I wondered if I was beginning to wear on his patience. Much I had told him, and he seemed mystified by it. But then, much of it mystified myself, and that was my point. Did not the mystery of such things point to the unreality of so much that we perceived? If my need to be shown that I was real seemed an indulgence, a frivolous search for that which I did not need and so should have the decency to do without, know that all men need to be. If life is but a joke that we tell among ourselves, is this not the same as to say that it is a dream common to all?

Think of how things are in a dream. The possession which, as precious as it is to your slumbering self for all of its unreality, fades away as it is neglected. I did not wish to be as that possession or to run the insane risk that my mother's friend did, waiting to be pulled back into the dream as one of the other dreamers notices my revels on this warm summer day that we have created. That feeling of surprise that my mother shared with her should have been her warning - she was on the verge of being lost to us. Thinking back, I try to find her face, her name, stories about her - all lost, faded from the dream. She was gone forever. I would mourn her, if there were still a her to mourn, but of course, in creasing to be, she ceased to have ever truly been, the past being as much our creation as the present. The time for tears had been lost with her for whom I would have shed them, as heartless a comment as that must sound.

I could only pledge to never be as careless, and to do all I could to see to it that others would be spared the same fate. This was the threat that forced us to face the true nature of the world - no less than that of annihilation, itself, for those who would not make themselves fully a part of the dream. A world carved out of stone, unbending to our will, such as the one that was imagined by simpler minds such as that belonging to the beast, was a world that we dared neglect, but this one required our care and understanding.

What was he looking for in that hip pocket of his, as he shifted from one position to another, as if he were a figety child? But then, wasn't that what he was? I must admit that even as he reassured me, he frightened me a little. Yes, he granted, as I mentioned my mother's friend, that it was a remarkable incident that I had shared, even though he didn't seem to grasp its metaphysical significance, but then he expressed his doubt that it had ever happened, insisting that I must have fabricated it for some reason which he didn't understand. Which didn't do much to restore my faith in the reality that sustained my existence, but had he done right in doing this? Was he calling me a liar, or warning me that I and all that had brought me forth was more faded than I had ever suspected - that the real in my world was becoming unreal, the truth becoming lies?

Or had he come to the same understanding of the fragile nature of existence that I had? As he shut his eyes, seemingly in pain, the pain of a transitory creature who only now knew how uncertain his place in the world had become and now was forced to face a fear from which he could not hope to escape, I gave him the only thing that I could in such a moment - my thanks. A sign that somebody appreciated the spirit behind his perhaps crude and misguided attempt to do what was right and cared about his struggle to understand what he was hearing, and was about to see, as he faced a truth from which he might so easily and comfortably flinched. "Oh, how glad I am that you agree with me, and it was most unselfish of you to stop me to let me know?

As indeed it was. How he had suffered in that moment! A moment he endured just to tell me, in one sense or another, that I was not alone, if I was now understanding his intentions better than I had before. Though I could not fully understand his point, I could now fully understand the nobility of his expression of it, I thought, for that nobility was to be found in all reasonable interpretations of his actions. How saddened I was by the suffering of this creature, brought low by the very moment that should have lifted him up, watching him stumble. His old understandings gone and his new nowhere in sight for him, he was as a man leaping through a fog toward a ledge that he could only hope would be there to catch him, knowing only of the abyss that waited for him, below, if he lost his footing for even a second.

Should I not ... did I dare share with him the hope that, in coming with the fear as it did, made the horror of an unstable world so much easier to bear? Talk with him of the power that came with the understanding? If life was but an excellent joke, defined by contradiction, no more sensible than a dream, was it, then, anything more than a dream, a shared dream? Is a joke ever so excellent that one can not, dare not, improve on it by changing a line, replacing a word, by changing it into a new joke by incremements? Such a world could be bent to our will, were we of strong heart and mind, greeting the world we dreamed together with such determination that the other dreamers were inspired to support the change.

This, as fantastic as this must sound, was when I began my experiments with time, itself, finding that I had done so not a moment too soon.