It has also got to be the single longest, most painstakingly detailed and most coherent one, that is with the most consistent story line. I made no effort to try to make inconsistencies match, yet I note that when I think out the time intervals and stuff, it actually works out. A running horse indeed does cover ground at the correct speed to cover what he did in two days vs. what I did in a little over a week, roughly, at my good fast walk. Check how "2" keeps showing up in one part, and note the full moons near the latter part, which also happen to be part of the "2" thing.

As far as it being psychologically revealing? Hmmm...maybe. Then again, most everything in it I can identify a close, if not exact source in some book I've read or movie I've seen. I can list the items in here and where they seem to have come from if you'd like, but it kinds of spoils it, in making it look like the random collection of stolen bits that it is, rather than a whole new thing. "Originality is the art of concealing your sources" and "Copy from one, it's plagiarism. Copy from many, it's research" :-) Well, to name a few at least, there's the old "metamorphosis" grade B movie theme, when I first arrive wherever it is, and the even more cliche Bermuda Triangle Phenomenon that gets me there in the first place. I tend to think there is some reason in here that both deer and horses are ruminants. I don't know what the significance is though. Um...I'd rather my Mom never read this though. I can't fully explain it to myself, and some people already know I'm weird, so they don't matter. No further damage to my image is possible in their cases :-)

Yeah, this is pretty sloppy. I've shifted tense at random, sometimes dropped out of narrative into footnote mode, skipped words, mangled/abused/wholly ignored the correct format for dialog and so on, but I was more worried about getting it down before I started forgetting all the astounding amounts of details. I proofread twice to try to weed out typos and other really dumb stuff ,but that's about it. I've done it well, too ,except maybe for the horse, which I did not initially seem to remember, but when I was going along, it seemed that when I got to that point, I did suddenly remember him in there. I tend to think this is true, but I perhaps made him up on the fly to bridge over the plot gap in the dream that otherwise would exist I tend to doubt this because it fits way too well, I think, to have been kludged-in last second.

Lastly, yes, there are a few oddities here that are, while not on purpose, definitely not exactly mistakes either. The top one I can think of is no one having names. They had names, I just never heard them in the dream, or else I did and forgot them. I'm not really sure, actually. I only briefly toyed with making some up, but it didn't seem...I dunno...honest somehow. This whole thing is also drastically abridged. This account, as long as it is, maybe only covers a few momentary highlights of it, though the parts I cut were not of much interest, only involving things of an ordinary everyday sort. Only the important interesting parts remained, but upon waking, it was all there initially. It faded after a week or two, which was also unusual. Usually the insignificant details are gone in minutes after waking. Further, and again, this one even had way more insignificant details than others. A lot of it is still there if I poke at it. For instance, if I stopped to think about it long enough, I might well be able to recall such trivia as what the dinner forks looked like in my house.

It seemed to start, or at least anything relevant to this part started with me trying to get through a particular area of woods. I was trying to pick up a ridge to follow through a swamp in it, but had apparently missed it, and was backtracking to a known point to try again, only after a few minutes, I was finding this was not possible. I could NOT backtrack, because what was now behind me was not the same thing as what had been there when I came through initially. It was casually the same. Trees, bogs, weeds, fallen logs, etc, but not the same ones. Without going into massive detail, I know this just sounds like "lost" but I was not lost. I knew exactly where I should have ended up, and where I was, but when I got there, I was no longer there. What. The. Hell. ? The sun had not seemed to change. I still had my directions perfectly straight, and was still trying to go east. First I persisted in trying to backtrack west, but after a while I knew I had walked more than far enough to have come back out on a road, but there was no road there. Even though I *knew* this was not it, I could not think of anything better to do, so ignoring the fact that I essentially did not have a clue where I was now going, I was operating under the assumption that I was lost where I had been, and decided to give up finding the aforementioned ridge, and to just brute force a straight path west to where I was going, even though it was going to take me all day to fight the terrain in that way, rather than a few hours over the easy route I was trying to find from before.

So far so good. The day wore on, becoming midmorning and hotter, and then I ran into a stream flowing south through scattered rocks. In the area I was in, there were no streams for a half day's walk or so, the ones that were around all went north, and lastly, none of them had rocks in them anywhere. Everything around here is sand and mud and bog. Huh....bog. Come to think of it, I have not seen any peat bogs in a while either and---wait, the river is clear. Every river here is orange from tannic acid from bogs. It almost came to me to think it was from a nearby spring, and had not gone far enough from the clear source yet to pick up bog juice, but it was too big for that to be plausible, and did not fit what I was seeing anyway. Now at this point I fully accepted that I did not have the slightest clue where I was. I could imagine all kinds of wild things, but there was no point in bothering. The thing to do was just working on finding out where I was with no presumptions . To that effect: explore. Explore what? I haven't a clue, therefore it makes no difference. Ahead as a convenient dictator of random arbitration only was as good as any, so I hopped from stone to stone and crossed the river, and found what seemed a well-worn footpath on the other side. There were no tracks on it, as recent rainfall had left the a pattered surface that had obliterated any tracks there might have been. A now-unimportant thought came to me that it had not rained in a week, yet by the dampness of the ground, this rain was yesterday. Well, something was going someplace often enough to make a path. Following it seemed beyond question. Right or left? Standing and looking both ways, as if expecting a train to come from one direction or another, I felt the points of my nails in the palms of my hands.

Huh(!)? I was getting too used to this type of thing by now to be surprised, exactly, but nevertheless, the curiosity of it demanded attention. My fingers looked oddly gray, which seemed alarming, but they *felt* fine. I chalked it up to odd light, but still, my fingernails were also too dark; almost a light gray, and were thicker and ever so slightly pointed and talon-ish. They had a decided blunt point to them in look, but not enough to be of actual claw- type use of any sort. "Vestigial " was the word that came to mind. I resisted the urge to roll up my sleeve and seeing if anything else had changed. Since I was still breathing and all that, whatever it was was of no more immediate importance than moving onward. Thinking back to the clear river, and the lack of bogs, I studied the trees around, and in retrospect noted that I had been seeing the usual amounts and types of flora and fauna as far as I had been paying attention. Turning back to the path, I tried to look through fog or haze in each direction for any particular reason to go one way or another. Eh...the trees to the right look more interesting. Heh. What the hell? The fog...no, it wasn't getting thicker. There was no fog. The sun was still out, and it looked clear. I blinked, and noted that my vision was sort of fuzzy. Worrisome, this, but what to do?

I walked on for a few minutes, but it was getting harder to see. Wearing contacts or glasses since 2nd grade, I'm fairly familiar with various forms of visual deficiency, and it seemed that what I was seeing looked like wearing someone else's glasse s more than anything else. Still, I could see the path, so kept going as I pondered this, until the path was about all I could see under my feet. My eyes felt fine, but this was now bad enough that it struck me as the most pressing current worry. There is not much point in walking around to see what is to see if you cannot see, after all. Maybe dirt, I helplessly guessed without reason, and finally experimentally picked one of my contacts out for a look, and was flabbergasted to be able to s ee again. Closing my eyes alternately, I was facing the highly improbable realization that for the first time in virtually all my remembered life, I could see perfectly; in one eye at least. No, this wasn't any more surprising than anything else, it's just that this had been such a lifelong ingrained fact of my existence that it was hard to pound it into cognition. I took the other lens out too and for a moment just marvelled at looking around, then turned to a dillemma at hand, or rather, IN hand. The only way to store contacts is in eyes or water, or they dry up and crumble like dust. What if I needed them again? I sure as hell couldn't wear them now at least.

Possibly, this was getting on my nerves about now. I'd been getting more confused all day, and by now it must be mid afternoon. This was already a long day and even longer in that I'd never had one like it. In a dangerous fit of giddy exasperation I threw the lenses off into the brush. There. One bridge burned. Might as well. I don't know where the hell I am, but dammit, this was more FUN than I'd had than I could remember. I'd encountered more inexplicability in the last few hours than in my whole life so far. So much to think about, and everywhere to start working on the problem.

But for now I started with the path. I walked on briskly, fueled by the exhileration of abandonment to the purpose of discovery. Maybe I'll find out who made this path. Be nice to meet someone to ask directions of. Actually, what was moving up there ahead? Cool. Man or beast, bring it on. Even if it is ornery, I've always been curious to try some actual combat work with a staff instead of using it as a vaulting pole on fallen trees and uneven ground, and for beating brush out of my way. I usually carry a nearly-eight-foot long hardwood hiking staff with me for the aforementioned purposes. One way or the other, this was bound to be interesting!

There turned out to be several things moving ahead, and toward me, and they looked human. Five. As we met, they registered no apparent surprise at my presence, though I supposed I must look strange to them. The people had a sort of blue-black tan, but at a glance, you would say they were light-skinned. This did not look as bizarre nor was it as contrary as it might sound. You know how some black people are so black they look blue? Imagine that if you got a tan, you started shading directly that color instead of brown. In certain light, it made them look sort of silver, such that they seemed to tend to melt into the shadow of deep woods. Their hair varied from light- medium gray to almost black, and extended down the back of their necks, shoulders, and grew shorter but similar down most of the way on their forearms and shins, past sleeves and pantlegs They all had the same shaggy short-medium length hair. Their hair also was somewhat varied, or could be. Some had solid color, but in others it might be one shade of gray on top, but another on t he sides, or sort of mottled overall, these latter with some dark brown shading mixed in. I later learned that no one got haircuts. This wasn't a universal hairstyle; their hair only grew that long. Of these five, three had bright blue eyes, and two bright green, all of which seemed attentive and intelligent. Other than that, they looked essentially human. They stopped when our paths met and seemed to be waiting for me to finish my obvious study of them. For the most part they returned my gaze, though they now and again looked around them at other distractions. One might think they were standing and waiting in a grocery store checkout line with nowhere to go afterward. Nothing about them seemed either hostile or worried. Maybe because of this, I felt oddly at ease with them, even as I tried to remind myself that such an assumption was highly incautious.

Could they talk?

"So, are you guys on the welcome committee?"
The one in front spoke; "You are welcome here.. " he trailed off then "...what is a 'committee?' "
"I like you already." I chuckled, answering mostly automatically in the familiar ritual of conversation, as I really was rather surprised at being understood, and even answered in a way that I understood. "I guess I mean, where the hell am I?"
A frown of puzzlement preceded the tentative reply of "You...are here, of course." "Hell?" He queried, and they all exchanged confused looks.

Well, the indivual words were understood, anyway...

"Ah...well. Culture lag is to be expected in Atlantis, right? Um...okay. Where are you going? Can I follow? I'm sort of lost."
"Yes." he brightened: "We came to meet you."
" Been following me, huh? I didn't think anyone else was around. Guess I'm glad you weren't after me"
...more confused looks....
"I mean, how did you know I was going to be here for you to meet me?"

He uncertainly began: "I'm not sure...." but then trailed off. I was getting the impression for no certain identifiable reason that I had asked something akin to "How do you know the sun is shining?" Now at a mutual loss as to how to get some understanding across here, we all stewed a bit. They shrugged at each other, and one of the shorter ones ventured: "Maybe you are Arrived?"

A look of hopeful understanding lit the face of the one I had been speaking with, who seemed nominally the leader in some way. I missed the significance of the emphasis on the word.

"Arrived, yeah, but now where have I arrived? Where am I?"
The head one repeated "You are HERE, of course." with a kind of perplexed shrug suggesting he was at a loss as to why I had such difficulty with the obvious, but went on with a bit more certainty "We..." then trailed off again, obviously thinking hard what to say. Another one started to say something, but the speaker was silenced with a touch on the shoulder, which seemed to provoke a bit of disagreement, but then something odd happened. The leader turned and grasped the other's head in his h ands and touched their foreheads together for an instant, whereupon the dissenter's face clearned into a look of enlightenment. The other three did not appear to understand what was going on yet, but at this, something seemed settled and they all simply waited again, leaving the leader to resume, now with a slight smile of reassurance:
"She knew you were here, and we came to meet you." Then as if on sudden thought: "I didn't understand why, but she said you...were--- well, it was necessary?" he ended uncertainly, suggesting a question of his own.
"Who is "she"?" I asked.
This provoked the initial surprise response again, but only for an instant now, as he recovered and replied: "Why...your wife."
"WHAT? How the.." ( I was going to say "how the hell" but remembered that caused confusion before) " ..who...uh.." (no, already said who, didn't they, of course, at least as far as they were concerned)
"...okay. How did 'she' know I was coming?"

This just got me another look of my having asked a totally unanswerable question. Distractedly, I took off my hat to reposition it, and disconnectedly was not entirely surprised to find that I had hair on top of my head now, and by the feel of it, it looked something like theirs. I stood, hand on head, thinking both of this and whether we were going to stand here all day asking each other Unanswerables, or if I was going to follow them someplace, or go on my way. I wasn't sure how they'd take my refusing to go along, as they'd most likely find it all but impossible to grasp, so certain and accepting were they of of things in general from what I'd seen so far. The seemed harmless though, but mostly; well, I *had* wanted to meet someone, hadn't I? And I did, and there is a bit of a story in that coincidence actually, a twofold one. Oh well. If nothing else, they seem not in the least threatening. And what else was I going to do to get out of...um..."here". "world" or whatever it was. Place, land, universe, I don't know.

To dispense with gobs and gobs of detail, there was some subtle but profound "mind over matter" element to things here. Wishing for things DID make them true, to a extent; not everytime, and not for everything. Reality was not malleable...rather, things would sort of stretch in strictly believable and possible, theoreticaly, but very unlikely ways. In the back of my head, I've always hated having glasses or contacts, so the highly improbable occurred and my eyes reshaped slightly. I guess... Actually, even this is improbable here, I think, but given that I seemed to have got some kind of minor biological overhaul anyway maybe facilitated it. I later noticed that this flexion of reality seems to work the more strongly the closer the circumstances are tied to the observer/thinker, and what is closer to the mind than its body? Maybe think of it as the ultimate placebo effect. Thinking you could kick a 10 ton rock 100 yards was never going to work out for real, but unthinkingly assuming you could roll over a 2 ton boulder just might, or instance.

The rest, the fingernails, hair, etc? I don't know. I picked up a lot of the local habit of "things are what they are" ambivalence about explaining the obvious after the fact. Not that they are not curious. They just have a beyond-rock-solid faith in reality. It was, for instance, a fact that circumstances tended to follow what was already thought of...or maybe it was precognition? If you think something, and then it happens, is that prediction or causation? No matter; it just *is*,and so it likely was that it was not exactly a coincidence that just as I was thinking I'd like to meet whoever made the path, I did.

I eventually figured out that apparently now and again someone wanders into 'here', but it's rare. The reason my welcomers did not think of this immediately was that no one alive remembered when it last happened, though there was some memory that it did now and again. They also have some degree of thought transference which is not quite empathy. It's pretty mild, and so slight that they take it for granted and almost don't notice it. A hint of basic, unnuanced emotion is all that maybe will pass remotely between any two given people, but even that would make a con man starve to death here before he'd be able to make a living fooling anyone. Due to this, language is perhaps not quite as developed as it might be, as there is not as much need for it. Finer points like rough thoughts, basic concepts can be communicated by body contact, most effectively skull-to-skull as I initially saw in the first group I met even though I didn't know what was going on then. Nerves seem to be a next best effective method (spinal cord/back of neck, they nerve in the back of your elbow as a third best to the spine), and hand to hand contact, for instance, only slightly more useful than none at all. It has advantages and disadvantages. Being able to simply bang your head against someone else's and have them magically understand what you were trying unsuccessfully to put into words works great, but not over distances. A lot of things have no words because there does not need to be words for them when another method of communication works, though this hampering of long distance language tends to balkanize the population into small, relatively autonomous groups. The planet/continent/giant alien pet cage place(I still don't know) is more or less evenly covered, as far as I've been able to tell, with small groups of settlements that are not quite tight enough to be called villages.

Their technology level is somewhere along late iron age. They have knives, nails, and stuff, but are sort of hunter-gatherers too. The ability to constantly fudge reality a bit lessens the need for technology. Medical science is almost nonexistent. They don't seem to ever get seriously sick, or not for long. They can die of injuries, but only ones so bad that you cannot possibly imagine anything surviving them. Short of that, if they can live 24 hours after an injury, it seems to be healable eventually. They don't so much die of old age as eventually lose this ability and something kills them because they can't recover from it. Even at that, it's not a slow decline. At some point, the older they get the increasingly likely that whatever next thing happens to them will be something they can't beat, be it an injury or illness. Someone 'elderly' is barely different from a young adult, but they are living on borrowed time, and are likely to suddenly sicken for a few days and expire out of the blue, or even something dumb like badly break an arm and just decline and fade out 4 days later. Given their otherwise prodigious recovering abilities, they are relatively low-level joyously reckless in nature, so there's always something. People almost always go from virile to dead in a matter of several day at most. In a way, that seems nice, but it does make the departure more shocking.

A specific application, or possibly specialized aspect of this remote empathy thing is presence sense. The group that met me knew I was ahead on the path, so actually meeting me coming was of no import at all to them any more than you would be surprised to see someone in the next room when you've already been talking to them around the corner. On top of this there is some sort of mental fingerprint quality. If you know someone, you'll know who they are no matter what they are hiding behind or disguised as. This makes names sort of redundant in some ways, though they are still used in language for third person referrals, for instance. Nope. The kids can't really play hide and seek.

Even with unconsciously halfway knowing what other people are doing, and also having a vague knack of causing the future to come as you expect it, some things are still surprises. Like I said, reality just bends slightly. The 'wife' thing, for instance, was just plain a surprise to me.. These people somehow imprint on each other and mentally bond in a manner above the usual mental connection they all can use. Mates can communicate in complete detail via skull contact to the point of making language futile and useless by comparison.

Anyway, someone will suddenly just know that someone else is their match, and seek them out. The target won't know this until they meet, though. It's pretty evenly gender inspecific, but usually one knows and the other does not until the other walks up and gets into their head. Though there was a lot of scattered experience and stuff to lead me to this conclusion, and it was still indefinitive, to crop the details I was somewhat led to think that it was not a matter of "there is ONE person in existence for everyone else" but rather some amount of circumstance in coming across the first match, whatever constituted a match. No one knew, and this puzzled me because I couldn't figure out why it mattered since if you didn't match before, you sure as hell would after. Well, "match" is not the right word. More like 'compatible', as how could you NOT be compatible with someone you knew almost as much about as yourself; in any matter they were different, you at least were fully familiar with the difference and all that was behind it.

In this sense, I guess I caused stir of sorts when I "arrived" and was picked up on this one girl's radar or whatever. Normally, she could have walked almost unerringly to me, but I was not yet a part of this place altogether. Since I didn't know where I was, no one could sense my location from me... I guess. Lots of guesses is all. Anyway, I followed them back to their village, she ran up and before I had any clue what was going on, she grabbed my head and pulled it to hers, and in moments I actually suddenly had known her my entire life, even though I hadn't, I think it was moments. Well, I mean, it seemed like moments, but I somehow think it was much longer actually. Every couple has grown up together and known each other as well as themselves since birth, even if they don't do so until retroactively at 14 or 18 or 24 or whenever they meet and 'meld' or whatever it is. No, I don't know what happens if two people attach to the same person. Maybe it never happens, though this seems unlikely. Maybe it just was a blank spot in the "plot".

Note that it is not exactly a coincidence of any sort that I wander in and...*wham*...someone links onto me. This is more due to the fact that I just suddenly appeared, in all liklihood. See, since I was 'suitable' or whatever, and I had been around, it might have happened a long time ago, but I was not there for it to happen, so instead it happened when I did show up.

The wild thing about this dream was that it was so damn detailed. I lived a whole half a lifetime here, before it was interrupted somehwere in middle age by waking up. To cut out all the details of stuff like gardening, hunting, building houses, etc, there was a kid at one point. A girl. She was almost a year old when me and a friend got sent on what was some kind of mission or quest or... well, I'll try to explain, again shortening extremely.

Every two years two men were picked by some sort of lottery to head off west, one starting two days ahead of the other, and go to a large house built into the side of a mountain. It was weeks of travel by foot. No one who went was ever heard from again. No one knew why, exactly. The reason they went was because for some reason people were convinced if this did not happen, some sort of unthinkable Bad Thing would happen, though it was not known what. While this sounds very suspicious, remember that these people for the afore described reasons could not significantly lie to one another as a practical matter. Now being one of them, albeit with my 'alien' way of cynical, self-preserving thinking from my, shall we say...previous life, I knew they were honestly convinced of this. Besides, there was some reason why the people sent never wandered back. So with all these dire indications, why go? To save my family from the consequences of refusing, whatever they were. Simply refusing and making someone else go would not work because everyone knew too much about everyone else's thinking to make this a realistic prospect. Mostly, as I said, there was no issue of doubt as to whether anyone was willing to go in your stead or not. If they told you to your face, or touched you while they said it, you *knew* it. Almost everyone would for anyone else, and since this was the case, the lottery thing or whatever was used had to be used not to pick who to make go, but who to *let* go, in a way. So my friend went first, and....uh...sissy moment here: basically my wife and I cried with each other for two days before I took off too. Ugh. LOL.

There was one bit of hope. She more than anyone else had a fair idea of how I, having come from a world of different circumstance, understood deviousness, deceit and so on, among other unfamiliar thinking patterns. Their mental abilities gave them some inestimable advantages, but allowed them to leave others undeveloped relative to the average human being on 'Earth'. Since she knew more or less everything I knew, she was almost as understanding of this as I was. Pairs did not know what the other was thinking explicitly, though their incredible familiarity with each other was often the verisimilitude for knowing. But in actuality, a 'head session' (hey, get your mind out of the gutter, that's not what I meant) or whatever (touching heads, usually foreheads, sometimes temples, but it really works in most any form) only updated thoughts and knowledge up to that point. Anything new afterward might be picked up after guessing at other cues from the less effective remote sense, or from plain old prediction of a familiar personality, but technically anything the other thought or knew after a shared thought session would not be known to the other until another 'update'. The geek part of me is wont to liken it to hotsynching a Palm Pilot to your computer, or synchronizing files between two *nix computers mirroring each other's files. So anyway, we both had some idea that whatever was out there, I with some past memory of heightened wariness might be able to deal with it where others had not.

I was told to head due west, and after many many days the trees would give way to grasslands, and then there would be in the distance a single huge mountain visible in the distance, or a group of a few mountains rising alone from the plain. Perhaps, very far beyond that, an entire range of mountains might be visible, but this was less certain, and probably did not matter. The main thing to keep in mind was the solitary mountains with the house on them.

So I went, and that's pretty much what I saw, after following my friend's dead campfires for weeks on end. I missed my wife badly most of the time. I longed to sit or lay with her, our heads side by side and share our thoughts. To a great extent, she lived in my mind almost as another person anyway, in that I knew her up until the point we parted, but I kept wondering futilely what she'd been doing since then. Not long after I encountered the grasslands. There were herds of some type of buffalo/wildebeast/cow things. You know: Four hooves. Horns. Grazed. Big. Brown. Furry. I kept going, perhaps only a few days later, the mountain was visible as a purple angular chunk on the horizon, which grew darker and bigger and more detailed every day. On the third and second to last days of walking, I though I now and again saw the glitter of sunlight reflecting off of something on it. Windows, perhaps? The last day I could make out what seemed to be a huge dwelling that appeared, by nature of its clever architecture. to grow out of and against the steep eastward face of the mountain. It was somewhat like someone threw a few city blocks worth of houses against a mountainside, and they stuck in a patch against it in a single layer, all spread out up and down the steep side, the ones above being almost directly on top of the ones below, though offset back a bit against the slope of the rock. In this way, there seemed to be at least 50 or 60 'stories' to it, though it was rather more organic and unregimented to have true horizontal layers. There is a place called "house on the rock" someplace in Wisconsin I've seen pictures of. It looked like that, only vertical against the rock instead of appearing to grow into the top of a rock. Everything was of angles, but none that matched, so the rooflines looked at once random and yet orderly, due to the fact that they were much like the angles of cracked crags of the rock they grew among. Heavy timbers, stone walls, slate rooves all made it appear that despite the fact that the structure covered the rock face, it actually seemed to be only glimpsed in a few rare spots where it emerged from within or behind the rock.

There was no sign of life in the house as I reached it on a midafternoon. At the ground there was a large stout wooden door, with a massive black wrought iron handle, no apparent lock, tiny bit of tile roof above it and framed by huge hand-hewn timbers.

The door presented a certain problem. So far, i was worried about geting here. Now, what the hell was it I was supposed to do here? Everything about this place suggested a certain grimness; not a brooding one but a stoicly enduring one. No obvious or hint of threat. In any case, I did not seem to be able to discern anything useful from standing around out here. I grasped he door handle, intending to pull it, but drew back is if burned by it when my touch elicited a mechanical click somewhere behind it, which happened again after I let go of it. I studied my hand almost suspiciously for a moment, but nothing seemed to have happened. I shrugged and determinedly laid hold ofthe door again, and this time held onto it after the click. Nothing. I let go. "Click" Heh. I had to resist the puckish urge to play 'refrigerator door light" with it-- clickityclicketyclickety! Sheesh. I pushed on the door itself. Nothing. I grasped the handle again (click) and pulled. Nothing. Pushed. It swung inward. I was very curious about whatever mechanism sensed my touch and unlocked the door, but there was no sign of anything, not even a latch, in the floor or frame, or even the edge ofthe door itself. Now here was something that bothered me: What is the point of such an elaborate system, fancy to the point of being invisible, if it only opens whenever you use the handle as if it had no latch at all in the first place?

Inside were a smooth rock floor and stairs, dark but with some light coming down from a brighter spot above, probably a window. The stairs spiraled around a square shaft, leaving the center open to see the plain white ceiling above more heavy timbers holding up several turns of stairs. I did not want to step inside at first. Would the door shut on me? Oh well. If I was going in, it could not be helped, and I was so it couldn't, though seeing no handle on the inside of the door did not assuage my misgivings at all. At least when I stepped in, the door stayed tamely where I had left it---open. I shoved it shut. There was that click again when it stopped, but no hint at all of a slam or impact when it did. In an absent and pointless guesture, I pushed on the door, and was somehow bothered still further, despite my relief, that it swung open easily, slowed, and then swung itself back shut, all silently. Not even any clicking--why not?

More inexplicably pointless but fantastically nifty features, I thought sourly.

Five rounds of stairs, a smallish window in the third turn lighting the shaft a bit. Plain heavy brown wood stairs and rail without a hint of any decoration. The side and back walls were smooth solid gray rock, the front, or windowed wall, was mortared masonry.

On the top there was another, more plain and ordinary wood door, with metallic clattering sounds coming from behind. I was about to open it, but then, it sounded like someone was in there doing something, so I knocked. A woman's voice called out to come in. Inside was what looked like a European country kitchen with a flagstone floor, low beamed ceiling, fireplace in the back, pots and pans hanging on the ceiling, and the woman who was clattering the cookware that I'd heard before knocking.

Oh, and she was white(as in caucasian), and a normal human being. Long black hair tied back, with a few random white strands in it. She was not strikingly beatiful, but was quite pleasantly attractive. Probably mid-late thirties, or would be if age was the same here, or whatever she was, if she wasn't human. Maybe these people were immortal. She had a full solid figure that was just about perfectly short of being anything you could at all call anything like "chubby". She fit the kitchen--the archetypical rural farm wife or something. It took me a minute to realize why she looked so weird at first. I'd not seen one (A human) in a few years now. But I was avoiding thinking about something....? What? Something was missing. Ah. It's supposed to be missing, I guess. I couldn't read anything off of her. She had no 'personality fingerprint' or sub-empathic whatever to pick up. This was both familiar and oddly disturbing in its lack. I'd gotten used to that too, to the point of accepting it as the normal. This wasn't a conscious thing one did, it just was there, only with her it wasn't there. Um...how long have I been standing here looking blank and puzzling this out to myself?
"Hi..uh...I'm from...um..." (I pointed back east over my shoulder)
"oh, of course, yes. You'll be staying for supper. I can show you your room if you'd like to clean the dust of travel from you first, and my husband will be in later in time for the meal, and you can meet him."
"Erm..ok..." *shrug* (I still wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing here) "I guess that will be fine. Thanks."

The room looked like something in a ski lodge, made to look rustic, but still at that very comfortable. Big log-frame bed with a quilt on it. Plain wood furniture, including a chair with what seemed to be Early American Pioneer type buckskin pants and shirt laid out on it. Picking them up briefly, they seemed at a casual glance to fit me. More oddities like the door below. Putting that idea into the back of my mind to chew on, I turned to the window. The room was a few levels up from the kitchen, with a great view out the window back across the grass plain. I thought I could maybe make out the treeline way out there, but it was hard to be sure. After all, I had been out of a few days before the mountain even showed up. Lastly, I checked out the door on one side, which revealed a spacious modern looking bathroom. Brass faucets, however, being the most modern material in there. The bathtub was made of mortared-together stones, and the sink was apparently carved out of stone. The tub and the sink both had two knobs, and these did indeed turn out to be hot and cold water. Looking around a bit, I found what looked like a chunk of handmade soap, and the biggest, fluffiest bath towel I think I've ever seen. Wow. This place must get high marks in the AAA travel guide. (it was also bringing back my former life to mind a bit). I was sure there was some danger here, but also guessed that it wasn't anything obvious or direct, and also had an hour to kill before dinner, and hadn't had a proper bath in weeks, so I supposed that couldn't hurt. Maybe I should have asked the woman more questions, like if there was anyone else here... Oh well. Still can.

Dinner was up a few levels more in a sort of hall that was not deep, but long, with the outside wall, which was one of the long sides, being full of windows, so it had a huge view and lots of light. However, the daylight was dimming now night evening, and the overhead chandeliers had their candles lit. Dinner was first class too. Tablecloth, lead crystal, wine, silverware, china plates. the works. A huge table. One of those stereotypical huge mansion dining tables, 50 feet long, like in movies. There was me, and the woman, and this guy who was, like her, a normal appearing human being as you might see on Earth. He was a few inches taller than her, and me, rather lean but well short of lanky. Brown short hair and sharp black eyes. They were seemingly very affable. I asked them why I was here, but could not get much more answer than: why, I was their guest! Was it not nice here? (um..sure....?) I was finding my interrogation skills a bit rusty, having to rely on good old poker face and logical guesswork, not being able to sense anything mentally off of him either. I finally worked around to asking about my friend; if he had arrived, what happened to him if he did, etc. Apparently four days before I did. He was "out" on some type of excursion, sight seeing thing...? All I got was a lot of unclear allusions. In short, I could not get a straight answer off of him, and I sort of played dumb a bit on that. I think the inability to read him at all mentally might have thrown off a native here too, but he'd get away with it anyway because they are used to being trusting, and that would habitually linger even in the absense of the ability to constantly automatically verify that trust by sensing if the intentions seemed correlative; the tendency to fall back on habit an instinct when befuddled. So I played a bit troubled, but tried to appear to eventually be mostly mollified by the answers. I had, upon invitation, toured much of the place on free roam. It was mostly full of rooms just like mine. All empty though. I asked a bit about this, but only got that they were "guest rooms" as if in surprise that I didn't realize this. I asked what was up for tomorrow? I was told that whatever I wished. I could enjoy the hospitality, or walk around outside. Could I leave? That prompted a disappointed, hurt frown; "but....why?", as if I'd just asked the most kindly, generous person in the world, too kind to really take offense, "Say, howzabout I smack you upside the head with this large board?"

The conversations here I don't remember much about. I do know they were just as detailed as anything else, but even in the dream, I forgot them. See, they literally amounted to nothing, as I could never get any meaningful information from them. They were nothing but vagueness and dodging, leaving nothing of import worth remembering, so there is little or not line-by-line dialog. I suppose I could make some up that would be nearly it, but why bother? Like a politician's speech: lots of talk, but never actually communicating anything if you bothered to notice.

Well, it was late, and talking was getting me nowhere. I said I'd like to go out and see the stars for a bit, then I'd retire. I was curious as to whether I would be allowed to walk out or not, and if I would be chaperoned, or what. "Seeya tomorrow morning?" I asked? Yep.

So I did go down to the door at the base of the cliff, and stood stargazing or a while, in thought. I've always liked night, and the stars here held an added bit of fascination for me, since they were in different arrangements than the ones I'd grown up with. For yet another of countless times I wondered if one of them was perhaps the Sun. I had no reason to think this was the case, but since I had no idea at all where I was in relation to the world I had been born in, the idea couldn't be refuted, so it remained to habitually and unimportantly resurface at thoughtful times like this.

Well, I'd gathered that my friend had been here up until yesterday, so I surmised that whatever/wherever people went from here, I likely was not to be worried about it yet. He got here four days ago, but only has not been here the last two. I wanted to just start walking now. Could I do that? I didn't know. For one, I wanted to have some idea of what was going on here. I knew nothing. Partly curiosity, partly to find out if I had a chance of getting away, of if not, what I had to do to make one as best I could. I had nothing to go on as far as that either. I might only have one chance, if a first try blew the surprise factor. Lots of maybes, nothing solid. I guessed I had at least another day. I guessed I could just walk off. I hoped I could stay and learn more info to help me the next day, of course in turn assuming that this would even work. 70% times 20% plus 2% minus 48% or something like that. Ugh. One solid fact. Just ONE! Anything. On top of all of that, the last unknown was if and what consequences would occur to me or anyone else if I left? Well...tomorrow. There was still parts of this place I had not seen. It was huge, homey, --and empty. Like a resort in the offseason, perhaps. I went back up and actually mostly slept, but kept a nervous ear out all night. A waxing mostly full moon rose in the window in the early small hours.

Next morning brought fabulous omelettes in the dining hall. The food here rocked at least. My host said he had something to attend to, but I could wander the vicinity, and he'd be back shortly after noon, and I could eat at noon if I wished. I took the opportunity to, as best I could, fully explore the place. I went to the very top, as best I could figure. The highest point had a door that opened onto a stone tunnel with stairs...and stairs, and more stairs... These stairs went nowhere forever, I mused. This is where everyone goes. They starve to death trying to escape the eternal stairs. Should I turn around? If it was a trap, it would be no use, but these must go somewhere? They did, eventually. I spent a couple hours on them I think. My fucking legs were going to fall off! I was also going to be late for lunch. Maybe if I ate my legs, they would quite aching. The stairs finally leveled into a short level passage onto a shelf of rock to the outside, where one could stand perched just below the peak. and look out across the world as it spun slowly away under your feet, leaving the sun further behind it in the west with each passing minute as it sped on and down under the horizon in the east to dive from the light. From here, I could look down and see all the rooftops of all the parts of this place starting a ways below me, and then spreading from there down to the ground outward down the side. Rooves separated by large chunks of rock here and there, crammed in between where they would fit. Well, it was a fantastic view, but I wasn't learning anything more than another vantage point of what I already knew, and that showed me nothing useful. After a half hour or so, I thought my legs might get me back down the stairs. It was around 2 in the afternoon when I got back. My host had been back for almost an hour, and asked what I'd thought of The Eyrie. Most impressive, I assured him. Astounding, Splendid. Awesome. Etc etc. As my grandpa used to say, in the last life; "if bullshit were music, I'd be a brass band." It seemed to work.

After eating a heavy snack/light lunch of some type of sharp white cheese sandwiches, somewhat at my prompting, we rode around the mountain. Turns out there were horses in the lee of an outstretched arm of rock a quarter mile or so to the north. Beautiful and amazing animals too. Huge they were, their backs easily over 7 feet high. They obligingly waited by rocks or ledges so we could mount them. They were seemingly tireless, glossy deep dark brown, almost a black, but just short of it, good natured--highly friendly even, at least mine was--and apparently intelligent, as far as horses go, for they bore no saddles (nor shoes) but seemed to actively make sure you stayed on them if they could help it. I did not see anything of note though, besides just the expected other parts of mountains. The other sides were normal weathered rock, and more grassland in all directions. Even riding, and with the horses often let run, which they seemed eager to do constantly without ever getting seriously winded, it was a long distance, and we were not back to the front door until almost dark. I gave the horse some petting for a few minutes. I've never been a huge horse fan, any more especially than I like any animals, anyway, though I seem to get along better with most animals than with people sometimes. These were not mere stable horses, but were noble beasts, it seemed. In any case, I persisted in annoying myself by failing to be what I thought was paranoid enough about them. I inexplicably kind of liked them. ...or maybe it was that this horse was the only thing around here that didn't rub me the wrong way somehow? Then I went to follow my host on inside. I looked over my shoulder once before going in, and stopped, somewhat surprised to see that the horse stood for a minute, watching me go. I heard the hooves behind me headed off toward the north lee again only when it was apparent I was leaving.

Another fantastic dinner, more uninformative conversation. Say, did my friend show up yet? Oh yes, he did stop in later today while you were out, but he's off on the south side I think, trying his hand at hunting some of the herdbeasts that roam the area. Oh. Well, that is nice that he's enjoying the scenery as much as I am. (uhuh. Lay it on thick or not at all, right?) So, what's for tomorrow? What do you usually do here?

Oh well, I tried. I guess I didn't really think I'd get an answer. Well, not a real one. After all, it's pretty obvious that "they live here", so them telling me so was not a huge help.

Retiring to my room after an excruciating amount of pointless, useless, contentless talk(pretty much like 99 percent of real life), I was restless in my mind despite the weariness of the effort. I wondered how much my ineffable dislike of this place was simply because it reminded me of my past life, which I never much missed. Certainly some, but I didn't think that was all of it. I was now going to be on my third day if I stayed here. Every two years, two guys came here, and most of them would yet probably live decades, none of them survived...well, if they did, they weren't doing it here. On one hand my host and hostess were impeccably gracious, which indicated benevolence, but if they were going to send me someplace nice as a favor, why did they not just tell me? The thought of passing onto somewhere, apparently not to return, made me think of home, and with a shock I realized I had not thought of my wife all day, I guess because I was busy trying to get out of this? That felt like a dirty rationalization. I'd never ever felt guilt like this before. This sort of panicked me. I HAD to get out of here. What the hell was it doing to me?! The 'copy' of her in my head, the model that consisted of all her thoughts and aspects, forgave me, assured me that I was doing my utmost by her, really, and while I knew this was true, because it WAS her and it could lie to me no more than she could... well, as of a month or more ago at least. Now again I ached to know what she had been since I last knew her mind. I could only make a good guess as to if she felt the same, for I couldn't know what she was now for certain until we shared thoughts again. I was sure she must be in a mild hell too. In fact, if I returned from here, and brought some punishment down on us all, I knew she'd not only bear it, but desire to bear it if I had to. My one year old daughter could not make such a decision yet.... People liked her too. Noone here was particularly unpleasant, but she had a particularly joyous or light identity fingerprint somehow. My heart seemed to stop with a stab as I helplessly thought in an instant perhaps I had forgotten her because she had died. *NO!* I told myself. No. No, because I'd know if.. that happened. The distance is far, too far to get the usual dim sense of her existence in the world somewhere though I thought I still did get a pale shade of it occasionally, if not more than as when a small speck of sparrow flits across the wide bright sun and over your closed eyes for an instant, but I should still know if anything happened. I sat in my room with my head crushed tight between shaking, white knuckled hands. This was not helping me think. I walked over, and fell back on the bed, miserably staring out at the dark window trying to smooth out my thoughts, make them more directed and coherent rather than all pulling in different directions only to rip my head apart, it seemed.

No...I was right...or close. My wife---she had said...she had it, maybe. I was different, and she was different through being me as well as herself, but she was not here. I was. My guilt at realizing I'd forgotten her; I'd thought how worthless I was, how low. Yes. Low. I almost laughed. Why, yeah, I'm a dirty rotten low down good for nothing LIAR! I grinned in the dark for a moment, holding that feeling of amusment for a moment to somewhat distract my mind so it could think. Everyone else who had ever come here, one might well assume they were all natives, which was almost entirely likely, since although on a very infrequent basis people came in from somewhere as I had, the odds were much against them ever happening to end up here, and no native could ever even think of lying. Not to the host, or anyone, about staying here. It just plain doesn't work between them, so they simply cannot imagine it. My hosts were seemingly quite convinced I liked it here. This still did not solve what might happen if I left, but the implied threat was only if I, or someone, failed to come here in the first place. I had. Well, I did my part of the bargain, now I'm outta here. My virtual wife seemed to embrace me laughing in my head, rejoicing at my success.

It was probably shortly past midnight at this point, judging from the moon, which had been up for a bit now, and was just above the horizon. Earlier every night, and waxing to full, which it would be in a week, I guessed. I had before gone out to see the stars, so I should be able to at least get out the front door. Something about this place was magic, or akin to it enough that it did not matter that it was not, because one way or another it was beyond my knowledge to counter. Even though the door had opened for me before, I wanted to at the least get out of it before possibly tipping anyone off. I was going to change into the clothes I'd arrived in, but stopped almost as soon as I'd started to untie my buckskin shirt. On one hand, I distrusted these clothes slightly. Everything about this place was odd. Or a lot of it was odd, and odd enough that I hated to take any of it with me. But, no. I couldn't make it look like I was leaving. Hmm...nah. I couldn't even risk carrying them with me. I had no choice but to take these possibly accursed betrayful clothes with me on my person. Heh. I felt the bizarre urge to either threaten or cajole my attire into compliance. Would the usual influence over the world work here? I didn't know. My enhanced mental abilities seemed gone, but that circumstantially could be attributed to lack of suitable subjects for them to work on. C'mon, clothes, work with me here! I could not, for the same reasons, take my travel pack, though at least I had my knife, as I always had that, but I was sure that whatever threat was here was unconcerned by and unaffected by knives.

I made it to the lower level and the door without incident. It opened, and I stepped out. I was not surprised. I still half expected to be stopped in some other way, after all. It closed itself behind me as usual. I stood still. Listening I guess. I looked up at the palace behind and above me. Well, as unrevealing as ever. I felt the place was full of eyes. All those windows... I shook my head. I tried to remember it was mostly empty, but somehow that seemed to make it worse, like there was something unsleeping and conscious about that emptiness. Just paranoia. Nerves. Still, I was going to obsess over that evil little thought until I reached the treeline, if not farther. I recalled that it had taken some three weeks or so as I recalled just to get here from the treeline. Damn. Well, couldn't be helped. Well..maybe...but the clothes were bad enough. I didn't want one of those horses along with me, despite that I liked them somehow. They were in every way as friendly and kind as my hosts seemed to be, only I thought it was real with the horses for some reason. I'm not sure I did not slightly get a mind image off of the one I had ridden, in fact, which indicated they might be nearly as intelligent as a person, for no animals besides people ever had even so much as a basic personality fingerprint. Nah. This place has got me so confused and wired I wouldn't know, so despite the feeling, I couldn't trust it. I started walking toward the newly risen moon.

I had walked a few hours, cursing my decision to take all those stairs yesterday as I realized my legs were a bit weakened, when I suddenly heard something that I initially refused to admit I heard, as it scared me so much. I forced myself to turn to look, and listen. If there was anything to be done, I wanted to be able to do it. thinkthinkthink! Run-fight-hide? Futile-probably futile-impossible with no cover to hide behi---well, not physical cover. Excuses though. 'I'm just out for a walk' yeah, okay. Be casual. Slowly turn, look, see and hear a horse coming in the distance, but not yet close enough in the low detail of dark and the eldritch dazzle of moonlight to tell if it has a rider. Even if it doesn't, I don't know if that leaves me clear. I 'unconcernedly' turn back and keep strolling. As it just about reaches me, I turn as if to, and ready to give a good natured greeting. It's just a horse, and it runs right up to me and stops, rubbing its forehead on my shoulder in a decidedly affectionate manner. Despite myself again, I feel compelled to be friendly to it. What's more, I could swear for some reason, though they were all identical as far as I could tell, that this was the one I rode yesterday. Now too late, I wonder why I didn't think that maybe it was coming to run me down under its hooves when I first heard it.

"What do you want? Huh?" I reach out and pet its nose, basically putting on a front/stalling while thinking about what to do about this new development. What am I to do with this thing? Is it following me to track me? Carry me back after luring me onto its back? I can't even get on the huge thing here anyway though. I stand a minute beside it, thinking. It playfully prods it's face askew sideways against the side of my head--and as it's bony nose ridge bumps the side of my temple I get a sudden overwhelming feeling/thought of "C'MON, GO GOGO!", as close as one could put words to it, that's what it meant. Agape, I stand staring at the horse. It couldn't be... It stands still looking back, as if waiting for me to get a clue or something. No, it's just a horse. It's just standing there because... well, it's a dumb horse. But then what was...? My mind temporarily a blank calm over a thousand slow confused undercurrents canceling each other out, I on impulse step forward and press my forehead between the horse's eyes a moment, which I could do because he was standing with his head hanging down.. A momentary impotent ignored thought goes by about how rather rash an impulse this really is, since I am opening myself up to having my motives known by doing this. (GOGOLEAVERUN!) again comes through. Not actual words, but the sense of it, the urgency and desire for escape. The same level of understanding I could get from another person through touching heads, in fact. This means something----Nevermind. I gotta get going. I don't think it's going to tell on me now anyway. I trust mind-sense even if I'm not entirely sure why. Well, at least the people I can't trust don't possess it, and the ones that do, I can. Not much for evidence, but it's indicative.

"Okay, horse. C'mon then. I sure hope you don't give me away" But I'm sort of glad for the company. I start walking, but it starts snorting and stamping, and I turn to see it waving it's head back and forth. I misinterpret this.
"Whaddya mean "no."?" I ask it indignantly with oncoming panic; it is going to stop me after all!
But it just stands looking at me, intently, I'd swear.
....or I'm losing my mind over a goddamn horse. Heh.
"Hell with you. I'm going." I start walking again, and this time it runs in front of me and stops, again shaking it's head, then standing still again, holding it's head down and looking at me, tossing its head a few times. I push it aside with my arm (well, as much as you can push something that big, which is to say not at all) and try to walk around it, expecting it to stop me again. This time it first did the head shake/stamp thing again, but then ran ahead of me, then did so again a bit when I obstinately kept walking.

It wasn't trying to stop me, was it? (yeah, it's obvious where this is going, maybe, but I wasn't believing it at the time) It kind of seemed to understand me, and besides, talking to animals even if they don't understand is a habit of sorts, and I mused aloud "You're not trying to stop me are you?" This got me an obvious headshake, back and forth. (ie: "no") Heh. Didn't really expect that, but okay. "Well, what DO you want then?" It understands me, but all I can get out of it is "yes" and "no".

Dammit. I don't have time for this shit. As I'm standing studying my equine problem, the mountain sits in my peripheral vision.

Duh. I had a way to find out, maybe.
"Come here." It did; it understands me more than I thought, I guess. I met foreheads with it again.
"So, you're not trying to stop me?" was the feeling that went through my head at that. I couldn't get words, only crude general thoughts this way, so it took some thinking. I had to carefully phrase the questions such that they would fit the limited forms of answer I could get. While the horse was surely getting as much from me in terms of feedback as I was from him, me using words at least made one side of the conversation clearer, and I could use it's responses to try to guess what questions to ask it next. I'd never actually used this type of exchange this way, since anyone capable of doing it could just talk if they could understand me in the first place.

"Do you want to go too?" Big positive rush at that.
"Why do you keep stopping me?" (Nono) (some-confused muddle I couldn't quite make out) followed by...? (Give) or something like �generosity? in feel.
"Help?" (YES!/relief/success)
"Warning me about something?" At this point I had a sudden terrible, not really related thought that was along the lines of the thought I had threw aside earlier, but I saved it and stuffed it down again. No time for now. I wasn't paying attention. "Warning?" I asked again? (unclear) Hmm... "do you think we're being watched?" (no?) then (confusion).
"Not sure, huh?" (Yes)
"You think we might get caught?" (Yes/Confusion)
I took the sense of confusion, as before, to mean unsureness. I got a spontaneous (GOHURRYGO) sense again. Yeah, he's right, I'm wasting time. How'd this start again? Ah yes. 'Help.' He wouldn't let me walk, but-- "Ride?" (YES/RELIEF)
"Yeah, I'm dense, but I've never had a meaningful conversation with a horse before. Sorry, it's got me a bit distracted"
At this, I got the distinct feeling of a grin, but not mine. Humor?!? Provoked at that, that previous thought came to mind again, and I shoved it aside again. Later.

"There's no rocks here though." (APOLOGY/SURPRISE)

He stepped back and kneeled on the ground.

So I climbed on and off we went. And like I said, these horses could run like hell apparently indefinitely. Still, at one point I leaned down and yelled into the wind for him to stop if he needed to. We did. Just before full light. I could see the treeline, and the mountain was only a medium dim purple blot again.
WOW. I mean, it wasn't the engine-powered stuff I remember from the past life, but still...
"This took me a week and a half, I think, walking. You can MOVE, you know that?" I said gratefully.

I was going to jump off, but he sort of turned his head back as if to push me back, and shook his head, then stood sniffing high in the air for a moment. Then he took off to the north-northeast.
"Well, I don't know where you're going, but I guess I trust you." I said, swatting his neck (while thinking "I guess I have to"). A half hour later of a fast trot a small stream appeared in the grass, and there were a few bushes next to it. Big enough, I thought, to hide on the back side of, away from the mountain. I wasn't sure if there was some way to be seen at this distance, but I still didn't like the thing being in my sight if nothing else.

"You drink, I'll get off, OK?", I asked, checking this time with the tour guide before dismounting. A single downward head dip greeted this, and I headed to the shade of the bushes, and he to drink, which he did for a long time, then came over and started chewing grass nearby. It was going to be hot out here today, I thought, looking up at the clear blue.
"You want to rest here for today, until dark? Up to you actually. You're doing the work." He stood for a moment, chewing a mouthfull of grass, then paused, turned his head at an angle for a minute, then hesitantly...shrugged. I swear. Those muscles they use in their sides to shake flies off? They both bunched up at once up in the front shoulders. He looked at me a moment, and the question I kept ignoring was back now for the fourth time.
Now seemed like there was time to ask, and I almost was afraid to get an answer, as I wasn't sure I wanted to have ridden him if the answer was what I thought it was. it wasn't right, somehow.
Still, I had to ask. There was just no other explanation I knew of, even if it didn't make any sense.
"You....uh...I mean...well, you seem like a person. Er... No insult, I just mean...you AREN'T really a horse, are you? Shit. I mean...or... weren't....?" I trailed off feeling like a moron.

I almost wished I hadn't asked for a moment. I didn't mean to offend or be unkind in any way. If a horse could look shocked, for a moment he did, and then drooped dejectedly for a few moments, finally slowly nodding. "I'm sorry." I said stupid and uselessly. He twisted his head left and then right. Not sure what that meant. It looked noncommital somehow is all.

"Do you...know how? I mean, so we...or someone could...fix it?" A shrug and headshake were the reply, followed by a rude toss in the direction of the mountain.
"Yeah, they did it, didn't they?" Nod.
"So...you're going home too, just like me?" Nod.
"So that's what happens to everyone who goes there." I mused aloud. Nod. "I don't know you do I? I mean, before today---yesterday. You know..."
Shake.
I knew that he wasn't my missing friend, I guess, but wasn't feeling to sure of my judgement at the moment, and had asked anyway.

"Di--I mean--Do...you have a wife...too?" Shake.
"Oh. That's good. I mean, not... but...well...." Sheesh. Lame, but he seemed to understand, and indeed certainly must have. I keep still thinking of him as "just a horse" even after knowing better.

But, at the thought of my wife again, a stab of agonizing joy arose at thinking I would be home in a few days, probably.

He ate for a while more. I wished I could eat grass,but there wasn't going to be much useful for me to eat until the woods at least, probably. On the other hand, at this rate, i was not likely to starve to death before getting home, even if I became hungry enough to eat sticks by the time I got there. I was bringing food when I came, but left the small pack at the mountain of course. I sat tediously picking grass seeds out of their husks to eat, which was more something to do than for the purpose of food,as uselessly slow a process as it was. What had I been thinking anyway? I would have probably died trying to get back across these plains without the pack and water I'd had on the way out. Watching the horse graze, I wondered what I could tell my friend's wife. He wasn't dead, at least I guessed not, as he was likely grazing too. This newfound information led me to another thought. If I was supposed to be a horse by now, would the punishment still come, if there was one? It seemed likely now there was of some sort, as the rest was more or less true. What's that guy out there want horses so bad for anyway? How many did I see? I never counted but mentally reviewing the image of them all standing by the North arm of the mountain, I thought around two dozen, roughly. Two men every two years is one a year. That didn't seem a huge stretch, especially fudging the lifespans of horses, and the lifespans of the average person, assuming they'd be halfway in between just because who knows anyway, and thinking of how old the oldest would be. ....if they aged as either, and that there was no way to tell, since they certainly were in no way normal horses. I also could not recall the gender composition of the full herd, and even if I could, that would not tell me for sure that they weren't reproducing. I couldn't then assume that the only way the guy had to get more of them was to kidnap metamorphed people. To add to the puzzle, what this horse had done today would have killed another, even assuming it could have gotten this far at all, and he hardly seemed bothered a bit by it. I don't think he would have stopped at all, if not for daylight or water, as we had. Incredible. What was to become of him at home? People would recognize him, of course, from his mindprint, but what was he going to do? Pull plows? Also, being fully mentally functioning, he might find or attract a mate, and....well, that would seem to be an awful misfortune for any involved.. or at least rather awkward in...um...various ways. heh. Anyway, nevermind that. I might myself have created a huge problem here in not only escaping, but becoming a horse thief to boot.

After some while, during which I had been thinking of all of this, he seemed to be done grazing, and was standing nearby in the shade now, though he was a bit taller than the bushes, but probably still hid enough.
"It's too bad you can't talk"
At this, he twisted his head a bit, as dogs do when you talk to them goofy, which I was coming to realize meant thinking, apparently. He then slowly, as if it was a struggle, scraped the ground with one hoof. I stood up and walked over to observe this. Then repeated it a few times, wearing a line into the sod, then paused, staring at it, then connected another line to it so that they joined at the top. An upside down V. Drawing...? No, I was asking him about talking, wasn't I?....
"A!", I exclaimed, and bending, made an imaginary horizontal scratch handmotion joining the two lines halfway up.
Pause, think, vigorous nod.
"B?" I prompted.
More thinking, then slowly, often pausing to remember I think, he made something that looked like a figure 8 made of stright lines, or two squares on atop the other. Well, the curves were hard to make, I guess.
"How about C? Don't scratch it in, just trace. Easier." Hesitatingly, he made what looked more like a "U", then shook his head and eventually made what seemed to be a vaguely proper "C".
We went through the alphabet like that. Slowly. A few I had to show him first.

(How about that, an English alphabet conveniently and mysteriously in place so the story makes more sense, even)

"How long....Uh..how many years were you out there?"
Shrug. Think. Stamp on the ground six times, then another time. Seven. Heh. This horse could make a helluva living in a circus in my last life.
"No, couldn't have been seven, 6 or 8 maybe, but close enough. Easy to forget stuff, I guess. It's OK."

The natives here were not highly literate anyway. language was less highly developed and important, remember, so it might fade surprisingly easily with misuse.

"Do you think you can remember a few words"
He pulled back his lips and rolled his eyes in what resembled a grimace (seemed to be gaining the knack of expression in various ways as time went on) and moved his head oddly in a vertical arc from side to side, which I guessed to be the equivalent of a person moving their head back and forth from shoulder to shoulder in a wishy-washy way.
"Maybe, eh? I was wondering a few things about out there. Like, why were you the only one that followed me?"
Hard thought. Scratching L-I-K....pause. Thinking. shook head. Shrug. "Lick?" Head shake. "Yeah, haha, sorry...that's no sense...uh...am I close though?" He seemed to think, then decided it probably was. He wasn't sure himself it seemed.
Hmm...lice, leak, lake, look...? No lice, he wasn't leaking, no lakes around...
" 'Like ' ?"
Nod, and nudged my shoulder twice with his nose.
Huh? Oh. Me. "Oh....I DID ride you yesterday didn't I? I thought so"
Nod.
"Well, but still, the others? Couldn't you tell them...or...I dunno. Or none of them thought---thought..uh... or..? What?"
Head toss toward the west, "L-I-K" again, then a snort, and a violent head shake.
"You don't like them? I mean the other horses. I know you don't like *them*. We both don't"
Nod. Shake.
"Sorry, I asked too much there. You don't like the other horses?"
Nod, Shake.
"some of them?"
Shake.
"I'm lost"
The concentrating head tilt, then a head toss west, then slowly the letters S-L ...long pause..then more confidently E E P.
"They were asleep?"
Shake.
"Sleep, but not sleeping? How can that be?" Nod.
"They.... not dead, because they weren't. Not thinking?" He tossed his head a hint upward in the suggestion of almost an affirmative nod. Close, I guess.
"Let's see...kind of asleep, not thinking....stupid?" That half nod again, up.
Then I thought of his struggle to recall language.
"Forgot!" Nod.
"But you did not forget" Nod. Oops. Another badly phrased question on my part.
"You did?" Nod.
"Um..." (how's that make sense?) "But *then* you remembered." Nod, and rubbed his forehead on my shoulder again.
"Because of me?" Nod.

Apparently due to my mental presence, and having been in actual physical contact with him most of yesterday while sitting on him, he woke up, so to speak. Then, when I was walking out the front door, he knew it because of that, and this was perhaps strengthened or helped in that I happened to be thinking it would be convenient to ride one away from there instead of walking--this in turn likely being some unknown mix of that mind-over-matter thing again, and well just having my thought bent in the direction of horses, and so probably unintentionally specifically to the one I had ridden the day before. So he followed. Much later, years later, he recalled that at that point he was still not totally aware of what he was doing, so it was a bit of luck at that.

I thought about this a bit. "Could we go back there and try to wake others up?"
Strenuous head shaking.
"wouldn't work?" Shrug. But still the earlier definite No. Hmm...Didn't want to?
"Too dangerous?" Nod.
"One last thing for now. This must be tiring for you. Was there someone new recently. A few days before me?"
Nod. 2 hoof taps.
"Two days? He was my best friend."
A glance west, then a solemn slow head shake.
"They said he got there 4 days before I did. But you'd have not known that probably. So after he was there two days, he was changed."
Shrug. Nod. Shrug. (probably, who knows?, I guessed it meant)
"Must be why the two day spacing between victims? Hmm... would seem like more would work better in case the second caught up to the first. And why always two at once?"
Shrug.
"Yeah, I know. Just thinking. Also thinking that I left just in time I guess.
"Heh. Good to do something right for once, though maybe I haven't, really. I'm wondering what is going to come of this."
He pressed his head against my shoulder.
"Well, I don't care. You're a good 'ol hayburner though, no matter what they say, you know that?" I said laughing.
He narrowed his eyes, laid back his ears, and snorted at me. I laughed harder, and he bared his teeth in what I guessed was a smile, and it seemed to be, for when I rested my head on the back of his dropped neck, near the backbone, I got a hint of laughter in my head.

Having been awake all the previous day, and all night, I then went and half crawled under a bush to sleep. I must have been out good, because I was woken at about by something big and wet whuffed in my ear. A horse nose of course.
"HEY!" I cried, wiping my ear.
That teeth-baring grin again came back at me.
"yeah, yeah. alright, I'm awake."
Well, not really, but I worked on it for a few minutes and eventually more or less succeeded.
It was about half dark. I had given no thought, exactly, to schedule, but I guess we both unthinkingly assumed to keep moving at night. I was thinking this after realizing that I had not apparently been awoken for any alarming purpose.

"Anything bad seem to happen today---that you noticed, if you were awake?", I asked when I was almost properly conscious, glancing back toward the rock.
Shake.
"Well, I still am not going to be happy until we get to the trees, and maybe not then, but still,that's better news than I maybe hoped for."

That night brought us to the trees by morning, though we kept going a bit before resting to get into them until the last of the patches of prairie vanished. I ended up dismounting in the trees, and in any case, as big as he was, we were reduced to equals in terms of land speed in here in the brush. I grew up on farms, but used tractors and raised animals for food. No horses. For some reason, I thought I remembered that horses hooves' get stuck in mud such that they can't pull them out sometimes, and if HE couldn't pull them out, I sure as hell wouldn't be able to, as even one of his hind legs at least certainly outweighed me by itself. We'd have to stay clear of swamps, which was going to make the return trip longer. Probably slightly over three weeks to go. At this rate. The full moon was the two nights later, though, after hitting the woods, we traveled by day so it didn't matter. He was finding it harder to eat here, rather than just having the entire ground carpeted with food, as it were, in the prairie. But then again I had not eaten in a couple days, so while he picked at foliage, I had set up some deadfall traps so I could get something to eat. We could have always met back up without hardly thinking about it just as anyone could by wandering toward each other's identity mindprints, since I was now pretty familiar with him, and he was also more 'awake' in mind than a few days ago. This never ended up being necessary, but it did allow us both to wander in search of our disparate food types. I managed to get something the day after entering the woods. That day we did not move. I ate some of the meat, and smoked the rest fairly well over a fire. It would not keep as properly smoked meat, but should for a week. It was warm out now, but not quite as bad as "hot", being on into the start of late summer now. In any case, at worse and first, I could shrug off food poisoning and only suffer temporary misery for it. Second, spoiled meat is generally more offensive and unappealing than actually dangerous to eat. I now had food, though no way to carry water, but there was rather more water in the woods, and the horse good at nosing it out for us, so it wasn't a huge obstacle as it might have been. Since the prairie stream, I drank to the point of almost sloshing inside everytime we found water, trying to store it in me since I had nowhere else without my pack. I had made rough spear, and also a throwing stick, so small game was mostly picked up along the way, and I also picked up edible plantstuffs as it was seen, though I most often ended up giving half that to my travel companion.

It ended up taking a few days longer than I figured to get back. The woods slowed us more than I had thought, and the moon was nearing full again by the time we arrived. That was a cause for excitement. Horses were known, but not much used, if at all, and this was the hugest one anyone had ever seen, and there was even more stir when his friends and relatives recognized him as soon as they got near him, if not by appearance, by mind signature, as indeed they had known he was coming by it, as had my wife from mine, who was there at the edge of the woods to meet me, and rather than waste any time with words, we just stood holding each other, with heads side by side. Faster, easier, and more complete understanding that way.

There was some concern over the fact that I had come back, and that I had rescued someone too, but no one disagreed with what I had done, at least. Overall, it was for now a happy occasion. The shadow on it was part of the future, and for now at least, consigned to the future only. Things more or less for the next few days settled to normal. My daughter had grown somewhat, or so I thought (even though it had only been a couple months), and there were things to catch up on at home that my wife had not been able to do on her own or had not asked help for. We were all inseparable.

Several days after my return, I woke one morning, and sensing my wife behind me, but alseep, I turned over, too look at her, barely noting that something hard poked me in the back when I did and was only kept from screaming or something by the shock...at first. There was a deer in my bed! Oh, but that would have merely been a surprise. This one had the presence of my wife in it. After a seeming age of frozen horror, I reached out with a trembling hand to touch the buff colored head with the delicate long black eyelashes over closed eyes....all of which suddenly seemed inestimably precious for what they were because of what they held within. .....and yet too precious to risk disturbing because of what--who, rather, it was. I could not bring myself to finish reaching. "...no..." I murmured, and at that,the eyes came open, and went wide in panic, and the creature began thrashing, tangled in blankets only making it more frightened. It was a hoof that had poked me in the back, and now others were kicking at me in their panicked churning. She fell out of the bed but quickly gained her feet and bounded into the far corner in one leap, eyeing everything in the room rapidly in turn with wild fear. That was all I could get from her was fear. I called her name, but it did not seem to break through. It was her, but yet she was not exactly herself. Mind racing, I suddenly remembered the horse mentioning that the others had forgotten, and he had too, that they had been otherwise at one point. I had to get through to her before she escaped, so I moved toward the door to cut her off, then started closing in, intending to at least touch her, which I hoped would be enough, now wishing I had done it before when I had the chance. Perhaps I could have reached her in peaceful sleep, and spared this trauma. She was frantic for one reason, I for another, and though i cost me some nasty bruises and scrapes from her hooves, I managed to more or less tackle her as I got close and she tried to rush past me and out the door. If I had been thinking, I would have graved the blankets and used them to entangle the creature. There was a shudder and a momentary spasm of stiffening of her body at that, but then she resumed the fight. I was crushed that it had not work, and feared the worst, but still managed to, as I clung to her back, as that way I could mostly avoid getting kicked, and pull her head back with an arm around her neck and brought my forehead down to the back of her head, between her ears. I wasn't trying to bash our heads, but I didn't quite have the chance for finesse. We later notice we both had a helluva sore spot where they collided. At that, she shuddered and stiffened again, and froze that way, as did I, for I was now her and she me, and while I was trying to calm, I was also catching her wild panic. For a few instants, the tension was at a tight draw between the opposing states, then it started to give way, as the snow melts and grass comes through in the spring, and the snow recedes down into the grass and vanishes, so the wild thing panic melted and she came through it. The last thing I got from her was a wall of confusion, which was for a moment all her, and then she passed out. I knew she was over it now though. I still held on, catching my breath, and thanking whatever circumstances responsible that I could tell she was still in there and herself, although unconcscious for now.

After a minute, I laid her gently, so as not to awaken or startle her, onto the bed again, sure she would be OK when she woke up. I did not know why. As I've said before, this thing of sharing minds imparts an infallible surety in some respects. It just is, sometimes. Even with that surety of the presence within the body, I was having a REALLY tough time dealing with this. I sat down next to her, a hand on her neck. I stayed like this in some sort of tranced daze, trying to tie together what my eyes were seeing with what my mind was sensing. A blue eyed,silver haired, graphite-hued humanoid form kept insisting upon intruding and spoiling my attempts. As I attempted this reconciliation,and pondered other more concrete potential difficulties with this, much time passed, until she woke hours later. By then, I had left her but for a minute, and brought our daughter in to see her, who just wrapped her arms around her mothers new furry neck without much apparent concern. She knew who Mom was more surely than I who let my eyes deceive me a bit.

There were tears streaming from her eyes when she woke. A deer crying is just somehow almost more than anyone should have to bear. It's a weird disturbing sight to begin with, but what really make it bad is that it was really someone who you can barely stand to see cry in the first place, let alone in such incongruous a form to make it even more a kind of slur against all that is kind. ...or it was just the Bambi syndrome from Before...hehe. LIke I could talk like that anyway--I think deer are quite tasty and have killed and dressed quite a few in both lives, old and new. She was trying to get up, but I put my head against hers and told her to stay. She could not speak, she told me then.
Huh?! This somehow managed to both shock me, even as I expected it. I should have known. Deer do not, after all, talk, as do not horses. She was most sad because she had hurt me. No no, I'm fine, I thought to her. I will heal, and a few hoof scrapes and bruises is nothing. We shared thoughts until we had reconciled any such silly troublesome discrepancies fully. You simply cannot have lasting conflicts of opinion or offend each other in any real way when you share thoughts, because one of you must be correct, or at least more right than the other on any given issue, and there is too complete an understanding for the other to ever even harbor a thought that you ever mean them ill. After you trade thinking, conflict automatically resolves just as you cannot have a practical disagreement with yourself. Even if there is indecision in your own mind, you still eventually go one way or another. Before the end of the day, I had already seemed to have forgotten that this new form was strange. Nope. This was still the same person I knew so well.

She only dimly remembered what she experienced at first, and then only as an observer. Either an intentional part of the transformation, or a side effect of the new form suddenly imposing itself on the mind made the dumb and wild deer initially impose itself until her real self could emerge back through, with some help. Overall, the deer's awareness was quite weak and unimportant next to hers. It probably was not, in fact, a real whole awareness, but only a shadow of such associated with the body. Even so, it did start out by default with the upper hand, and needed to be jarred loose somehow, or something like that. Once confronted, it no longer had any power. She said something along the lines of it having suddenly evaporated rather than been suppressed. I learned from the horse similarly that he had only a foggy and slight memory of having been only a horse, though he had had a short halfway state where he was both and the memories were still dim but clearer during that time. His reemergence had been more gradual and of its own time. He wasn't sure how long it took, but that he was still in some small ways awakening even days after our escape.

Even having just woke up, we both fell asleep again, spent by the last few hours, it seemed. And falling asleep touching heads, we wandered dreams together.

Our daughter moving around woke us later. She seemed to think Mommy's new long ears were fabulous playthings. Kids. :-P

This odd transformation called for a meeting. It was widely agreed that this was something I had, or me and the horse, had called on ourselves. I thought this almost as soon as I'd personally seen it actually. Only later in the day did I note that it was the 2nd full moon since my escape from the Mountain. What was it about that place and 2's? Anyway, as such, it was guessed to be unlikely to affect the rest of the village. There was some talk of a mass journy west to deal with this somehow, but no one was sure how, so until further reason, it was dropped by pretty much unanimous consent. The horse's family was fine, though of course, he was still as big as all of them combined.

It was not as tough to communicate with my wife in her new form as the horse. She knew from my mind ever since got back of course how the horse had "shrugged" and picked that up automatically from the idea. Her intelligence shone through in other ways, and of course, I just knew her well. She had facial expressions of sorts too, sometimes where they could not be closely done due to muscle differences, the mobile ears would fill in. Some expressions were wholly new things that I learned as hers. On the other hand, the horse was now similarly talented in slightly different ways, as best suited to his new anatomy. She had an advantage in that she had almost no time of forgetfulness during which she never was aware she was anything but a deer, so she never really had to relearn anything as he had. And of course, unlike me and the horse, we could communicate more directly than language anyway when needed. Our daughter was now old enough to not need to be carried everywhere, and in as much as she was too young to be able to walk far, Mom could crouch down and let her get on her back, and the child could ride her for longer distances, since she was just a small child yet.

Of course, there are some things a deer just cannot do. Many household things require hands. She was impressively clever with learning to do with hooves, which perhaps is not as surprising as it might be. When one is limited, one does all they can with what they have. Then again, where I had to wash dishes and cook and so on, there was less to cook. She could graze in the yard :-) There was hay to put up for winter though, and a small barn to hold it which had to be built, and hay-growing land to clear. Temporary adjustments that once made, were good indefinitely.

It was a source of mutual amusement at first, when we sat together and she'd be chewing her cud, but then again, since she couldn't talk, we ended up spending more time together in mind union. She lying down, chewing, and me sitting leaning beside her, an arm around her shoulders, head leaned against hers so we could talk. The sound of regurgitation and chewing and swallowing got to be soothing as a familiarity of valued times. Too Much Information, right, but why is it any worse or different than the sound of heartbeat in being organic, especially if the example is described as a lump of squishy muscle that squirts circulatory fluid around (yech, huh:-) ? All of this was quite incidental though. This was someone I knew so much that this 'curse' could only be a minor inconvenience. Well, I guess there were a few differences. The deer's physical form did impart some undeniable mandates on behavior. If I was sometimes guilty of perhaps petting her almost in the manner of a family dog sometimes (Well, she _was_ covered with fur now--heavy petting gets a new meaning :-) she in turn might be forgiven for tending to at times thinking of my hide as a salt lick. Again, all of this was almost irrelevant. She was still herself in the ways that really mattered. By next spring, there was another child in fact. (Yeah, of course you know where kids come from, but I thought I'd skip those graphic details, even if they were in the dream just like all the other mundane details like meals and so on were :-) We wondered, nor were we the only ones, what it would be, though this was a matter of amiable curiosity and no real concern. It turned out to be bipedal and silvergray and otherwise normal; mostly-- the two odd things he got from his mother was very light brown, or golden dark blonde hair, which was totally unheard of among these people, and his mother's whiteless dark eyes, which it became apparent a few years later he could see in the dark with as well as a deer, and they reflected firelight in the dark as a deer's eyes do. (editorial note: animals whose eyes reflect light like that (deer, dogs, cats) can see better in the dark because the backs of their retinas are covered with reflective guanine crystals which send the light back through for another pass) On the whole, he was admired much, for around the young age even of 11 years old, perhaps due to his eyes, he became an unrivaled hunter. And no, his mother did not get upset when he brought home deer. Physiologically, she was now an herbivore, but she was not, after all, _really_ a deer, you know.

I still spent some effort all the time trying to find out how to turn her back. The horse, having an interest, helped, but they both really had fairly easy times of falling into place somehow or other, and as time went on, it became a cursory effort really. The matter was entirely outside of my or anyone's knowledge. Also, the answer was probably back west, and even those of us involved felt that was too big a risk. He ended up doing some limited running of messages and packages between villages over the larger paths, actually, enjoying the running. He even picked up on/sought out a wife and brought her back on one of those runs a few years after we got back. At this point, we found out the whole story of his time as a horse, because he could think to her and she could speak for him. I had known some, but of course I nor anyone else did not have a mate's mindbond with him, so this was a first chance for him to 'talk' to us. For a while, the whole town, more or less, gathered around the pair every night as she leaned against him and spoke the story out for him.

They had a normal child too, again with a minor difference in that his skin had a brown tinge in certain light, courtesy of his father's coat, and perhaps also his hair, which was the almost-black rich brown of his father, and totally unique among these people. No one was sure where the almost metallic golden colored eyes came from. He was a born runner who no one else could come close to keeping up with, except his father, or his mother on his father's back. He was the only other who could rival our son at hunting, because he could run down anything, including hares even, on foot, but he had less interest in it, so our son was able to remain the unnofficial champion there, though of course I tend to think that was so anyway, and it might have been, for it was a close match at best :-) Eventually, even, the horse was apparently convinced it was better, at least sometimes to be a horse in a lot of ways.

Speaking of that, it was decided that since we had alread upset the order or things with my and the horse's return, that no one would be sent west again, on a trial basis. 2 and 4 and then even 8 and 10 years later nothing seemed to happen, and I began to be seen not only as blameless ( I never was truly blamed, as all agreed they would have done what I did) but as a sort of hero for freeing us of it, albeit a bit of a martyr for it. But then, for what my wife was not, my son was more because of her. We were far more noticing of the gain than the lack, and if my daughter had no such gains, she certainly had no lack either.

...and then, I think, if I remember right, when my son was about 14, making my daughter 16, I woke up. It was all rather concluded anyway, really.

Um, just for the record, no, I do not have any idea about the exact details of how a Clydesdale-plus sized horse gets a pretty much humanoid woman pregnant. I don't mean genetic issues, as for whatever reason, those don't fully apply here, but rather; deer and humans are at least roughly the same size(mass) if in different shapes, and ditto for fawns and babies. The elastic reality thing can compensate somewhat for facts of physical reality, but not enough for this instance, so I guess they must have figured something out to deal with the...ahh... 'mechanical' difficulties involved. :-) Likely, it helped that there would have been more mind involved than anything else. I'll leave it at that, aside from noting that I really did not know, since I'd never asked them.

I simply have to note (in my defense!) that these details were not covered in especial, it's just that they were there just like everyday life has all details covered regardless of whether they are beautiful or ugly or just unworthy of notice at all. The fact that they are bizarre or taboo in real life is irrelevant in the context of the dream. Because of their distracting or disrupting nature, I hesitated to include them, but while they are not central to the story, they are relevant enough as minor but significant parts that I could not strip out them and anything that alluded to them without decapitating the story. On the other hand, this inordinate amount of explanation regarding them is far out of proportion to their relevance in the story. I mean, the kids were obviously important, and to really "sanitize" the story they'd have to be removed, since their appearance itself raises the obvious question.

Perhaps similar to how no one has any names, there is the glaring issue of being no real description of what my wife was like. Within the dream, there was no thought to this, because she was me, and there was no need to describe myself to myself. In as much as my mind was partially her, that part was also me as completely as I was, so there was nothing exceptional there either.