…Dream awake, open the gate…
The echoes of her persona supporting mantras maintained her as the codestream flooded into her mind. She repeated the echo over and over as the ecstatic sensory overload crashed through her consciousness. She struggled for the mental anchor, the starting place; the repeated condition needed to ground her, cycle through her.
…Icon of truth, icon of actuality, icon of veracity, anchor me, hold me, steel me…
I’ve applied some fragments of stream of consciousness before in this story, right at the beginning in fact, and I do these for a reason, primarily to simulate dreamlike states as opposed to concrete real world states.
I will admit, I also fiddled with the rules of style and punctuation to differentiate them as well. Yes, I knew that this would annoy people. I also know that using dashes, properly or not, would annoy some people. So there you go.
Back to the commentary, already in progress.
Of course, since these are all different experiences, whether they be the mirror maze visions, dream-like reality suppressions or actual dreams, I wanted to have them reflected at leas slightly differently.
I certainly wanted Althea’s entry into the logos of the Macro to be more of match for the uncontrolled dreamlike visions that have been portrayed. After all, in this place, she has agency, she has control and direction.
Again, when this was originally devised, it was intended as an audio script, so Altheas thought and experiences would be reflected in a stream of consciousness, almost poetic flavor.
Experiences burst on the edges of her consciousness – intense, raw – points in a pinwheel; sharing laughter in a crowd, touching, pulling, buffeted, straining up into a brilliant light; the touch of lips, soft skin under her fingers, warmth and hot wetness, taste of spices and blood, physical heat, deep heavy breathing; cold, harsh light, glass and stars, cold metallic taste of the air; loneliness, palpable, longing; looking out, a blue ball through the windows, huge, gorgeous; home, sweet, sour, hot tastes, smell of smoke, of sweat; murmurs all around, spicy liquid pouring down the throat; satisfaction, pleasure, voracious hunger, unsated, still.
Here, in a novel, though, I have to describe the experience in far more detail, describe what her mind visually experiences through the link.
How did I work it out? Well, it came from many things I’ve read and how then I wanted to filter the experience through my own lens. This included cyberspace forays from the writers of cyberpunk novels; experimental stream of consciousness writing; and even from one of my favorite and personally influential series, Dumarest of Terra, specifically the experiences of the Cybers when they access their universal mind (kind of an interstellar, biological internet, as it were, using brains for servers).
But, of course, that was just the starting point. I then turned to Althea, and who she is, for what she would personally experience.
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