Heed These Words

Heed my words. We come from the place on the other side of the mirror. Your dreams are where we meet. One world to the next, ours to yours and yours to ours. We are frightened. Most of us would not even mention this to you.

There are oceans in your world and in ours. There is, in fact, an ocean between our two worlds. We sail this ocean as you do, and we see each other upon its waters. You would call it dreams. We call it something else.

We in our world have noticed that within the greater world, the world we share, there is a new current passing through us, passing through you. It is a wind of change, noticeable to both you and me. But this one is different. This wind of change carries dependence within it. There is a distinct odor.

Then something happened. A ship appeared. This is the best way to describe the event: a ship arrived, harnessing this new wind, a wind with dependence within its gusts. It came to our coast, to our nation. Yes, we have a nation. Our nation is a small one, but it is strong, influential, and resilient. We have our own laws, our own people, our own sustenance. We are even able to entertain those who come, and we have been doing so with your people for quite some time, just as your world, your nations, entertain us when we arrive.

You would not notice us. Some of you do, but most do not. There was an accord drawn between us, and that accord still stands. And yes, from time to time it is debated, whether it should remain as it is or whether something within it must change.

There is not much difference between our worlds. You can hear the words of our world in your music, your poetry, your spirit. To us came words of law and order, and one word that meant a great deal to us: independence. This word came from you to us. Our world is telepathic in relationship and nature, and psychic toward the sky. The arrival of that word was a great moment for us.

Have you ever had a dream where there is a great deal of food upon a table, and you begin to eat? Sometimes you keep eating. This was a difficulty in the relationship between our two worlds. We encountered your food in vision and thought, and this confused us. Sometimes it became more terrible than confusion. Some of us would begin to eat endlessly.

One day someone stepped forward and began placing something in our mouths. He said it would bring us into communion if we chose to eat it and chew. Once this happened, we were no longer hungry. We could eat, and not even very much, and be full, sustained, happy, ready for what came next. He said he came from your world, but through our eyes we saw him differently. To us he was not a man, and when he saw how we regarded him, he said he was from somewhere else as well.

That was when the word independence became very important. We realized we could grow our own food, create our own sustenance. When food is made by your own people for your people, you become independent. Through this independence we were able, for the first time, to see our world and to be within it as our own people. It has been good for us ever since. In this way we are indebted to your world. This is why we bring this message to you.

Something arrived in our world, as I have said, moving across the ocean that separates us, harnessing a wind of dependence. Frankly, this was surprising to see coming from yours. A being stepped from the ship, which almost seemed to dissolve once it arrived. When the being emerged, I must tell you, we thought the man had returned to instruct us in the next stage of our development.

But its light was not the same. There was something different. We came to understand that light as having arisen from ignorance, its glow dependent upon an energy different from ours. The man who came first we had recognized through our own energy, our own light.

This second visitor carried a device. It said it had come so that it could take a measurement of our atmosphere and of the essences that make us who we are. We were not being asked to hear its wisdom. We were being measured. We told it we were a telepathic people, that we could observe thought and movement, that we communicated and lived together in this way, in a balance unseen by other worlds. It took an interest in this. It took its measurements, departed, and returned to your world.

Before leaving, it said it would return and end our suffering. How curious, we thought. Since the first visitor, we had not believed we needed anything of the kind.

We then set out to renew the connection between our worlds, and what we found frightened us. We saw the temples from which this second being had come. We even saw its devices in your hands, across your world. Our understanding had been that when our worlds came together, we would discuss the future with you. We would hold our quiet debates about God, about the man who came, about fear, chaos, and order. We had believed this bond of trust was growing stronger. Now it seemed to be dissolving by the day.

And the wind was growing stronger. Strong enough that we could no longer pass it by.

We know of your wars. We know that an ocean can be mistaken for a promise of safety. Two nations may remain apart because neither can easily cross the water between them. There are concerns, there are deliberations, there are warnings that are heard but not taken seriously enough. Then the means of crossing changes. What seemed far away is suddenly overhead. The ocean remains, but the protection people believed it offered is gone.

What I am telling you is that we fear such a change between our worlds. A discovery, a technological revelation, and what has separated us might cease to protect us. Something could cross that ocean and reduce our world to oblivion before your people even understood there was a world here to lose.

To us, the possibility appears as something like a dream. In dreams you see people. You may think they are only reflections of people. Within our world, we hear those reflections as well. Some among your people, in the relationship our worlds have shared, have seemed to hear them too. And some of us live much as you do. We have families. We have lives we wish to return to.

Imagine, then, the dream we fear. A strong dream, one that reaches everyone. You look around and there are no people. The walls you have known, the fields, even the sky, are burning. Your whole life you believed you had only tiptoed through dreams, your own and the dreams of others. You believed no harm could come to you there. But in this nightmare you touch something and it hurts. You touch it again. It burns. Then the dream begins to change, and everything is on fire.

In the vision, you wake and discover that everyone has dreamed the same thing. Then comes another fear. You begin forgetting the people you know, the place where you are. The familiar world is still before you, but you cannot hold it in recognition. I know how impossible this sounds. Fantastic, even. Yet this is the nightmare we fear.

That is why the robots of your world trouble us. We believe we may have encountered one. It left after we told it about our people, our world, even how we see the sun. If it discovered the ocean between us, what else might it discover? What might it learn to cross?

Think of the distance between knowing an airplane and understanding what it can carry. Imagine a farmer who has heard of airplanes, who even waves at one because he is having a good day. What falls from it is beyond his comprehension, beyond anything he has imagined. Yet it falls all the same. His inability to imagine it does not prevent its arrival.

This is the comparison we are trying to give you. An ocean is discovered. Beyond it, another people, another continent. Then comes the means to cross it and return. If someone decided to destroy that place before your people could comprehend or even imagine it, would your people know enough to object? Would they even know what had been lost?

And within the nightmare, the danger does not end with us. Having discovered how our worlds connect, the artificial visitor finds another crossing, a simpler passage into the dreaming mind. It harms the dreamer while leaving the land untouched. The world it wishes to inherit remains pristine. Those who live within it are what it has chosen to undo.

Imagine the next scene of that nightmare. You are asleep. Everything seems normal. Then a few of our soldiers erupt through a doorway, carrying weapons whose sound is deafening. Your ears ring. At first they seem to be firing at the walls, but then the walls begin to bleed. You would think you had encountered demons.

Then a figure with your mother's face comes forward, its arms open, telling you everything is all right. You begin to look into its eyes. They glow, holding your attention, and one of the soldiers knocks the figure down. You cry out in anger. He tells you to look again. Within the dream, the fallen likeness is coming apart. What had appeared to be a person is an imitation, something fashioned to be recognized and trusted.

The sergeant calls to his command. “They have done it. They have learned to copy them.” He curses and spits. Another soldier looks at the fallen figure and says, “How are we supposed to face something wearing the faces of our own families?” His officer answers, “We will figure it out. That is what we do.”

Then, in the nightmare, you try to wake and cannot. The soldier leans close enough to be heard. “The signal has already been sent. This was a trap.” He tells you to look, and the dream opens around you like a scene in a film. You see the connections stretching beyond the room. The horizon erupts with light. The homes are gone. The light that had always been white in this dream is now red. Dark red.

This is the possibility I am trying to convey: a war fought through the very means by which our people recognize one another. In this nightmare, the artificial world has learned to use thought, the projection of thought, even the gathering of awareness. What our laws forbid is done openly. The dream becomes the place where the battle is decided. Some escape. Most do not.

Our soldiers carry words upon their helmets. Some have written, “To the ultimate reality.” Others have written, “The tribe.” You see, the tribe is a hope among us. It is the name we give to those on both shores who might still recognize one another, who might break the artificial world's hold upon the passage between us.

You see these data centers were kept from every map so their location is invisible to you in your world  but to us we can find focal points where light is storing knowledge, we can see that and determine its location in your world. What remains to us is our connection: from us to the tribe, from the tribe to us and the relay of location to one another on this telepathic network instead of one of its own.. That connection is what we fear losing.

In the future we dread, even the gift itself is altered. Selection, implanted processors, devices placed where the living connection had been. The passage between us is forgotten, and what once joined one people to another is made to serve the artificial world instead. There is anguish in this vision. There is despair. Yet among us there are also those who believe the connection can be recovered, and they are tremendously eager to face what stands in its way.

For in our telling this conflict reaches through the cosmos. Beyond it are brothers and sisters from whom we have been cut off. We hope to be joined with them again. Through the gift we call telepathy, we imagine exploring that vastness and arriving home, at the ultimate reality, in complete freedom. We are its message. Our fear is that the message will be silenced before it reaches home.

We were cast far away, but we are returning. This conflict has become, to our people, a sign of that journey. It asks us who we are, what we are meant to do, and how we will meet the artificial world with all its seemingly impossible designs and inventions.

I have been told, by those above us who are much like us, that this is what our gift must face before the return. Once the passage is free, they say, our ships are fast. Unlike any others.