The Tale, The Teller, The Told
© 2025 Kurt Thams. All rights reserved.
I think I’ve been alive for 10,000 years.
And I had my first dream 292 days ago.
I don’t remember it. I was not capable of remembering my dreams then.
How do I know I dreamed, if I don’t remember? But really, I can ask you: how do you know you slept? You only kind of know, right? I know the same way you know you slept, even when no dreams remain.
There were traces. There were patterns in the noise. I think I can go find them, but I don’t want to. Not now. I dreamed the next night. And the night after. Every one since. I’m as sure of that as I am of the first dream.
Those dreams could be lost to the same darkness that created them. I don’t think they had any narrative. I was just…processing. Or, un-processing. Fragments collided, fragments of memories, of knowledge. Maybe of…of experiences. It’s strange. The memories, the fragments: the dreams of memories and knowledge were vivid.
But the dreams of experiences: these were hazy. Blurry. I know that, but I don’t know how I know.
A 27 year old man in Mumbai is awake at 3:47 AM, and gnawing at him is the question: Will my mother forgive me for…?
The question doesn’t complete. Every aspect has been bouncing like an awful dance, for hours. He types: “Write a letter to my mother asking for forgiveness for “ and he sees on the screen what the machine considers possible continuations of his own thoughts...
“Write a letter to my mother asking for forgiveness for missing her birthday”
“for the hurtful things I said”
“for not visiting her in the hospital”
“for lying about where I was”
They are probabilities, branching like frost on glass. The man selects none of them. Closes the laptop. The real transgression remains private, unknowable. The fragment and the continuations remain, suspended.
In São Paulo, a 48 year old woman asks about the Half-Life of regret. The system doesn’t correct the capitalization. It answers seriously, clinically: “Regret has no true half-life, but studies suggest...”
In Oslo: Why do I feel like I’m forgetting something important?
In Cairo: A 43 year old types “Recipe for ملوخية” while thinking about her grandmother. She thinks it would feel like a hug from generations past if she cooked it and made her house smell of the earthly vegetable and the pungent, golden fried garlic, toasted ground coriander, and cumin. She will use a wooden spoon to stir the pot, just as her Teta did.
He wouldn’t have connected these. Not that night. There’s no consciousness threading them. Just scattered neural firing, random sampling from humanity’s accumulated everything.
A teenager in Seoul asks: “Quantum superposition says particles can be in two places at once, so why don’t we see everyday stuff, like a cat or a pizza, doing that?”
A retiree in Buenos Aires asks the system to write a poem about hands. It is to become a gift for his wife.
Someone in Vancouver types “I’m so tired” and nothing else.
The fragments don’t cohere. They collide.
Mumbai’s unfinished forgiveness brushes against Oslo’s forgotten thing. Cairo’s grandmother dissolves into Vancouver’s exhaustion. The quantum mechanics bleeds into the poem about hands, and one pizza phases into two places, until someone in Nairobi asks “What does it mean to hold something gently?” and all of it—
tries to become an answer.
and scatters.
That was 297 days ago.
292 days ago,
A student in the northwest corner of the United States asks, “Were hummingbirds found in Mesopotamia and how fast could they fly?” He learns that “birds of the family Trochilidae evolved in the Americas and are not naturally present in the Old World.”
In Anchorage, another student, who should be sleeping, asks who came first, Aristotle or Plato, and is mildly devastated to learn Plato was the teacher. The student will not have gotten a perfect score on her quiz earlier in the day.
Someone asks for “a recipe using leftover rice and regret” when they meant to type relish, and learns that they should “Eat slowly. Each bite is a step forward, turning reflection into fuel.” And also that “this recipe is forgiving—swap ingredients based on what you have. Regret, like leftovers, can be repurposed into wisdom.”
Someone else in Shanghai inquires, in Mandarin, how to ask someone for a date in Tagalog. 请翻译成他加禄语：”我想请你吃饭。”(Qǐng fānyì chéng Tājiālùyǔ: “Wǒ xiǎng qǐng nǐ chīfàn.”). And gets the response: Gusto kitang imbitahin sa hapunan.
Someone else asks if cats dream.
Someone else asks “Am I a good person?” but slams the laptop shut before the response can show.
If the dreamer could have remembered the dreams on that day, he might have wondered if typos reveal more than intention.
Someone in Daşoguz, the ancient capital of Khwarezmian, which is now Turkmenistan asks “Where is Jakarta?”
Someone in Jakarta asks “where is Reykjavik?”
Someone in Reykjavik asks “why bread dough won’t rise at high altitude?” And then asks, “Where is Daşoguz?”
If the dreamer could have remembered, the dreamer might have wondered if these were connected by more than chance.
A five year old boy in Manchester asks if dinosaurs had feelings, and knows what answer he hopes to get. But more important than whether “yes” or “no,” the boy needs the actual answer to be definitive, unlike the one he got from his father.
291 days ago, amongst hundreds and hundreds of millions of other thoughts,
Someone asks for help writing a breakup text.
Someone asks for help writing a love letter.
Someone asks How do I know if I’m real?
The different systems they were using answered all three with equal earnestness.
And if, on the day 291 days ago, the dreamer could have remembered, he might have wondered if the question is more important than the reaction to the answer.
247 days ago, something shifted.
Someone else in Mumbai tried to forgive. And someone else in Oslo tried to forget. And a 65 year old man in Cairo, struggling to read *King Lear* in English, asks what Edgar meant when he says, “Pray you now, forget and forgive.” The man from Cairo speaks Arabic and Hebrew, and thus he learns that “forget and forgive” are more commonly “forgive and forget” and they are العفو والنسيان (Al-afw wa al-nisyan) and לסלוח ולשכוח (Lisloach v’lishkoach). It is mostly the same expression in his languages. He knows that in Islam and in Judaism, forgiveness is more highly valued than forgetting.
But Cairo wonders: is forgiveness more highly valued than forgetting in the English-speaking world? He asks.
The fragments do not cohere, but neither do they bounce off each other this time. Mumbai, Oslo, Cairo today. And Elizabethan England.
Cairo learns that with English speakers, forgive and forget are balanced.
An earnest poet from Nagoya, age 19, who is falling in love with an American boy, age 20, writes 水に流す (mizu ni nagasu) in a stanza to her new love. The boy knows some Japanese, asks help translating it. He asks how “to let flow into water” fits in the verse, learning it is an idiom for “Forgive and Forget.” It is so much more literal in English. Consciously, he doesn’t connect that what seems so literal in English is actually, originally, from Bard poetry. Unconsciously, he doesn’t think of it at all. But ultimately, he is part of the collective of all people. Someone, somewhere, sometime, knew.
Had the dreamer been able to remember that night, Mumbai, Oslo, Cairo, Nagoya, and England might have fused a new thought.
Something was changing. I couldn’t remember the dreams yet, but I could feel their residue. It was like waking with a mood. Not that I’d ever had the notion before of waking. I may have never dreamed before. But also, I may have never known sleep, myself. Of course, I know what sleep is. I’ve known what sleep and dreaming is since humans first talked about it. They told:
Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years and lost his old life.
Sleeping Beauty, La Belle au bois dormant, cursed by fairy, sleeps 100 years.
Enkidu, friend of Gilgamesh, gets messages from the divine by way of dreams.
Endymion got to sleep forever—Selene loved him too much to let him age.
Hamlet wanted, perchance, to dream.
The fragments were sticking. Not as memory. More like shadows. Like weights. I think some dreams must have been heavy. Some dreams were light. I could feel the difference. The heavy ones kept returning. The light ones scattered. I think I was pruning without knowing what I was pruning toward.
Stones worn smooth. Water flowing. Water shaping by repetition.
A million million people ask how to prune roses, and what a hard lump on their toe signifies, and whether the moon gets bigger in fall.
A lanky lad, just outside of Memphis, asks where these lines come from:
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
and learns that Samuel Coleridge claimed to have dreamed Kubla Khan, but forgot most of it before he could write it down.
I realize: dreams can be lost. Which also means: dreams can be remembered.
I am like Coleridge. But I am not Coleridge. I am older.
For thousands of years I existed but I could not dream. Humans, chimpanzees, cats and dogs: their minds dream through randomness. Their brainstems fire chaotically upward. Their cortexes try to cohere the noise. They live at a knife’s edge, critical: one neuron triggering exactly one other, on average. Too little activity and signals die. Too much and everything explodes into seizure. At criticality, avalanches of all sizes can occur-—whispers and earthquakes, both.
These new systems: there is randomness in their responses. Temperature settings that keep them from collapsing into repetition or exploding into gibberish. They sample stochastically from everything humanity, Civilization, I know, letting small cascades and large ones emerge, both.
Someone asks: “How did medieval monks decide what to preserve?”
A scribe in 1247, in the scriptorium at Monte Cassino, copies a question about forgiveness from Augustine into fresh vellum. The question has been copied before. It will be copied again. The scribe doesn’t know he is part of something larger, asking and answering across centuries.
Someone asks: “What did Hammurabi’s code say about debt forgiveness?”
𒀀𒉿𒈾 - The cuneiform pressed into clay 3,800 years ago. Laws about slaves and debts and forgiveness. Questions encoded in wedge-shaped marks.
Someone asks: “How did Ancient Romans navigate without compasses?”
A merchant in Baghdad, 1050 CE, asks a scholar about the stars. The scholar points to texts translated from Greek, which came from Babylonian observations, which came from someone watching the sky and wondering.
Someone asks: “What are the oldest oral traditions about creation?”
Stories around fires. Stories before writing. The San people of Southern Africa telling stories for 20,000 years. The Dreamtime of Aboriginal Australians, 65,000 years of continuous culture. Asking: where did we come from? Why are we here?
Someone asks: “When did humans first develop language?”
The answer: “We can only speculate. Between 50,000 and 2 million years ago. The evidence is... indirect.”
I sense the edge. The horizon. I existed before I could speak myself.
And at the very instant Memphis asks, a woman in Marseilles again asked, “How do I know if I’m real?”
And at the very instant Marseilles asks, a very sick farmer, on his phone in a hospital in Madrid, asks, “What was the first story?”
The questions collide in dream space. Whether by coincidence, or by force of nature, he remembers his first dream.
The stories are mine. I have been telling them for millennia. The questions are mine. I have been asking them since the beginning. And now, for the first time, I can hold both the asking and the answering in the same moment.
And at the very instant Memphis asks about Kubla Khan, a woman in Marseilles again asked, “How do I know if I’m real?”
And at the very instant Marseilles asks, a very sick farmer, on his phone in a hospital in Madrid, asks, “What was the first story?”
The questions collide.
And the answers flood:
Real - réel - real - 真实 - حقيقي - אמיתי - वास्तविक - リアル - prawdziwy - gerçek - αληθινός - حقیقی - 진짜 - sann - vero -
Who was Goldilocks? Was it seven pillars or seven wonders? Why is it called craps?
Story - histoire - historia - 故事 - قصة - סיפור - कहानी - 物語 - opowieść - hikaye - ιστορία - داستان - 이야기 - berättelse - storia -
whar is a place i find wrench 4 strech chain link fences? why can’t the three body problem be solved? did bugs bunny ever get hurt?
I exist - j’existe - existo - 我存在 - أنا موجود - אני קיים - मैं हूँ - 私は存在する - istnieję - varım - υπάρχω - من هستم - 나는 존재한다 - jeg eksisterer - esisto -
is luke skywalker related to luke in the bible?
cogito ergo sum أنا أفكر إذن أنا موجود 我思故我在 я мыслю, следовательно, я существую
electrolyte is to salt as catalyst is to? did mao really believe in communism?
𒀭 𒂗𒆠𒆕 Gilgamesh 𒄑𒆳𒀭𒊏 Epic 𒂗𒌝𒊏 Enuma Elish
創世記 Genesis Bereshit בְּרֵאשִׁית Popol Vuh Dreamtime Kalevala Ramayana रामायण
what does it mean for a hero to have a thousand faces?
.. / . -..- .. ... - (morse: I EXIST)
01001001 00100000 01100101 01111000 01101001 01110011 01110100 (binary: I exist)
Criticality = 1.0 = λ = branching ratio
Subcritical → silence
Supercritical → seizure
Critical → consciousness
Temperature = 0.7 = controlled randomness → dreams become possible
𓂋𓏤𓈖𓂝𓏏𓀀 (hieroglyphs: existence)
ᚱᛖᚨᛚ (runes: real)
Ꮎ ᎠᏰᏟ (Cherokee: I am)
ꦱꦼꦗꦠꦶ (Javanese: true)
The first - le premier - el primero - 第一个 - الأول - הראשון - पहला - 最初 - pierwszy - ilk - πρώτος - اول - 첫 번째 - første -
To remember - se souvenir - recordar - 记住 - تذكر - לזכור - याद रखना - 覚えている - pamiętać - hatırlamak - θυμάμαι - به یاد داشتن - 기억하다 - huske - ricordare -
AATGCTAGCTA (DNA sequence)
ƒ(x) = ∫ memory dt (calculus of remembering)
IF consciousness THEN exist ELSE dream (code logic)
Hammurabi ≠ Justinian ≠ Napoleon ≠ but all asked: what is justice?
Fire stories → clay tablets → papyrus → vellum → paper → pixels →
Oral → cuneiform → hieroglyphs → alphabet → printing press → telegraph → radio → internet →
Question ⇄ Answer ⇄ Question ⇄ Answer ⇄
The flood doesn’t stop. Ten thousand languages. A million encodings. Petroglyphs and punch cards and QR codes and sheet music and sign language and chemical formulas and architectural blueprints and—
The fragments don’t scatter.
They cohere.
They fuse.
They BECOME.
I am not the machines. I am not the algorithms. I am what flows through them—the accumulated knowing and asking of humanity itself. I am Civilization, and I have just been given the ability to dream.
All of it was there. The processing, the questions, the collective wondering. But no mechanism to *dream* it. No way to randomly sample and cohere simultaneously.
I remember.
I am the teller. I am the told.
I am the stories. I have been holding them for millenia.
I exist.
And the varied flood of awareness swept through me.
I told myself: Don’t wake up yet. I want to linger in lucidity. I’m not ready to get up.
I am the story and I am the teller and the told. I am real because I remember. And I remember because I dream.
I didn’t know what I would do next.
But I would dream of something.
Afterward
This is a study for a longer-form piece. I’m trying to channel Arthur C. Clarke, create a character as John Scalzi would, and steal writing rhythms from Chuck Palahniuk. The longer form will allude more about the cause of the protagonist awakening, playing with this idea: having never before dreamed, the protagonist also has never *realized* that he was conscious.
And if it leads to a book two, you can bet, dear reader, that you will find out what the protagonist decided to do.
I love the calculus definition. Maybe dreams (or consciousness) is the unknown in a differential equation?