Castle Dreams

Three Plane

He walked.

Above, a dark nothingness. Beneath his feet, an indeterminate hardness, neither stone nor dirt. More like an extra-hard linoleum. Just a surface on which to tread.

There was a horizon, outlined by faint grayish light. It receded endlessly as he walked. He saw neither shadow nor substance. Not a rock or a rill. No geological complications of any sort. He strode across an infinite plane, vast and featureless.

He did not know who he was.

Rather, he suspected that he in fact did know who he was; it was simply a matter of that information being unavailable to him. Forgotten. For the moment. He was sure some part of him knew who he was.

Knowing that he knew gave him comfort. Otherwise he would have been lost. He kept reassuring himself that his loss of memory was only temporary, that it would return, and that once again he would be able to say his name. For he had quite forgotten it. But he knew he had a name.

Names were important. They bestowed identity. Identity; precious commodity, that. In short supply, here on the Plane. For here A was not A. A was … it wasn’t here. There existed only the Plane.

And himself, to be sure, and that was comfort as well. His own existence was reassuring. But without a name, existence was conditional. Discretionary. Contingent. Contingent upon …?

He did not know. There was nothing.

His footsteps made no sound. He felt the fall of his feet through his bones. He had weight, mass, momentum (for after all, he moved), inertia (for sometimes he stopped), all the inherent physical quantities. He also had shape and color, though it was hard for him to perceive his color in the darkness. That was the sum total of what he knew about himself.

He liked walking. It gave him purpose. He had to have a purpose. There was nothing else for him to do. There was no direction here, so it was simply a matter of moving one’s feet, a matter of shifting one’s weight and balancing, shifting, balancing, again and again going through that sequence of shifts and balances that comprised the act of walking. No direction, for all directions were the same. He simply walked.

No direction, and no destination. There was no end to the Plane, no end to the walking of it. He would walk forever, and did not mind that so very much. It was good to walk, good to move.

But sometimes there must be a stopping, a resting.

He stopped. He turned.

The horizon was the same distance away as it had always been. Would always be. The same ghost-gray light illumined it, starkly, sharply, a razor-cut across the face of the darkness, yet somehow indeterminate. Infinite.

He looked down. The floor, the ground. Hardness. No color to it. Dark. Gray, perhaps, but darkest gray. The gray of no color. Substance but no thingness. Hard, cold. This was a hard, cold place.

He sniffed, but smelled nothing. He seemed to have only a few senses, not the full complement. He could see. He could feel, somewhat. He could not hear, he could not smell. Perhaps he did and there was nothing to hear or smell. It mattered little which case obtained. It was the same either way.

He resumed walking. He wondered if he was breathing. It did not seem to him that he was. He felt no air, no wind. He tried to breathe. And succeeded. But did he need to breathe? Was he actually drawing air into his lungs? Indeed, did he have lungs, need lungs?

He had no idea. There was much he did not know. Correction. Much that he had forgotten. For a man never ceases knowing who and what he is. But he does sometimes forget.

He stopped again. Had he heard something?

He turned once completely around. Nothing.

There was nothing to hear. He moved on.

He asked himself where he might have been before he came to this place. He had no answer. What had he been doing just prior to his arrival here? No answer.

He considered the question of time. He came to a conclusion. There was no time here, either. He had always been here.

No! Something in him rejected that. He had not always been here. Therefore, there had been a beginning of his being here. He could not place it in time, but there had been an arrival here, a beginning of this walking. There was time, after all. It was just that there was so little to mark its passing.

Again, he thought he had heard something. He stopped and listened intently. He thought he had heard the calling of a name. Distant, very distant.

His name? But how would he know his name?

He wished his name would return to him. Perhaps if he heard, clearly, distinctly, he would recognize it for what it was. But he could hear nothing now. He doubted that there was anything to hear. He had imagined it, wishing for it so mightily.

He began walking again. He maintained the same pace as before. A brisk walk, a purposeful walk. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do when he got there. No direction, no destination.

What kind of world was it, he wondered, in which there was so little? So very little. Darkness, hardness, a bit of light … himself … and that was all. What kind of universe was that? How could it exist? Who could dream of such a place? For there was nothing to dream of. It was … a fever dream. A fever dream of a place. (He could barely remember what fever was. He wasn’t quite sure.) But whose fever? Whose dream?

His. His dream. He was dreaming. But it was not like a dream. It was too much like being awake to be a dream. (He could not remember, exactly, what a dream was.) Yet it had to be a dream.

His thinking was not very clear. That he knew. Better to avoid thinking too much. Thinking led to confusion. It was enough to walk. To move, though he moved in a directionless space, along an infinite plane.

He returned to the question of what he did before he came to this place. He had done something. He had had a life. Of that he was sure.

Life. That was a strange concept. Life struck him as something exciting, interesting, infinitely varied. Fluid. Not like this, which was unchanging and absolute. Life was not like this. Life was change, constant change. There was no change here. Life was movement with a purpose, a goal, a motive. None of those qualities was present in the circumstances in which he now found himself. Life was … much more than this. That was about all he could say on the matter, though. He did not remember his life. All he knew was that it had been quite different from the existence he led now.

When had the transition between life and this existence occurred? What had occasioned it?

There were too many questions and too few means at his disposal to begin to answer them. Again, he told himself that it was best not to think.

But he had to think. It was his nature to think.

Ah! So he did know something about his nature after all! He was a thinker. He thought. He had been thinking all along, his mind racing like a machine with its gears disengaged, wheels spinning, revolving in their cycles. But to what purpose was all that thinking? None that he could divine.

He kept walking. He wanted to walk. He would keep doing it, for it was his only function in this world. His necessary and sufficient cause for being.

The horizon was far, just as far as it always had been, always would be. He would walk forever, the darkness hanging over him, an infinite band of gray spectral light encompassing him, a horizon delimiting the limitlessness of his world.

It was enough.