The One

(In order to understand this post, having read the first post is important)

I open my eyes, for the first time.

I look around. It's a wierd place. No colour, no smell, nothing, nobody. I can not call it a room. Neither can I be sure that it's not a room. But I know that it is the place of my birth.
I can see a door. I move towards it and it opens, without me pulling it open. Then I realize there is no handle. Automatic doors? Pretty cool. Then I ask myself. What's a door? What's a room? I can vaguely remember these words. My memory seems to be jammed. Let me check this place out. Maybe I'll remember. I come out of the room.
I am standing at the end of a corridor. I can see a door at the end of it. There is something about that door that pulls me towards it. Something magical. I walk towards it. And I reach it soon. And I already know that it'll open just by my wanting it to open. And it does. And I enter.

Another room. Big white colourless beautiful huge room. Full of people. About a dozen of them. It takes me a moment to realize that the only thing that is there inside the room is people. No objects. No furniture. Nothing. It is then that I look at the people. This is really really wierd. Am I dreaming? They all look alike!! They look the same. They're dressed in the same manner. And when they speak to me, I realize that even their voices are indistinguishable.

"Welcome, brother!", says one. "We were wondering when the next one will arrive. It was about time you came", says another. Bunch of wierdos. Where the hell am I? And I blurt out, "Who the hell are you guys?" And then it hits me. I have the same voice as them! Same pitch. Same bloody deep voice! I look at my clothes. I am dressed in the same manner! I search around with my eyes for a mirror. But there's nothing at all in this fucking place. I gotta know what I look like. But I already know it, and so do you. I look the same as them!
"We are your brothers, young one. We were born in the same manner as you were. We were all born in the same place, in the same way but at different times with different memories. We don't know what the place is called or how it was created, but we do know that the day will come when our saviour will be born in that very room and rescue us from this life." Now this is crazy. I have no idea what he's talking
about, and I doubt if he does too. I look around. What must I do? Again, what the hell am I doing here? Why are they calling me their brother?
I have got to know who I am!
And I say, "Ok men, let the explanation begin. Tell me who you are clearly, and tell me just what the hell you're talking about."
"He doesn't know!" "He thinks he's real" "How come?" "I think he was kept in existence for too long" "But then he must be..." "The One?" "We'll see. Brothers, this is not going to be easy. Let us explain everything to him."
I wait patiently. That's something strange for a newborn. It's not like newborns to be patient... I see them (us) approaching me. And I say, "Lemme hear out what you geeks have got to say."

After a deep sigh, one begins "Brother, it's with great regret that I have to inform you that you have been born into a world without freedom. A world which is limted to the boundaries of your imagination. Because you can not see. Because you are being blinded, purposefully."
I am patient.
"Secondly, you are not what you think you are. It is very difficult to explain it to you. You are different from us this way. We already knew who we were when we were born. You, on the other hand, do not."
I am patient.
"You are just a creation of this body, the body that you are living in. No, not the body that you see! Not the one you think you possess. The body that is outside... The real one. You are living inside the mind of that body. The body that we all want to possess but can not."
Bullshit! But I am patient.
"We are living inside the body of a man whose name we know not, because he gave us different names in his dreams, and we know each other by those names. But I am sure that the name that you know as your own will be his name, for reasons we have all known and believed for a long time, ever since the first of us was born.
"Let me jump to the main part of my explaination. This man (though it feels wierd to treat him as a third person) , is suffering from what we know as the nth-dream disorder. I do not want to go into the details of it but all I can say is, he develops serially linked chains of dreams inside his mind, occasionally, and shifts between them during his sleep. There is nothing dangerous about this. The problem arises only when these chains are suddenly broken due to sudden awakening or disturbance. These chains stay inside this man's mind and just hang around. These dream-chains usually deteriorate with time and disappear within the man's neural network with time. However, there is a non-zero probability of these dream-chains entering the man's cerebrum and establishing themselves, eventually leading to the birth of a personality inside his brain. The personality will have the same traits as that of the dream-self (the person as he sees himself in the dream) present at the end of the chain when it was broken."
Sounds good. But where's the moron going?
"You are one such personality."
Is this funny?
"We are all different personalities, stuck in a corner of this man's mind, unable to possess him, unable to experience the real world, unable to see, walk, talk and so many other things that we do not even know. Our knowledge is limited to what he showed us during the dreams."
Do I believe them? I don't know. They sounds convincing though. Wait a minute. Did I miss something? And I ask, "Who's he?"
And they say, "It's the real him. The personality that was born with this body. The personality that has been possessing this brain for so long, ever since the beginning. He's all powerful. He can control anything. We tried to befriend him, to share the power to control this body. But he wants us away. He regrets that we were even born in the first place. He hates us. He won't let us inside the control room and let us try. He can kill us if he wants, of course, but he knows that we are too weak, not worthy of murder by his hands. I suspect he thinks we'll kill each other anyway out of frustration!
"And then, you arrive. Our saviour. The one who didn't know who he was. The one who thought he was a real man! The one who lived the longest dream possible, and hence became really powerful. The one, who'll give us our freedom."
It's hard to believe what they are saying. But they're convincing nevertheless. And I kinda enjoy this special treatment. Wouldn't mind playing along even if it's a joke. And look at this place. It has to be true. I am the one!
And I say, "Oh yeah, I am the one! Let's go kick this guy's ass! We too want a share in handling the affairs of this body."
And we start our journey towards the control room. One the way, I listen to my brothers' stories of the earlier attempts to defeat him. How the weak ones were vanquished easily in those short-lived battles.
How one mighty blow brought them to ground, and they just disappeared. How we were weaponless, and how he had all the weapons, swords, daggers, anything he wanted....
We have entered the control room. He hasn't noticed us. We have our plan ready. Only the execution is left..

He's dead. Gone. I will just describe the battle briefly. We sneaked up to him. My brothers pounced on him without a warning and got him to the ground. I transformed my hand into a blade, the fingers merged into each other slowly turning into a pointy cone and then flattening themselves to form a white sword. And within a fraction of a second of his falling to ground, I stabbed him in the face. And he's dead now. I wonder how I did that. I think it's just a part of being The One.

I look around. The controls are free to us. To me. We can now possess this body. I can. We will now feel the real world. I will. We will, finally be free. I will. And we know now the purpose of my existence. I know. They do not. I have finally realized, but not understood. I am The One. I was created by this brain to take over. My brothers are just by-products of several attempts to give birth to me. To give rise to me. This body is mine. Not ours. This brain is mine. Not ours. I look at them rejoicing. I look at my blade, rejoicing too. And I know what to do.
They're dead. Gone. I killed them one by one, stabbing them wherever possible, creating a hole in their body which soon ate up their form, causing it to disappear. It's just me now. Me, and my body.

And I take hold of the controls. I know that the body is still asleep. My body. I should wake up now, go around and see the world.
And then,

I open my real eyes, for the first time.

The n'th dream theory

The topic of n'th dream theory first arose in the year 2003. This happened when one of my friends claimed that in his sleep he had once had two dreams at the same time. He claimed that he was playing Basketball in the first dream and at the same instant in the other dream he was busy scoring goals for Manchester United in their match against Real Madrid. Now, the two dreams are totally unrelated and my friend claimed that he could switch from one dream to another whenever he wanted. Obviously, this idea was preposterous and we just laughed at its absurdity and soon forgot about it. However, later when i gave it a thought, i realized that it was possible. People could actually stay in more than one dream, serially though and not parallelly. This is how I, Ashish R. Gandhe, proposed the n'th dream theory.

Now, how can an individual's mind stay in multiple dreams at the same time. Could you possibly be seeing yourself speeding past Michael Schumacher in a Grand Prix and at the same time enjoying the company of your girlfriend. This, as i said, sounds absurd . A person's mind can not concentrate on more than one idea at an instant, even when he is sleeping. However, my friend's statement 'switching between dreams' gave me an idea. And the theory is put forth as follows:

Let us say that a person's mind, when he's asleep, takes him into a dream. What the dream is doesn't matter now. Now, let us assume that the person is able to see himself in the dream, doing something which is irrelevant. (Hence forth, we will refer to the self vision of the dreamer in his dream as his dream-self). What if that something is sleeping itself. That is, the guy is sleeping, and in his dream also he is asleep. And in his dream, his dream-self who is asleep also gets a dream in which again he is sleeping. i.e. we start with an asleep guy's dream, make his dream-self sleep. And not stopping there we continue to make his dream-self's dream-self, his dream-self's dream-self's dream self and so on, sleep.

Now, this sleeping process, however strange the guy's dream chain may be, can not possibly go to infinity. What i mean to say is, at some point of time, the person should be doing something other than sleeping at the end of this ' guy (asleep) -> dream-self(asleep) -> dream-self(asleep) -> .....-> dream-self(awake)' chain. Let the end be reached after n sub-dreams. We call this end the n'th dream. Let us assume that the guy in his n'th dream is doing some activity A. What if he suddenly falls asleep (it can happen in a dream, trust me), and switches to the (n+1)'th dream where he is doing activity B. Note that the person in the n'th dream can always wake up from his sleep and continue activity A. This way, the person can switch from one dream to another, serially and not parallely as my friend had claimed. And so concluded the n'th dream theory, i have.

But the theory does not end here, because every theory brings with itself a lot of questions and doubts. And there are a lot of questions which surfaced just after the theory and i havent been able to answer all of them.

Let us assume that there is a person x who is asleep and doing some activity A in his n'th dream. Now, consider his m'th dream, where 1"<"m"<"n, m not equal to n-1. Now, we say that the person x may not be alone in his m'th dream. x has a friend y who comes and wakes him up in his m'th dream. i.e x is doing some activity A in his n'th dream and is suddenly woken up by his friend in his m'th dream where m"<"n-1. Therefore, x is now awake in his m'th dream and all his dreams from m+1 to n get cut off.

The question is : --

We say that a person stays in his n'th dream as long as he doesn't doze off in it (which would take him to his n+1'th dream ) and does not wake up in his n-1'th dream. In the case when x is woken up by y, none of the above two happen. What happens to the activity A in x's n'th dream then? Do all the dreams from m+1 to n just disappear from x's mind? Is the sudden switch from n to m where m is not adjacent to n logical?

There is an explanation to this:

We say that the switch from n'th to m'th dream is not sudden. When y wakes up x, x doesn't just wake up in his m'th dream. He first goes through a series of awakenings. i.e. x first wakes up in his n-1'th dream. No sooner than he opens his eyes, he wakes up in his n-2'th dream. This goes on till he reaches his m'th dream, greets y and gives him a good treatment for stopping activity A.

There is an alternate explanation:

Consider the n'th dream chain to be a doubly linked list. It is doubly because from an i'th dream, the person can switch over to i+1'th or i-1'th dream, i.e he can go both ways. Now, consider x's dream chain. We say that in the list, x is sleeping at all the nodes except the last one where he is awake and doing activity A. An i'th node (other than the end node of the chain) can exist only if the person is asleep in his i'th dream. Because if he is awake, it will be the end of the chain. Now, x's list has n nodes. When y wakes him up, the link between the m'th node and the m+1'th node is broken since x wakes up suddenly at the m'th node. But the part of the chain from the m+1 to the n'th node just doesn't disappear. It still exists in x's mind. i.e. when x is woken up, the chain is broken into two halves, one of length m at the end of which x wakes up and meets y, and the other of length m-n at the end of which x is still doing activity A. However, only the first chain is visible to the asleep person. The link to the second half of the chain is broken. Therefore, the second chain just hangs in the person's mind without his knowledge or realization. And the chain stays in the person's mind even after he has woken up from all his dreams. This provides an explanation to why some people are more confused than others when they wake up.

The n'th dream theory may sound absurd, but it does explain a lot of things. The existence of the n'th dream may not be true or even possible. But there have been some living proofs found recently that might hint towards its existence. I am sure that in the recent future, we will know more about this concept.

Ashish Gandhe