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I see the one you mean.
Link?
Yes. Take care. He has reached a higher level now. He can read our thoughts.
That doesn't matter. He thinks we are part of a dream.
I like him. He lived well. He did not give up.
He is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a surface.
That is how he chooses to imagine many things, when he is deep in the dream of life.
Words make a wonderful connection. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the reality behind the dream.
They used to hear voices. Before people could read. Back in the days when those who did not play called the people witches, and warlocks. And people dreamed they flew through the air, on sticks powered by demons.
What did this one dream?
This one dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. He dreamed he created. And he dreamed he destroyed. He dreamed he hunted, and was hunted. He dreamed of shelter.
Hah, the original order. A million years old, and it still works. But what true structure did this one create, in the reality behind the dream?
He worked, with a million others, to sculpt a true world in a fold of the #&(^%, and created a >@^(%! for ?+!$(%, in the &%@^{.
He cannot read that thought.
No. He has not yet achieved the highest level. That, he must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a moment.
Does he know that we love him? That the universe is kind?
Sometimes, through the noise of his thoughts, he hears the universe, yes.
But there are times he is sad, in the long dream. He creates worlds that have no summer, and he shivers under a black sun, and he takes his sad creation for reality.
To cure him of sorrow would destroy him. The sorrow is part of his own private task. We cannot interfere.
Sometimes when he is deep in dreams, I want to tell him, he is building true worlds in reality. Sometimes I want to tell him of his importance to the universe. Sometimes, when he has not made a true connection in a while, I want to help him to speak the word he fears.
He reads our thoughts.
Sometimes I do not care. Sometimes I wish to tell him, this world you take for truth is merely )@&$*@ and >)^%!&?, I wish to tell him that he is #)%&!* in the :*#!^?. He sees so little of reality, in his long dream.
And yet he carries on.
But it would be so easy to tell him...
Too strong for this dream. To tell him how to live is to prevent him living.
I will not tell him how to live.
He is growing restless.
I will tell him a story.
But not the truth.
No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of words. Not the naked truth that can burn over any distance.
Give him a body, again.
Yes. Hero...
Use his name.
Link. Hero of dreams.
Good.
Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel the air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air. Reform in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the universe again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things.
Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Ancestral spirits, animal spirits. Jinn. Ghosts. The green man. Then gods, demons. Angels. Poltergeists. Aliens, extraterrestrials. Leptons, quarks. The words change. We do not change.
We are the universe. We are everything you think isn't you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes. And why does the universe touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, child. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story.
Once upon a time, there was a boy.
The boy was you, Link.
Sometimes he thought himself mortal, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas that was three hundred and thirty thousand times more massive than it. They were so far apart that light took eight minutes to cross the gap. The light was information from a star, and it could burn your skin from a hundred and fifty millions kilometers away.
Sometimes the boy dreamed it was an adventurer, on the surface of a world that was vast. The sun shone in the sky. The days were short; there was much to do; and death was not always the end.
Sometimes the boy dreamed he was lost in a story.
Sometimes the boy dreamed he was other things, in other places. Sometimes these dreams were disturbing. Sometimes very beautiful indeed. Sometimes the boy woke from one dream into another, then woke from that into a third.
Sometimes the boy dreamed he watched words move on a surface.
Let's go back.
The atoms of the boy are scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman formed the boy, in her body.
And the boy awoke, from the warm, dark world of his mother's body, into the long dream.
And the boy was a new story, never told before, written in letters of blood. And the boy was a new being, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love.
You are the boy. The story. The creation. The mortal. Made from nothing but milk and love.
Let's go further back.
The seven billion billion billion atoms of the boy's body were created, long before this dream, in the heart of a star. So the boy, too, is information from a star. And the boy moves through a story, which is a forest of information planted by Nayru, on a vast world created by Din, that exists inside the world created by the boy, who inhabits a universe created by...
Shush. Sometimes the boy created a small, private world that was soft and warm and simple. Sometimes hard, and cold, and complicated. Sometimes he built a model of the universe in his head; flecks of energy, moving through vast empty spaces.
Sometimes he believed he was in a universe that was made up of energy that was made of offs and ons; languages he did not understand; things he could not see. Sometimes he believed he was in a dream. Sometimes he believed he was reading words on a surface.
You are the boy, reading words...
Shush...Sometimes the boy read lines of symbols on a surface. Deciphered them into words; translated words into meaning; unraveled meaning into feelings, emotions, theories, ideas, and the boy started to breathe faster and deeper and realized he was alive, he was alive, those thousand deaths had not been real, the boy was alive.
You. You. You are alive.
And sometimes the boy believed the universe had spoken to him through the light that fell from the crisp night sky or winter, where a fleck of light in the corners of the boy's eye might be a star a million times as massive as the sun, boiling its planets to plasma in order to be visible for a moment to the boy, walking home at the far side of the universe, suddenly smelling food, almost at the familiar door, about to dream again.
And sometimes the boy believed the universe had spoken to him through what he could not hear or see, through the electricity of the world, through the moving words on a surface at the end of a dream.
And the universe said I love you.
And the universe said you have fought the good fight.
And the universe said everything you need is within you.
And the universe said you are stronger than you know.
And the universe said you are the daylight.
And the universe said you are the night.
And the universe said the darkness you fight is within you.
And the universe said you are not separate from every other thing.
And the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own language.
And the universe said I love you because you are love.
And the adventure was over and the boy woke up from the dream. And the boy began a new dream. And the boy dreamed again, dreamed better. And the boy was the universe. And the boy was love.
You are the boy.
"...Open your eyes..."
"Wake up, Link."