Daydream V

If she were awake, she’d wonder why her sleeping form was shivering, swathed as she was in an electric blanket and layers of fluffy flannel cotton.

It wasn’t that she was cold; on the contrary, she was rather warm. Her surroundings seemed to keep the temperatures at a clement mid-twenties (measured in Fahrenheit; such a world would always measure in Fahrenheit). She wished fervently that she were in a world that did not see fluctuation in weather as an enemy! To feel cold or hot would be to know one were alive; to be merely comfortable without feeling content was rattling. She would leave. Where, she did not know, but she would leave nonetheless.

She stalked briskly past walls of gleaming white and aluminium strips. The room glowed, almost from the inside, as if the halls were lit from the mere reflection of white tile playing against white tile. She could not see any sources of light and she supposed that was just how it was designed: eternal light; eternal brightness; eternal absence of shadow.

—Her body cast no shadow. She danced from foot to foot, darted from right to left, eyes trained upon the crisp, smooth, white (how she hated white at this moment!) floor, searching for a trace of herself. She couldn’t find it. She was shadowless; she was Peter Pan without a Wendy to kidnap; she was in a world that had stripped her of her shadow. What world would strip one of one’s shadow?

‘I want a ticket for the train,’ she found herself saying to a station attendant. And wondered: to where? Where could she go that would be different to here, wherever ‘here’ was, with its coldly glowing walls and stolen shadows?

The attendant turned cool eyes to her. She felt herself being watched; being asked to answer non-existent questions.

‘I can’t…’ Her voice trailed off.

‘You don’t have Thought,’ the attendant said, his voice cracking as though it had not been in use. ‘How… quaint.’

‘What is—?’ She stopped. She knew what Thought was; she could sense it. She didn’t know that it would be here. ‘I didn’t want a computer installed in my mind,’ she replied, ‘especially one called ‘Thought’.’

The attendant arched an eyebrow. ‘You won’t be able to survive here without it. Everyone converses via Thought; we type on Thought; we laugh on Thought; your train ticket has been sent to you via Thought.’

‘I don’t care for a machine that encourages me to replace my thoughts with a database of the thoughts of others,’ she said quietly. ‘Give me a physical ticket, please.’

‘Thought bestows us with knowledge,’ the attendant said placidly. ‘Thought gives us the strongest ideas. No brain is stronger than its weakest think.’

It sounded familiar, and she tilted her head to rifle through her memory. ‘That last sentence was a quote.’

‘Such is Thought,’ the attendant said in flat triumph. ‘For every statement you utter, I can bring up on my database a hundred arguments to refute your thesis. For every claim you make, I can prove it or disprove it with statistics, research, data. I have the world at my fingertips. What do you have?’

‘My own!’ She felt like stamping her foot but she did not want to hear her stamps absorbed by the tiles; she wanted to pretend that she could stamp and hear her stamps; she wanted to pretend she had a shadow. ‘I have my own ability—my own will, at least—to think up my own arguments; to do my own research. I may not be good at it, nor will I ever think of anything as groundbreaking as Plato or Socrates, but at least my arguments are mine, not simply platitudes couched in the words of others! You’re not arguing; you're simply quoting!’

‘Life itself is a quotation.’

Another quote. She bristled. ‘A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought!’ she snapped. ‘And that was a quote, too! Because for every meta-quote praising quotes that you can find, there exist a dozen others that scorn quotes.’

‘Everyone hears only what he understands,’ the attendant droned, ‘and that, too, was a quote. I am not ashamed that Thought allows us to access everything; to understand everything. What can you access? What can you understand?’ He pushed a ticket through the glass.

‘I understand enough,’ she said quietly, plucking the ticket from the counter. ‘One may be able to access everything but that never guarantees understanding. There may be people who are able to entertain thoughts without accepting them, but how many people would go through the trouble to forge new ones when there are so many accepted thoughts to be regurgitated?’

The words flew from her mouth and the scene flew from her too (she was sick of arguing with people over technology and its potential dystopic tendencies; she would not do it in her dreams) and she found herself settling in a train seat. Her muscles grew less tense and she melted into the seat cushions. Trains were a dream; she could always relax on trains.

Except on this train.

She stiffened suddenly and sat bolt upright. Something was different; something was—not right. Was it the seats? No, the seats were fine; the seats would always be fine. The windows were fine; the walls; the doors; everything was fine! She fidgeted, crossed and un-crossed her legs.

And the buzzing started; it was a tinny, whining hum floating above her ear. She listened—she couldn’t not listen—and it grew stronger, more pronounced; hums became murmurs became words and she found herself chanting along: buy betty’s baked goods get grime gone now new nylon nets on sale slashed prices betty’s get now baked slashed buy new—THIS TRAIN IS NOW ARRIVING AT: TOWN HALL—need new nails? Nifty Neil’s Nail Salon meets all your nail needs; needs nails new nail—

She threw herself forward, off the seat, away from the loudspeakers. Consider the daffodil, she thought, consider the lily, consider English landscapes with velvet fields and moths dancing upon the sunlit silence; it’s a dream, damn it, it’s a dream: change it! She stared fiercely out of the window; stared into the sun (it was so bright; so painfully bright; the colour of flaming bronze against a cloudless blue-tile sky) until her eyes watered.

The passengers on the train turned blankly curious eyes to her. When had she put passengers in? She didn't recall dreaming them in—had they materialised with the loudspeakers and its incessant ad-chanting? She backed into the train’s corridor and quietly looked at them all through the window, her curiosity dampening any desire to change her dream just yet. They were so still, she thought, so inanimate. It wasn’t the stillness of death; it was the stillness that came with the sheer absence of life and it chilled her.

No, she couldn’t stay. She needed out. ‘Come on,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Change it; change it to anything, please, so help me God, just change it.’

And the window whirled and the people span too; a rainbow of colours and horrid murmurs and blank eyes. It whirled and she became almost dizzy, trapped in nowhere, waiting. And, as if a film projector had jammed, a single clear memory fixed itself in her head and outside of the window, focusing with almost ridiculous concentration on a scene whipped out from childhoods long past.

It was a birthday cake. She pushed her way through the window and stared at the cake standing on the table. She was enveloped by the smells of icing snow upon the white mountain, the aroma of frosted blossoms and candied roses, of petal pink candles and translucent frosting. It was a piece of winter saved from years ago, frost and snowflake and apple and lily-bud. Her finger darted forward and swiped a bit of cream from the side (no one would notice, she was sure) and felt it dissolve in her mouth like a cloud on a summer’s day.

A bell tolled, its peals tearing the air. She jumped, half-believing that the cake was rigged with alarm bells—but it was not, it was simply the doorbell; the doorbell that they did not have in the house of her seven-year-old world… perhaps they had changed the doorbell? But no. Someone was ringing, knocking, pounding at the door and clamouring for her attention.

She bolted up from her sheets and saw daylight streaming through her curtains. No, it wasn’t fair; she hadn’t slept; she hadn’t rested. She refused to get up. The caller could wait; could come back later; could knock the door down for all she cared. She would not answer it. Not yet; not now; not till she had dreams of cake and cream and trainless, gadget-less worlds. With one swift motion she buried herself in her blankets and flung her arm over her eyes as if to trap an image of that cake, in cameo perfection, on the shell of her eyelids.