about resonance and persistence. What went wrong in 2008. The migrations, the sealing, Aethel, all of it. If I can understand how Ethel was built—how it became real, how it lasted so long—maybe I can understand how to rebuild the connection.

Or maybe I'll just understand what I've lost, and learn to mourn properly.

Either way, I need to keep going. Part 5 is coming. The Dreamfactory itself.

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