There are many evils which deprive sleep of its restorative power, but most insidious is the Dream. It arrives in the brain, it torments, it is forgotten, and its passage is only marked by fatigue. We have all shared it; we have all dreamed its yellow halls.
Electro-mechanically, the Dream is indistinguishable from any other dream. The sleeper’s eyes flit around as they plunge into REM, and if the vitals are disturbed, they are no more changed than they would be by an ordinary nightmare. This intangibility has historically dissuaded research into the Dream; it is impregnated with the whiff of fantasy, an intolerability to any scientist. Like quantum physics, it attracts charlatans. Unlike quantum physics, it has yet to be rescued by the pragmatics of engineering.
Somnologists at the University of British Columbia’s DWell (Dreaming and Wellness) laboratory hope to change that. Having previously studied sleep as a window for addiction-curbing neuromodulation, DWell, helmed by Professor Alexandria Strogoff, is now investigating subtractive modes of healing.
It is already established that reducing hours spent in REM sleep can lessen the severity of depression. By extrapolation, eliminating the Dream, which is an order of magnitude more damaging than its brethren, should be correspondingly beneficial; but this theory, while promising, suffers from a lack of data. For example, it remains unclear how often the average person has the Dream, and its amnesiastic properties severely complicate the collection of new information.
Unfortunately, the oldest bank of data on the Dream originates from its most sordid episode of study. German Schutzstaffel Simon Gerhard experimented extensively on the prisoners of the Langenstein concentration camp, and, despite his barbarity, is considered the first Traumforschung, or Dream (capital D) researcher — another reason for which scientists have distanced themselves from its study.
Nevertheless, the Gerhard papers comprise the foundation of our understanding of the Dream, which until then had only been attested in mysticism and folklore. So what, exactly, did these Nazis discover?
The most salient quality of the Dream is its yellowness. Cultures with traditions of spatial visualization will, furthermore, agree that it is corridor-like. (Elsewhere, the Dream has been interpreted as an entity rather than a place. In the British Isles it is known as Gorse Shuck, and associated with the spectral hounds of Annwn.) Few historic illustrations of the Dream exist, as its representation is condemned by all breeds of superstition; we are essentially limited to consulting the darkly kept mandalas of one reprobate Tantric sect, or the paintings of the consumptive Romantic artist Edgar Cornswaithe.
Gerhard, thus, was the first to attempt a scientific mapping of the Dream. To circumvent amnesia, the prisoners upon whom Gerhard experimented were awoken every fifteen minutes for interrogation. Bone-gnawing exhaustion was rampant, and rewards, in the form of sleep, were offered in exchange for especially lucid recollection. The camp was a hotbed of schizophrenia. Hunger and sleep deprivation wrenched minds to their limits, and “compromised specimens” were especially poorly treated. Ironically, these broken candidates seemed to visit the Dream most often, but were incapable of bringing home the clarity Gerhard sought.
Gerhard’s notes are filled with dreams, but the Dream is what obsessed him. By the closure of the camp, his non-specific interest in oneirics had spiraled into monomania. Removed from his supply of victims, it is rumored he continued to experiment on himself — but only rumored, and any record of that period has vanished. In modern Langenstein, a yellow monument stands, emblazoned with the names of some four-hundred prisoners, memorializing their accidental contributions to neuroscience. It is said to make passersby deeply uncomfortable.
The Dream is of a hallway of inhuman proportions. Some fifty feet wide, that expanse is made narrow by its dizzying height, which eclipses the deepness of canyons. The ceiling, receding into dimness, is tiled with thin-spoked sixteen-pointed stars. The floor, likewise, is tiled, a discordant checkerboard of black and white and ochre, crawling four feet up the walls, which are stained an ominous yellow.
Above the wainscoting runs a carven white border, into which, between netlike cross-hatching, is chiseled a repeating word. To Gerhard's European victims, the script looked Arabic. Those of the Middle East, however, are apt to call it Scandinavian, as it is too angular, too runic to be of their own abjad. From side to side the floor is tilted between 0.25 and three degrees, just enough to destabilize.
Each segment of corridor, and these vary in length, terminates in a recessed Moorish arch, twice the height of a man, leading to the next hallway. Because the floors of adjacent segments are often raised or lowered relative to each other, there are also stairs as necessary, up to the archway or down from it, or into a short bridging tunnel, a suffocating gap in the yellowness.
This variation allowed Gerhard to map the Dream. He perfected his interviewing technique, extracting the data necessary to identify a waypoint as quickly as possible. If prisoners were never fully awakened, they would often return to the Dream, and on a productive night might pass through as many as five segments. Painstakingly, Gerhard stitched these wanderings together, committing much of the Dream to memory in the process of searching for overlapping series. He was to leave behind a map of two hundred and three island sequences, the greatest of which was forty segments long. At the close of the War his work was buried, and would remain unknown until 1989.
The Dream faded once more into obscurity, lurking undetected in forgotten sleeps. In the mid-1970s, out of the unlikely cauldron of the West German punk scene, a subculture of “radical lucid dreaming” was spawned. It grew, perhaps, from a latent nostalgia for the Surrealist art of the post-War period, much of which had been informed by dream-study and hallucination. Its participants sought musical inspiration, self-knowledge, or an alternative to mainstream consumerism in the theatre of the mind. It was not long before they rediscovered the Dream.
Beginner Morpheonauten were advised to follow a regimen not unlike that which Gerhard inflicted upon his victims. They set intermittent alarms, cycling rapidly between states of consciousness. Some wore barbed arm bands, only removing them to sleep; the absence of pain was meant to signal they were dreaming and jolt their rational faculties online. Dream journals, cheaply self-published as zines, were circulated in clubs and at concerts. Among the accounts of mundane dreams and nightmares, one setting recurred.
It was considered something of a joke, a glitch in the minds of the suggestible. “Gelbe Gänge, wir treffen uns endlich!” (Yellow hallways, we finally meet!) announces the grainy cover of one leaflet. “Urinkanäle des Gehirns” (Sewers of the brain) is scrawled in a mocking, jagged font on another. However, neither its unsettling nature nor its negative effects on dreamers’ health could long be ignored. By the 80s lucid dreaming had breached mainstream awareness, but the strange yellow Dream, eerie in its consistency, remained a legend known only to the scene’s veterans.
Some could not resist its siren call, the attraction of the unknown and hazardous. They were known as wallpaper casualties, after “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an English feminist story of some renown. It follows a woman’s descent into madness, as influenced by the suppressiveness of her husband, and the wallpapered room she is confined to. While the deteriorations of the casualties were rarely as stark as that story’s protagonist’s, they grew more tired and less stable, and without intervention their lives often collapsed, crumbling into the hole that the Dream opened up in their psyches.
Laura Brack’s fiance was one such casualty. Though not personally involved in the lucid dreaming community, she was keenly aware of what had driven her beloved to hospitalization and the brink of insanity. At the time of his illness she was studying for her Master of Laws at Saarbrücken’s Europa-Institut, writing a thesis on medical rights which frequently referred to the Nuremberg doctors’ trial. Gerhard had not been among the accused, but several of his letters to other doctors were presented as evidence. One of them described the Dream.
Brack immediately recognized that narrow place, which had so often featured in the ravings of her (now recovering) fiance. Fearing a remission if she shared her discovery, she continued to research it in secret. They wed; two years later, in 1991, their marriage dissolved, incapable of withstanding the onslaught of psychosis. Brack, dismayed, finally published the fruits of her labor, close to two-hundred pages of unearthed documents pertaining to Gerhard and his experiments.
Her research was met with disdain from the scientific authorities, and with reckless enthusiasm from the rapidly growing lucid dreaming community. Having established a presence on the Usenet, their numbers had swelled, finally reaching a global audience.
English translations of Brack's compendium were released within months of its publication. Produced by amateurs, some with a questionable grasp of the languages involved, Brack's carefully phrased notes and warnings were frequently rendered incomprehensible, or elided in favor of Gerhard's uninterrupted rambling. One notorious version edited out all references to Nazi Germany, and instead styled the text as an occult manuscript, complete with illustrations. Brack's research was so well-known among netizens that it earned Gerhard a cameo in 1992's Wolfenstein 3D, as a biologist zombie in a secret yellow room.
That year, too, marked the founding of Onerkanna, located at onerkanna.org, which became the web’s premiere resource for lucid dreamers and dream analysts. It included forums, a searchable database of user-supplied experiences, and an entire section dedicated to mapping the Dream. Its creators, known only under their handles of Onerfala and Onervaetor, were keen to support any projects exploring the yellow labyrinth.
Out of this accelerator, amongst sundry bizarre footnotes of art and science, emerged Jim Foster's The Tombs of King Mefistofilus, a text adventure game which employed the Dream as its setting. Contributors to Onerkanna had significantly extended Gerhard's map, resulting in a much greater corpus of sequences, several of which were over two hundred rooms long.
Compared to its contemporaries, it was stark, the repetitive nature of the Dream allowing Foster to describe each segment with a concise list of properties: its estimated length, the angle of inclination of the floor, the number of steps in the stairs, and any abnormalities. Whereas other games lovingly detailed their changing worlds, all crystal caverns and blood-red lava fields, The Tombs exhausted players with relentless, monotonous yellow.
Despite these apparent failings, the game was a great success. To the uninitiated, its enormity inspired awe, and passage through its arcades was a meditative gateway to strange visions. To lucid dreamers, it was a map and memory aid, and often fuel for a dormant obsession.
Foster took few liberties with the Dream, introducing only those elements deemed necessary to maintain the game's integrity. There are weapons and ensorceled artifacts hidden throughout The Tombs, and secret portals between the Dream's disconnected sequences. The only enemy encountered in The Tombs is King Mefistofilus himself, shambling at random through his tarnishing golden crypt. The goal of the game is to collect as much magical armor and weaponry as possible, and defeat him in battle.
Negative reactions to the game were often phrased as warnings, reminiscent of Laura Brack's descriptions of her fiance's distress. Most have been lost to time. While Onerkanna remains online, it was discovered in 1997 that its admins had been instructed by Onerfala and Onervaetor to remove all discussions of the Dream's adverse effects.
Despite the Onerkanna controversy, Foster continued to update The Tombs with newly discovered Dream segments, until his disappearance during a 1998 caving expedition.
As the millennium turned, concerns over video game induced psychosis grew more prominent. Ironically, The Tombs of King Mefistofilus escaped scrutiny, considered tame due to its lack of graphics and restrained textual violence. Yet an analysis recently conducted by DWell has linked it to nearly sixty psychiatric hospitalizations in the province of British Columbia. Most occurred in the late 1990s, but there have been admissions within the past two years. Somnologists have campaigned for the game's removal from Onerkanna, which continues to host it, to no avail.
Foster's description of King Mefistofilus reads as follows:
Ahead of you, a figure emerges from the doorway's shadowless yellow gulf.
…
He shambles towards you, stumbling on the crooked floor… but as he staggers, his left hand stays firmly pressed against the wall's hieroglyphic mantra.
…
His robes are white and tattered, funereal bandages billowing in mimicry of the royal mantle.
…
In his right hand he clutches the PHILOSOPHER STONE, its carbuncle edge worried to dagger-sharpness by centaeons of caressing.
…
Even in undying ruin he radiates the power and malice of tyranny.
Ancient necromancers are not atypical villains for the genre. However, an enduring rumor on lucid dreaming forums asserts that King Mefistofilus was based on an actual entity encountered by Foster while exploring the tortuous corridors of the Dream.
It's a strange claim, for several reasons. Gerhard's papers repeatedly emphasize that the Dream is distinguished by its emptiness, by how devoid it is of the archetypal intelligences which otherwise populate the unconscious. None of his victims, abused though they were, reported perceiving an animate evil presence. There was only the malevolence of the hallways themselves.
And yet, an increasing number of dreamers are reporting encounters with Foster's King, or something resembling it. Clad in white, corpselike, limping, one preternaturally long arm extended to make contact with the text running along the walls, its presence harkens a nightmarish intensification of the Dream's baseline dread. Sleep paralysis, heart palpitations, and emotional outbursts often proceed from its visit. Terror awakens the dreamers, but they know no comfort until the sun rises.
Many researchers dismiss this phantom as a blending of game-memories and the Dream. At DWell, somnologists have coined the term Traumatic Tetris Syndrome, positing that subconsciously-registered familiarities between the Dream's environment and the game map cause players' brains to hallucinate the King; he is superimposed over our collective mental architecture, and not emergent from it.
However, classic Tetris Syndrome is associated with frequent and high-level play of the hallucinated game. Relatively few dreamers troubled by the King meet those standards. Some, more familiar with the memetic infamy of Gerhard than The Tombs, believe they crossed the Nazi Traumforschung himself, eyes wild, bone-pale lab coat hanging in fluttering rags. It remains to be explained whether the traumatic presentation of Tetris Syndrome has a much lower activation threshold than its counterpart, or whether The Tombs of King Mefistofilus is simply a hyperstimulus.
Despite its tense relationship with academics, DWell, and many other laboratories, rely on Onerkanna's massive databases of dream and Dream experiences. Recent allegations, however, may prompt researchers to regret this dependence. Leaked communications from the Onerkanna creators to a mailing list of carefully selected supporters detail a host of unethical programs, including a decades-long policy of censorship much broader than previously suspected.
Among the demands for brutal human experimentation, the suppression of records of the Dream's behavioural effects, and the sale of user data to various militaries, what stands out is an elaborate proposal for a sequel to The Tombs.
Initiated in 2006, the game aimed to follow Jim Foster's formula, with the addition of simple graphics, an updated Dream map, and a new pair of villains to replace the King. Titled The Temples of King Mefistofilus, wandering players were to be stalked by Adoratrice Salome and Stolas, characters representative of Onerfala and Onervaetor, respectively. Development, on schedule until 2008, stalled after a series of artists dropped out of the project, several citing crippling sleep disturbances.
Yet discussion of the ideated game never ceased. As gaming technology evolved, so did their blueprints for The Temples, always prioritizing realism and immersion. More than a tribute to Foster, the Onerkanna elites believed that it would serve as a sarcophagus, eternally preserving their minds in the fabric of the nightmare. What appeared to be indulgent self-insertion was in fact a ritual of teleportation.
Foster's King Mefistofilus had retrieved the Philosopher's Stone from the abyssal depths of the human unconscious. Now, it could be wielded, not to cure wounds or to restore youth, but to transmute flesh into Dream.
The King in Yellow Leaves his House and types ADVENT.EXE
This is a bleak delight.