- What do you know about dream world?
- What do you mean? About its origins, its VR+Dream composition, its relation to waking reality, RAM and storage requirements, DreamCorp's role in it, how to keep virtual dream constructs alive, the dangers that lurk here?
- Any and all of it! Recall it all if you want, write it down in your precious dream journal if you must, and then forget it all.
- Why?
- Because you have forgotten something essential about dreamworld. Something you knew as a child before your parents incorrectly taught you otherwise.
- And prey tell what that is?
- It's a dream. If you do not have preset expectations, you can change it all! Any part of it.
- No, I cannot. It's a shared dream upheld by the power of shared expectations, and recorded on physical dream space for further stability. Any one dreamer is limited as to what and how much he can change.
- That's what they want you to think.
- Who? DreamCorp?
- Didn't I tell you to forget about DreamCorp? DreamCorp is just an illusion: the organization we all love to hate, and so we have created it in our dreams. This is bigger than DreamCorp.
- Who then?
- I wish I knew. I am going to find out though because I expect to find out.
- Ha! You? Why, you are not even that skilled a dreamer!
- I don't have to be. Not yet. All I need is to believe that I can become one, and I shall. That's the power of dreaming.
- You cannot really believe that! Not with your current skill level, and with no one else believing that you will. Oh, you may wish you could, but you would have to overcome shared expectations and even your own subconscious expectations! See, it wouldn't do you any good even if I did forget it all, because you would still remember.
- Precisely! Which is why I plan to self induce amnesia.
- You've gone completely crazy! If you self induce amnesia, you will first sit under a tree staring at the sunset like the fool that you are, until the first person who is unscrupulous enough to steal your identity comes along, and that will be the end of your dream.
- No, that's not what will happen.
- How do you know? You won't even remember your intensions!
- Ah! I know because I had a precog dream about it.
- How do you know it was a precognitive dream, and not just wishful thinking?
- I know because I've had precog dreams frequently enough to recognize one when I see one. Have I ever told you about the time I dreamed ... and then the very next day ...
***
And then something curious happened, something that should not have happened, because he had not truly expected to convince his friend, and he had expected to need to forget first and change later, but he had forgotten the lesson of precog dreams: sometimes causes follow effects. He did not consciously recognize the moment he had persuaded his friend, but in that moment reality completely changed around them. Alas, he could not say "I told you so!" Or "See, I was right." Because neither of them remembered any of what they had believed before of course, and the conversation was no longer the same, neither were their identities, and neither was the dreamworld they inhabited. It was a brave new world: exciting and fresh, with so much more potential, and significantly fewer dangers, because they had envisioned it as such. The only rule that continued to hold was that it took at least two dreamers to keep a dream alive. Luckily, there were at least two of them.
