“As the narrator slides into fifth dimension consciousness I perceive the connectedness of the fifth dimension reality. It looks rather dull at first; the fullness of the picture destroys the clarity, and so it appears the same as its inverse—a void.”

-Dr. Gerard Mann, ‘Discermination’
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When I am a child, my dreams fascinate, horrify and astound me; and always, they hide their implications from my conscious mind. It is said that a person’s soul is revealed in dreams, that one’s inner portrait is drawn, as it were, in these animations of the subconscious’ fears and desires. But I don’t know what kind of person I am, or why.

And here I am a man, and I don’t know what kind of person I am, or why. I am still confounded by my dreams, which often seem too real to be called such. They seem like forgotten memories, or maybe lost possibilities…different versions of my own life or someone else’s life that is somehow connected to mine—not rotting in the past or shimmering in the future, but alive in these “dreams” and proceeding alongside my waking reality. And I feel that these parallel experiences hold the answers to certain questions in my heart and on my mind; I don’t know what my (or this other self’s) purpose is, but I keep searching for it.

Why, I wonder, is there such a discrepancy between my feelings and circumstances? Why do my incomprehensible dreams ring truer than my waking life? Where do the narrations come from?

The doctor assures me that my narrations are important, but I don’t understand their relevance to me; I can’t remember ever making a decision to become a narrator, and have observed anyway a negating trend—that any decisions I do feel responsible for at the time they are made, seem in retrospect not to have been mine at all. There is another force at work in my life: a subtle yet inescapable will, pushing and pulling me, spinning me around—tricking me into following its design. But the shape of this design and the purpose of this manipulation remain a mystery.

I never remember the narrations, though the doctor has read me snippets. They read almost like a dream, like the feelings are more important than the events tied to them. But why are these events chosen? I wonder. It’s one of those questions that no one can answer satisfactorily, because you need a greater perspective to comprehend the answer; I can see it sometimes, in the sunrise between sleeping and waking, when my subconscious feelings converge with conscious thought; but the picture is only complete at that indefinite moment, darkening in one aspect as it lightens in another, and the lucent epiphanies manifested at the breaking of my mind fade along with my heart’s light into opaque metaphors in the shadow of my turning.

Still, this feeling of knowing haunts me, burgeoning with time into an obsession and branching out as it grows. What is the significance of my life, and how does it relate to my dreams and narrations? Who or what determines the course, where does it lead, and why? How does a narration occur?

The doctor has explained some things to me, but even his more simplistic illustrations only make sense right before I go under or as I am coming out of a narration or a dream—where I am on some level, in some degree, experiencing it. And I think that it is something that cannot be fully comprehended apart from the experience. I don’t understand the process through which I am transported to other contexts, to see through other people’s eyes. He tells me that everything that ever happens is, and will always be, continually occurring in the four dimensions of time and space, and that by adding another dimension to my perception of reality I am able to transcend the previous ones.

But I understand the concept of narrating best apart from considerations of motivation and function: I am a kind of historian, observing rather vividly, certain chosen events and the internal and external reactions of the people affected. All of my experiences are translated into text by the ‘Transcriber’ and stored in confidential archives here at the Institute. Our work being still in its experimental phase, my narrations are hidden—for the time being—from the world.

There is a certain technique to narrating, at least in ‘going under’. I settle into the chair and wait as the doctor straps me in and attunes the Transcriber to my PI Chip, then, when all is ready, use my training to alter my conscious state. Some like to repeat a mantra; others use their imagination to create some sort of visual that helps them.

I think about God, and in my head perceive a great emptiness, a deafening silence.

Focusing on the void I disintegrate, then awake into it, no longer as a mental image but as a reality—as from a fleeting dream of life I am awaking to find that I am someone else—feeling an overwhelming sense of relief at the dissipation of my old anxieties juxtaposed against the gradual renewal of an even older set. And though I feel the change, somehow when it is complete I know that this is how I have always been. It’s a difficult feeling to explain (even to myself), but in the context it’s natural and makes perfect sense—I am changed completely only to find myself even more vividly the same. All the insights of this other self I know without thinking, but what I know I cannot know, precisely because I don’t think it.

Lines appear faintly all around me, stretching infinitely into the right and the left. These lines are Chains of Events.

My eyes are drawn to one of the chains, and as I stare, the distance between us shrinks; but my eyes, in altering the depth of their perception so rapidly, cease to see the chain itself but see rather into it. Inside is an image of the universe, or at least the universe in my mind—darkness filled with tiny winking lights that float around and past me like so many fireflies in the depths of an infinite ocean—into and through which I move as I stare, towards a particular dot of light (that’s the marker) that grows bigger as I move faster and faster, until it overpowers all my senses and all around is only white light, ringing in my eyes, so to speak.

And here the motion ceases, the light recedes, and the narration begins.