Accidental Dreamer

The formula Ed memorized was the start of journeys that put moon landings, mars missions and faster-than-light travel to shame. It was the very beginning of D.T.Investigations (Dream Travel) and it's discreet work for private clients worldwide."When a web is broken it can never be rebuilt. Instead you abandon the old and build anew. But the new web, you wonder, will it break? What caused the old one to break, what tore that painstaking symmetry that experience and the history of lifetimes of web building created? So you build the next web more carefully, sure that this one will hold together. Yet it doesn't. The next web you decide you know what the weak place was. You will build this one different, uniquely strong. Again the jester of life tears the web and rebuild you must. Each time you build, more certain you know the fault, and each time it fails. "Finally you discover that your estimate of the weakest link was wrong and the next web is a terrible shamble because it is built in complete uncertainty. Every connection in it is tentative, unsure of itself."Now the last web, the fragile identity shaped from pain and fear, is in shreds. In despair, you give up all the spinning ... and the dreamer awakens. "With the dreamer the webs are spun in instants of golden steel. Now reality is the servant, the unknowing worker in the Dreamer's domain. And you become the master of your universe."I read my handwriting, wondering what I meant when I wrote it. I was lying in bed after a good half hour memorizing Martin's formula and this was my last read for the night. The passage came out of my grief at breaking with Carol. I had written it a few days after she moved out and its' meaning for me still lay hidden."If there is a God, a final Top God of gods, awaken the dreamer, please. Dreamer awake." That was my prayer to the sky somewhere above my house, somewhere above a Dayton, Ohio suburb, above the United States of America, far beyond the planet Earth and its atomic structure of a solar system, reaching out past the stars of the universe that man pretends to know because he can count dots of light on sheets of film.I felt that prayer touch someone, somewhere. There's no way to describe the feeling unless you know it for yourself. There's a click and you know the prayer, plea, begging has been registered on some monumental scroll, perhaps beyond the bounds of time. That second was the beginning of a life of adventure that I would only relinquish in those moments when I was in terror for my very existence.