Alisaura
Blue Crack Supplier
Philosophy Warning: Well, that pretty much says it... things got a bit more philosophical and psychological than I was expecting. One of those times when the characters run off at the mouth without permission... 
Usual Disclaimer: Purely a work of fiction; don't know the band, never took philosophy at Uni, etc. Lyric quotes clearly not mine.
end of chapter 15:
----------
"Stop," I said. "Next thing you know, it'll be Monty Python quotes all day."
Ed began whistling the Lumberjack song, and I had to laugh, albeit unsteadily.
A silence stretched – not precisely companionable, the memory of that incident remained too fresh. But neither of us had run off. There were still a lot of unspoken words to be said.
-----------
Chapter 16:
-----------
And I have no religion
And I don't know what's what
And I don't know the limit
The limit of what we've got
"Do you believe in it?" I asked at length. "Re-incarnation, all that stuff?"
"Not 'all that stuff', per se," Ed replied, after a pause. "And no, I can't say I believe in it. But I think I should keep an open mind about every possibility... from a conspiracy of food-tampering, to re-incarnation, to alien beams from space."
"Hey, I hadn't considered that," I said. "Advanced alien technology explains everything." I smiled to show I wasn't serious. Ed looked a trifle relieved.
We arrived at my campsite, red tent still set up next to the 4WD, a camping stove sitting on the ground.
"Well, now I know what your car looks like," he said, looking around. I shrugged off the backpack (which contained my notebook), and faced him. He took a deep breath and looked me square in the eyes. It was disconcerting, but I didn't look away.
"Lisa, I promise you, I did not even know you had a notebook, and never found it or read it. I did not learn about your dreams from reading anything you wrote down about them. Do you believe me?"
I thought about it for a moment, and heaved a sigh. I could cling to my increasingly untenable theory, and call him a bare-faced liar, or I could follow my instincts. Once again, it seemed I had made an utter arse of myself. Again I wondered why he kept finding me, after all these embarrassments.
I held his gaze, and surrendered a fraction. "I do, I believe you. And I'm sorry for accusing you, too." I sighed again, gesturing in frustration. "It's just... there didn't seem to be any other explanation. And hearing you say that..."
"I know." Ed rubbed the back of his neck. "It was a shock, the way you reacted, because it meant you had dreamed about the same people I had."
"I can't have."
"There are no other explanations left," he said gently. "We've been through everything."
I pinched myself, hard, and looked around. Not dreaming this time. "It was worth a shot," I muttered. I glanced at Ed again and tried, one last time, to figure out what had happened on the hilltop.
Re-incarnation? No.
Time travel? No.
Food poisoning? No.
Drug-induced hallucination? Unlikely.
Alien beams from space? ... No.
Repressed sexual tension? I thought about that ... No. I didn't buy it. I'd never felt any hint of physical attraction to Ed, despite the cliché of people disliking each other at first but then having a passionate snog immediately following some heated argument. That wasn't how it had happened, anyway.
I turned red again.
Why was he still here? Why had he followed me, why had I let him? Some level of attraction seemed the only answer, but if that was the case, then it was very deeply repressed indeed. I didn't believe it.
"Oh god," I groaned. It all suddenly seemed to become like a physical weight on my head, too much to hold up any longer. I folded in on myself until I was on the ground, head in my hands. "What am I going to say to Glen?"
I heard Ed lower himself to the ground as well. "I know," he said, sounding lost, as if he didn't know anything at all anymore. "I can't keep this a secret. I can't."
In the silence that followed, I realised why we'd stayed in one another's company this morning. And why it had kept happening. We had each had a series of bewildering, confusing, frightening experiences. This last the most of all. But we had shared them. No one else on the planet would understand, but we could. Even if I'd hated him at first sight, even if he'd been assaulted by me, even if I usually shunned social contact; under these circumstances, I simply didn't want to be alone. Perhaps Ed felt the same way, unconsciously or otherwise.
Purple blotches were blooming in the darkness, from the pressure of my hands on my eyes. I raised my head, and sniffed. "I need a cup of tea," I said, rubbing my face. "How about you?"
"That would be welcome," Ed allowed, his eyes still distant. Probably in Dublin. I lumbered to my feet, and set about making the tea.
The silence stretched as we brooded over tin mugs of Earl Grey. Neither one of us seemed inclined to resume our normal lives just yet... or seemed able to. I was sunk deep in a series of imaginary scenarios, trying to figure out how to tell all this to Glen, when Ed finally broke the silence.
"Have you come to a conclusion yet?"
"What?" I was startled, wondering if he'd guessed what I was thinking.
"A conclusion, about what is causing all this. An explanation."
My relief was short-lived. "No."
"Are you willing to accept even the remote possibility that these could be the memories of real people who lived here? That we've been dreaming the real history of what happened here?"
"No."
Frustration on Ed's face. "I know it's far-fetched, and I don't like the idea either, you know. But nothing else explains the fact that we've been having the same dreams, about the same people. Before either of us mentioned them to the other."
"We don't know that they've all been the same," I countered. I'd managed to avoid mentioning many details about my own dreams, but I wanted to puncture Ed's crackpot theory. "Tell me what Eleri's last words were, if we've been dreaming the same dreams."
Steam curled into the air from our tea.
"Ewain wasn't there when she died," Ed said cautiously. I would have smirked, but then realised that he was right about that detail too. "Mag told him later, though. Eleri had asked if her barrow was ready, and then said, 'You will know what to do' to Mag, just before she died."
My experiment had backfired. I had nothing to say. I took a gulp of the still-scalding tea. Ed didn't need me to tell him he'd been right. And mentioning Eleri had been a mistake... grief welled up from somewhere, my reaction to the dream of her death still too close to the surface. I scrubbed at my eyes again, and Ed looked away. I resisted a sudden urge to tell him what had happened at the barrow – he would only say it proved his point.
"You can't deny what you've seen and felt," Ed went on after a while. His voice was gentle, coaxing. "What we've seen. That's what's real, you know, even if it makes no sense. Even if it clashes with all your conditioning, logic, and previous experience."
"I'm not denying that I saw and felt those things," I said carefully. Ed was as bad as Glen for having to get to the bottom of things, or at least bring me round to his point of view. I had dug my heels in, however. "What I am denying is what you seem to see as the inevitable conclusion. Just because we haven't thought of it, it doesn't mean there can't be a logical explanation that doesn't resort to... parapsychology."
"You sound like Spock," Ed said.
"I don't have the ears for it." I make jokes when I'm uncomfortable. "Anyway," I continued, "perceptions can be fooled. I read about experiments and things where they can stick electrodes in your brain and produce any number of intense visions or feelings or whatever. They can give people near-death experiences, or religious experiences, on demand. Perceptions are not always reliable indicators of reality."
"Electrodes?" Ed quirked an eyebrow, and made a show of checking his beanied head for wires.
"Who knows what you've got under that thing," I muttered under my breath. Louder I said, "Okay, they can probably do it with magnetic fields or something now. And I'm not saying someone's zapping us with mutual-prehistoric-hallucination magnetic beams." I paused. "And I know, that still wouldn't explain the... similarities." It almost hurt physically to admit that. Ed had the grace not to look smug. "But, you can't deny that perceptions are fallible. What you see is not always what's really there."
Ed was nodding. "I certainly can't deny that," he said, something of wry amusement in his face. I wondered at that, but he went on. "So theoretically, everything we perceive could be a lie. The grass might not be green, the tea might not taste like this, someone you touch might not really be there. YOU might not even be there. How could you function in a world like that? If you couldn't take ANYTHING you sensed for granted? It's just not possible, you would be paralysed."
Ed paused to drink from his mug, and I tried to grapple with that scenario. My head was already aching, and this wasn't helping. I had barely concluded that he was right, when he continued.
"Everyone chooses their reality. Out of everything we perceive, we have to accept some, or most of it and react accordingly. We accept that trees are solid, and walk around them. We accept that gravity works, and so we're not afraid to take our feet off the ground. It's not a conscious choice, most of the time, but it's a choice nonetheless."
"Wait," I said, shaking the image of gravity-defying people drifting through insubstantial trees out of my head. "How can it be a choice if it's unconscious? Choice implies consciousness."
Ed was ready for that. "Infants have to work all of this out as they develop. Perhaps you wouldn't call a six-month-old baby fully conscious, but their brain is working overtime, you know, assimilating this vast amount of information that pours into all of us, all the time. They have no preconceived notions about what is real, or possible. A baby will think his mother has disappeared forever if she leaves his line of sight, until she appears again. It takes time to learn that you should expect someone to reappear if they walk behind an obstacle, or leave the room. As children grow, all of these processes are learned, and become habit, and finally are submerged into the unconscious, because they don't need to think about them any more. They learn the rules of reality, through their perceptions and repeated experience."
Ed paused long enough to see me nod in understanding, although my brow remained furrowed.
"We've all gone through the same process. But now, you and I have experienced something that directly contradicts all of that. It's a huge shock. The first reaction anyone would have would be to ignore it, forget it, push it away. We did that. But it persisted, so we tried to explain it, make it fit into our version of reality. Now that is becoming impossible."
I stared at him.
"The answer doesn't lie in redefining what happened. We have first-hand experience, it serves no purpose to edit what we know we saw, and felt. No more than you would fudge your data to make the map look the way you want it to." He met my eyes pointedly.
"Touché," I murmured, but my mind was running around in panicky little circles. I looked away quickly. The tea trembled in my hand.
"The only answer is to redefine how you – how we have perceived reality. To make that process conscious again, of choosing which of your perceptions governs your reality. Your definition of the possible." Ed was leaning forward, eyes intense. "You could choose a reality where everything is delineated by what we understand, and nothing can exist outside of that; a reality with no mystery, nothing left to be discovered, nothing outside the boundaries of commonly accepted logic. A reality determined by external consensus, that may have nothing at all to do with what you perceive, or what you feel internally. One where someone is drugging your food and giving you hallucinations."
I grimaced, mind still reeling.
"Or, you can choose a reality that fits your perceptions, even if it doesn't fit everyone else's. You don't have to believe anything, just allow the tiniest possibility. Who do you trust; yourself, or a host of people who don't know what you've experienced? It's your reality – you have to live with it, in it. Can you live in a world which is at such sharp odds with what you've seen with your own eyes?"
Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, the dreams, the incident in the circle, general fatigue. I was already buckling under everything. Maybe there was something in the tea. My defences were low, I was vulnerable. Whatever it was, Ed's words fell into my brain, resonated, and sank all the way down, settling in my bones. Stillness had come to my thoughts.
I had not suddenly converted to mystical druidism. But for the first time in my professional life, something cracked in the wall separating wistful fancy from my reality, from science. The stillness was more from shock than sudden clarity. If anything, the waters were murkier than ever, but I'd realised that I didn't need to see through them before I could put my toe in.
It could, just maybe, be possible.
"...Lisa?"
I came back to earth with a start, and stared at Ed with red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. He didn't look much better. Shadows had gathered under his eyes, and lines were showing on his forehead. His goatee was disappearing in growing stubble.
"Where did you learn all that stuff?"
He shrugged, perhaps uncomfortable with the way he'd rattled on. "I've read some books, and talked to some people. Are you all right?"
"I'll be fine. I think. I need to think. And I need to sleep." There was no point even thinking about getting anything useful done today. I couldn't even remember what day it was. I decided it might as well be Sunday, for me at any rate. The remainder of my tea had gone cold, and I threw it into the grass behind me. My backside was damp from the ground, my legs stiff from holding an awkward position. I levered myself up, tossing the mug absently in the back of the car.
Ed stood as well. I remembered that our last couple of partings had been distinctly melodramatic. I took his mug from him.
"Almost anticlimactic, isn't it," he said, a corner of his mouth quirking upwards. He really needed to stop using my brain – it was about worn out, anyway.
"I can throw this at you, if it'd make you feel better," I drawled, hefting the mug he'd been using.
"Oh, help. I must escape on my valiant steed..." Ed suddenly looked around, apparently realising he'd forgotten all about his valiant steed up until that moment.
Fortunately, the steed was only a short distance away, trying to eat around the bridle. It looked annoyed.
Once Ed had ridden off, I crawled back into my tent, and didn't come out again until the next day. It wasn't much of a place to hide from the world, but it was better than nothing.
-----------------
Usual Disclaimer: Purely a work of fiction; don't know the band, never took philosophy at Uni, etc. Lyric quotes clearly not mine.
end of chapter 15:
----------
"Stop," I said. "Next thing you know, it'll be Monty Python quotes all day."
Ed began whistling the Lumberjack song, and I had to laugh, albeit unsteadily.
A silence stretched – not precisely companionable, the memory of that incident remained too fresh. But neither of us had run off. There were still a lot of unspoken words to be said.
-----------
Chapter 16:
-----------
And I have no religion
And I don't know what's what
And I don't know the limit
The limit of what we've got
"Do you believe in it?" I asked at length. "Re-incarnation, all that stuff?"
"Not 'all that stuff', per se," Ed replied, after a pause. "And no, I can't say I believe in it. But I think I should keep an open mind about every possibility... from a conspiracy of food-tampering, to re-incarnation, to alien beams from space."
"Hey, I hadn't considered that," I said. "Advanced alien technology explains everything." I smiled to show I wasn't serious. Ed looked a trifle relieved.
We arrived at my campsite, red tent still set up next to the 4WD, a camping stove sitting on the ground.
"Well, now I know what your car looks like," he said, looking around. I shrugged off the backpack (which contained my notebook), and faced him. He took a deep breath and looked me square in the eyes. It was disconcerting, but I didn't look away.
"Lisa, I promise you, I did not even know you had a notebook, and never found it or read it. I did not learn about your dreams from reading anything you wrote down about them. Do you believe me?"
I thought about it for a moment, and heaved a sigh. I could cling to my increasingly untenable theory, and call him a bare-faced liar, or I could follow my instincts. Once again, it seemed I had made an utter arse of myself. Again I wondered why he kept finding me, after all these embarrassments.
I held his gaze, and surrendered a fraction. "I do, I believe you. And I'm sorry for accusing you, too." I sighed again, gesturing in frustration. "It's just... there didn't seem to be any other explanation. And hearing you say that..."
"I know." Ed rubbed the back of his neck. "It was a shock, the way you reacted, because it meant you had dreamed about the same people I had."
"I can't have."
"There are no other explanations left," he said gently. "We've been through everything."
I pinched myself, hard, and looked around. Not dreaming this time. "It was worth a shot," I muttered. I glanced at Ed again and tried, one last time, to figure out what had happened on the hilltop.
Re-incarnation? No.
Time travel? No.
Food poisoning? No.
Drug-induced hallucination? Unlikely.
Alien beams from space? ... No.
Repressed sexual tension? I thought about that ... No. I didn't buy it. I'd never felt any hint of physical attraction to Ed, despite the cliché of people disliking each other at first but then having a passionate snog immediately following some heated argument. That wasn't how it had happened, anyway.
I turned red again.
Why was he still here? Why had he followed me, why had I let him? Some level of attraction seemed the only answer, but if that was the case, then it was very deeply repressed indeed. I didn't believe it.
"Oh god," I groaned. It all suddenly seemed to become like a physical weight on my head, too much to hold up any longer. I folded in on myself until I was on the ground, head in my hands. "What am I going to say to Glen?"
I heard Ed lower himself to the ground as well. "I know," he said, sounding lost, as if he didn't know anything at all anymore. "I can't keep this a secret. I can't."
In the silence that followed, I realised why we'd stayed in one another's company this morning. And why it had kept happening. We had each had a series of bewildering, confusing, frightening experiences. This last the most of all. But we had shared them. No one else on the planet would understand, but we could. Even if I'd hated him at first sight, even if he'd been assaulted by me, even if I usually shunned social contact; under these circumstances, I simply didn't want to be alone. Perhaps Ed felt the same way, unconsciously or otherwise.
Purple blotches were blooming in the darkness, from the pressure of my hands on my eyes. I raised my head, and sniffed. "I need a cup of tea," I said, rubbing my face. "How about you?"
"That would be welcome," Ed allowed, his eyes still distant. Probably in Dublin. I lumbered to my feet, and set about making the tea.
The silence stretched as we brooded over tin mugs of Earl Grey. Neither one of us seemed inclined to resume our normal lives just yet... or seemed able to. I was sunk deep in a series of imaginary scenarios, trying to figure out how to tell all this to Glen, when Ed finally broke the silence.
"Have you come to a conclusion yet?"
"What?" I was startled, wondering if he'd guessed what I was thinking.
"A conclusion, about what is causing all this. An explanation."
My relief was short-lived. "No."
"Are you willing to accept even the remote possibility that these could be the memories of real people who lived here? That we've been dreaming the real history of what happened here?"
"No."
Frustration on Ed's face. "I know it's far-fetched, and I don't like the idea either, you know. But nothing else explains the fact that we've been having the same dreams, about the same people. Before either of us mentioned them to the other."
"We don't know that they've all been the same," I countered. I'd managed to avoid mentioning many details about my own dreams, but I wanted to puncture Ed's crackpot theory. "Tell me what Eleri's last words were, if we've been dreaming the same dreams."
Steam curled into the air from our tea.
"Ewain wasn't there when she died," Ed said cautiously. I would have smirked, but then realised that he was right about that detail too. "Mag told him later, though. Eleri had asked if her barrow was ready, and then said, 'You will know what to do' to Mag, just before she died."
My experiment had backfired. I had nothing to say. I took a gulp of the still-scalding tea. Ed didn't need me to tell him he'd been right. And mentioning Eleri had been a mistake... grief welled up from somewhere, my reaction to the dream of her death still too close to the surface. I scrubbed at my eyes again, and Ed looked away. I resisted a sudden urge to tell him what had happened at the barrow – he would only say it proved his point.
"You can't deny what you've seen and felt," Ed went on after a while. His voice was gentle, coaxing. "What we've seen. That's what's real, you know, even if it makes no sense. Even if it clashes with all your conditioning, logic, and previous experience."
"I'm not denying that I saw and felt those things," I said carefully. Ed was as bad as Glen for having to get to the bottom of things, or at least bring me round to his point of view. I had dug my heels in, however. "What I am denying is what you seem to see as the inevitable conclusion. Just because we haven't thought of it, it doesn't mean there can't be a logical explanation that doesn't resort to... parapsychology."
"You sound like Spock," Ed said.
"I don't have the ears for it." I make jokes when I'm uncomfortable. "Anyway," I continued, "perceptions can be fooled. I read about experiments and things where they can stick electrodes in your brain and produce any number of intense visions or feelings or whatever. They can give people near-death experiences, or religious experiences, on demand. Perceptions are not always reliable indicators of reality."
"Electrodes?" Ed quirked an eyebrow, and made a show of checking his beanied head for wires.
"Who knows what you've got under that thing," I muttered under my breath. Louder I said, "Okay, they can probably do it with magnetic fields or something now. And I'm not saying someone's zapping us with mutual-prehistoric-hallucination magnetic beams." I paused. "And I know, that still wouldn't explain the... similarities." It almost hurt physically to admit that. Ed had the grace not to look smug. "But, you can't deny that perceptions are fallible. What you see is not always what's really there."
Ed was nodding. "I certainly can't deny that," he said, something of wry amusement in his face. I wondered at that, but he went on. "So theoretically, everything we perceive could be a lie. The grass might not be green, the tea might not taste like this, someone you touch might not really be there. YOU might not even be there. How could you function in a world like that? If you couldn't take ANYTHING you sensed for granted? It's just not possible, you would be paralysed."
Ed paused to drink from his mug, and I tried to grapple with that scenario. My head was already aching, and this wasn't helping. I had barely concluded that he was right, when he continued.
"Everyone chooses their reality. Out of everything we perceive, we have to accept some, or most of it and react accordingly. We accept that trees are solid, and walk around them. We accept that gravity works, and so we're not afraid to take our feet off the ground. It's not a conscious choice, most of the time, but it's a choice nonetheless."
"Wait," I said, shaking the image of gravity-defying people drifting through insubstantial trees out of my head. "How can it be a choice if it's unconscious? Choice implies consciousness."
Ed was ready for that. "Infants have to work all of this out as they develop. Perhaps you wouldn't call a six-month-old baby fully conscious, but their brain is working overtime, you know, assimilating this vast amount of information that pours into all of us, all the time. They have no preconceived notions about what is real, or possible. A baby will think his mother has disappeared forever if she leaves his line of sight, until she appears again. It takes time to learn that you should expect someone to reappear if they walk behind an obstacle, or leave the room. As children grow, all of these processes are learned, and become habit, and finally are submerged into the unconscious, because they don't need to think about them any more. They learn the rules of reality, through their perceptions and repeated experience."
Ed paused long enough to see me nod in understanding, although my brow remained furrowed.
"We've all gone through the same process. But now, you and I have experienced something that directly contradicts all of that. It's a huge shock. The first reaction anyone would have would be to ignore it, forget it, push it away. We did that. But it persisted, so we tried to explain it, make it fit into our version of reality. Now that is becoming impossible."
I stared at him.
"The answer doesn't lie in redefining what happened. We have first-hand experience, it serves no purpose to edit what we know we saw, and felt. No more than you would fudge your data to make the map look the way you want it to." He met my eyes pointedly.
"Touché," I murmured, but my mind was running around in panicky little circles. I looked away quickly. The tea trembled in my hand.
"The only answer is to redefine how you – how we have perceived reality. To make that process conscious again, of choosing which of your perceptions governs your reality. Your definition of the possible." Ed was leaning forward, eyes intense. "You could choose a reality where everything is delineated by what we understand, and nothing can exist outside of that; a reality with no mystery, nothing left to be discovered, nothing outside the boundaries of commonly accepted logic. A reality determined by external consensus, that may have nothing at all to do with what you perceive, or what you feel internally. One where someone is drugging your food and giving you hallucinations."
I grimaced, mind still reeling.
"Or, you can choose a reality that fits your perceptions, even if it doesn't fit everyone else's. You don't have to believe anything, just allow the tiniest possibility. Who do you trust; yourself, or a host of people who don't know what you've experienced? It's your reality – you have to live with it, in it. Can you live in a world which is at such sharp odds with what you've seen with your own eyes?"
Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, the dreams, the incident in the circle, general fatigue. I was already buckling under everything. Maybe there was something in the tea. My defences were low, I was vulnerable. Whatever it was, Ed's words fell into my brain, resonated, and sank all the way down, settling in my bones. Stillness had come to my thoughts.
I had not suddenly converted to mystical druidism. But for the first time in my professional life, something cracked in the wall separating wistful fancy from my reality, from science. The stillness was more from shock than sudden clarity. If anything, the waters were murkier than ever, but I'd realised that I didn't need to see through them before I could put my toe in.
It could, just maybe, be possible.
"...Lisa?"
I came back to earth with a start, and stared at Ed with red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. He didn't look much better. Shadows had gathered under his eyes, and lines were showing on his forehead. His goatee was disappearing in growing stubble.
"Where did you learn all that stuff?"
He shrugged, perhaps uncomfortable with the way he'd rattled on. "I've read some books, and talked to some people. Are you all right?"
"I'll be fine. I think. I need to think. And I need to sleep." There was no point even thinking about getting anything useful done today. I couldn't even remember what day it was. I decided it might as well be Sunday, for me at any rate. The remainder of my tea had gone cold, and I threw it into the grass behind me. My backside was damp from the ground, my legs stiff from holding an awkward position. I levered myself up, tossing the mug absently in the back of the car.
Ed stood as well. I remembered that our last couple of partings had been distinctly melodramatic. I took his mug from him.
"Almost anticlimactic, isn't it," he said, a corner of his mouth quirking upwards. He really needed to stop using my brain – it was about worn out, anyway.
"I can throw this at you, if it'd make you feel better," I drawled, hefting the mug he'd been using.
"Oh, help. I must escape on my valiant steed..." Ed suddenly looked around, apparently realising he'd forgotten all about his valiant steed up until that moment.
Fortunately, the steed was only a short distance away, trying to eat around the bridle. It looked annoyed.
Once Ed had ridden off, I crawled back into my tent, and didn't come out again until the next day. It wasn't much of a place to hide from the world, but it was better than nothing.
-----------------
Ed is so smart 
just...gah, 
Hi Ali... I missed it again, didn't I? 
I keep doing this lately. Maybe it's because the forum is moving so quickly these days.... (have you any idea how hard it is to keep up when you've only one brain cell, especially when said brain cell is asleep most of the time?)
