Hey, Gresen, how're things?
Hi, Brehsil. I'm not sure how I feel today. I had the strangest dream about being in a weird futuristic society that had eliminated social problems through networking everyone's minds.
OK, OK. Don't say any more. Haven't I told you to see a shrink about these dreams?
Yes, of course, and I appreciate your trying to help, but the'y're all the same, these head doctors. They tell me it's about my parents, or my repressions, or my libido, etc.; whatever, it says in the books they've been reading or have written. None of them really listen to me.
How about therapy?
  Same thing. Everyone's inside their own head, trying to put their ideas into mine. Brehsil, I was another person in that dream. I was alive for 35 years, until I decided to protest and my brain was decommissioned. I went through every day of that life.
Just like all the other dreams. No wonder you look tired today!
  Sometimes I don't know if I ever want to go to sleep again, and I start thinking of ways to carry on life without letting my body relax into sleep. Other times, I can't wait to get into the next life. Then I find myself in a feudal society, or some terrible place, going through such pain and suffering. When I wake up into this life, I feel terrible.
Do you remember your present identity in these dreams?
  Not at all. It's always a new life, and I'm experiencing everything for the first time, and it goes right up to the moment of death. I've died so many times these past few months.

These were typical conversations. She had tried talking to friends. going to psychiatrists, even spiritualists. None of them had been able to explain her dual lifestyle. In the end, she'd stopped trying to share things, and had accepted that each time she went to sleep, she would start a new life, and live through it until the moment of death, when she would re-awake in her present life.

In all, this had been going on for twenty years now, and she had been through more than seven thousand lifetimes. Her waking hours had merely been preparations for the following life, though she often needed the morning to get over the trauma of death, which never came easily. The memory of a particularly unpleasant death through disease or deprivation often stayed with her the whole day, and had caused her to give up her original job in favour of nursing. At least she could identify with the people she saw every day, though it was hard to offer words of consolation. After all, she could be suffering in the same way that very night.

Questions such as "Why me?" and "Are other people going through this?" had long since become irrelevant. She had stopped going to doctors the moment she saw the fear of incomprehension in their eyes, since she knew that the asylum was their only answer to her condition. They could not take her seriously, so they could not take a professional interest in her. She was outside their zone of acceptability. If there were others like her, then either they had come to the same conclusion, or they were already in those asylums, and she didn't want to go looking for them.

by now, of course, her waking life was a dream, for reality was different each night (or day, depending on her work-shift). When she closed her eyes to sleep a new reality appeared, which she lived through to the end, finally "waking" to her original reality, which seemed no more than transitory - a waiting stage between lives. Maybe this was it. Maybe the people around her were going through one of these "dream" lives - the ones she visited when she closed her eyes - and would wake up after death in their own "real" lives, to face the same conundrums about their existence.

There was an exhausted peace about Gresen's waking life these days; a peace she had not known before, and could never have imagined, being not like any other definition of peace. Having been through so many lives, with ever new ones to come, there were no frightening pleasures or charming distresses that could evoke in her any reaction other than inattention in involvement. This was not the peace of inaction, nor the fear of confrontation, not even the bland siren of apathy that many call life. Gresen found herself in a mode of acceptance; a dearth of description; neither good, bad, happy, unhappy, positive nor negative. Such descriptors no longer had meaning in this state of accepting being and being accepted. Strangely alive, through an absence of divisions and attachments, she had no causes to fight for, no security to chase after, no riches to sell her soul for, nor recognition to persude others to grant. There was simply an empty clarity that placed her in the moment, the eternal fractal moment, accepting even herself, accepting that she had gone beyond acceptance into an awesome, beyond-time, beyond-dimensions, unity beyond unity.

No longer the need to differentiate one life from another, one moment from another, one memory, idea, emotion, from another. Gresen was one with them all as she closed her eyes for the last time, entering on the chosen life; a birth foretold by the great fathers and signified by unnatural events, astounding foresights in a young life and a power to heal troubled spirits, to cut the gordian bindings of thought, association and survival. There were many before, and many would come after, but this was her moment to wander the dry mountains in padded feet, to call the caves home, to trapse the unforgiving tundra with her wondrous white fur blowing in gale force winds. A life of miracles and transmutations, of illuminations and enlightenments, passing from the one to the many, the simple to the complex, and retracing through the complexity of simplicity into an all-encompassing one, the dew drop to the pond, through the rain frog and the carp riding the young salmon to the ocean of shared awareness shared being unknowing.

Consummate unknowing.

She felt her life force slip away at last the cells ceased striving and her non being shed skins sloughing death was coming quietly and peacefully the first time it had happened so naturally for her a dreaming of all dreamings.
_____________________

Engers opened sleepy eyes to the news that the volatile disc of radiation was already way into the skies. She would have to stay below ground today while she prepared her documents for right of passage to sister galaxies, parallel dimensions, an existence close to a star not on the verge of implosion. But what a dream that had been; so full, resplendent, vivid and peaceful. A lone snow leopard, walking the heights and plains of the old world - an incredible dream (probably induced by the nutrition tablets she had found yesterday, but an amazing experience for all that). It made a change from those life forms which had been inhabiting her subconscious lately.