I woke on a cold, hard mattress in a dingy police cell.
In the dream, I felt like I knew the cell well and today was like any other day. I knew exactly what was coming : every now and then, a small slot would open, and a pair of eyes would stare at me through the door to my enclosure for a couple of minutes at a time. Then they'd leave, and the cycle would continue. No-one ever said anything directly to me - I think it was assumed that I knew what they meant, if anything at all. I probably didn't : I used their eyes only as a makeshift clock. This was not a willed or conscious decision. I didn't want to know the time, It didn't matter to me, but my cells, my body and my heart craved rhythm and used the only source available to them.
I didn't care what they saw. Their world was so utterly different to mine that I knew whatever conclusions they constructed would be tainted by it. Their thoughts and actions were all secretly governed by the desire for acceptance - in a network as large as theirs, that meant extreme adherence to global behavioural rules was inevitable, and it followed that their branches of conceptual possibility would become localised to a specific, socially pre-determined point. In other words, there was little freedom of thought (even though it might have seemed so) and as such, little chance of conceptualizing an object outside of their network to a high degree of accuracy. They would reach conclusions, but they would generally be placeholder labels, as they had been taught that these were acceptably accurate answers, and did not question (sometimes didn't even notice) the processes constructed to calculate them.
Their thought processes, on the other hand, were something I could approximate pretty accurately. After all, I was a human once, and that was the clincher - I could see them, but they couldn't see me. Every time I glanced up and saw them staring through, I imagined their reactions to me. I eventually built a whole internal network based on snippets of conversation, on tone of voice, on dialect. Rooms, cars, streets, people - anything which they mentioned became an internal reality. Often, I'd see myself through their eyes as they stared at me : then I'd watch through their eyes as they walked down the hall, then into darkness, then to the meeting room they often mentioned. I'd have conversations with other members of the network, talk about my behaviour - we'd go to the pub, have a drink, go home to our respective husbands and wives and kids and families, and do it all again - the cyclical nature of their lives made it easy to approximate what events would occur and when, which gave me even more insight into the thoughts that they had.
I often tried recording the rules they abided by in a notebook I had smuggled in with me, but it was difficult to conceive of a method of communicating them in a universal fashion. No mix of language, mathematics, diagrams or illustration seemed to be sufficient, but in the end it didn't matter - there was no-one to communicate with but myself anyway. As long as I could understand what they meant, I was content. Even if I could have written them down in plain English, they seemed to be so absorbed in their network it that it wouldn't have mattered much to anybody (save a few marketing execs and economists - people who wanted to manipulate for their own gain, without having the insight to realize their every action was dictated by those same rules). No-one wanted to know that they might be living a lie - no-one wanted to know that they might not be who they thought they were. At most, they would accept the fact that it could be the case, but would relegate that possibility to the realm of insignificance. That would imply a lack of control, a futility. On a certain level, it would imply failure. People had spent far too much time building understanding dependent on who they thought they were, relating themselves to everything around them, building up a strong relationship with their conceptual selves to break such a strong connection to a perceived truth. So long as there were others around them that shared the same mindset, they were justified in their denial - they were able to live without worry in their jointly constructed world.
I often thought along those lines when I wondered why I had found myself in the cell - I wondered if I had done anything wrong at all, or if my captors were simply trying to protect their imaginary selves from the threat I posed to their foundations.
I often fantasized about reasoning with them, but could never find the words - how could you communicate the flaws in a medium through the flawed medium itself? Unless they were able to separate themselves from it (an improbable outcome), at best you'd be considered a little crazy, and at worst, you'd be locked up.
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