Onto another scene. This one occurred the following day, as Renko and I sat in our office, idly swapping theories. We were both sitting around the table while I drew on a piece of paper.
"Dreams and reality are the same thing, or at least equally real to their observer, that's one of the basic precepts of Relative Psychology: all reality is subjective and dependent on the observer," I began. "When multiple people's subjective realities happen to overlap with each other, then they can agree on how certain aspects of reality behave, and that forms a consensus. This agreed-upon consensus reality is the realm described by empiricists like yourself, Renko. But as even you realize, the nature of the observable world is affected by the act of observation. While there's enough similarities on a macro-scale that people can generally agree on things like 'violence is bad' and 'people shouldn't be coerced or tricked into doing things they don't want to' that we can build societies and live within them, on the micro scale everything is much more subjective. Just like individual elementary particles within a system can have different properties depending on if they have been measured or not, individuals within a society often have unexamined beliefs that can collapse unpredictably into wildly different ways of viewing the world when tested."
"You sound like a politician trying to talk out of both sides of their mouth at once, Merry. 'The effects of change are unpredictable, so it's better to just keep everything the same forever.'"
"You're ascribing a motive where there is none, Renko. Relative Psychology isn't inherently conservative, it just states that people interpret reality in unique ways and that you can't necessarily predict how individuals will react to a given stimulus or if it might reshape their worldview. To a Relative Psychologist, the view that 'the effects of change are unpredictable, so we might as well change everything to see if that works better' is equally valid. Just like physicists don't try to ensure that Schrödinger's cat ends up alive or dead, Relative Psychologists aren't concerned with prioritizing one type of reality over another. As a clinical practice, we seek to understand the function of individual minds and build models of how an individual reacts to the stimulus they experience without any judgement or desire to apply the lessons learned in one case to the case of any other minds."
"Alright, so where does that leave us with regards to these shared dreams?"
"Let's look at it like this," I said, drawing two ovals on the piece of paper. I wrote 'reality' in one and 'dreams' in the other, then connected them with a single line. "Normally people in waking life experience reality in unique ways, but what we experience has enough overlap that people can reach a consensus." I drew a number of smaller ovals further down the page, connected to the 'reality' oval, positioned so that their edges overlapped each other. "In dreams though, things work differently. Individuals all experience reality in radically different ways, so no superposition of consensus can typically be achieved, right?" I asked, drawing several more ovals beneath the 'dreams' bubble, each of them distinct and separate from the others.
"Right. If dreams operated in a way that we could have consensus they wouldn't really be dreams any more. More like a shared online game - an alternative reality." Renko said, nodding. "So then if dreams aren't a shared reality then your theory of the dream world being a distinct place can't work, right? If it was, then people would be able to agree on what it was like."
"Not necessarily. Comparing Gensokyo to the Scientific century, in which world would you say subjectivity was stronger?"
"Stronger? Well I suppose from what we've seen of Gensokyo the fact that the laws of physics can be discarded by beings with enough willpower suggests that it's stronger here, but that could just be a result of the consensus, couldn't it? People here believe that impossible things are possible, so they are."
"It can't be just that, or in the Outside world you'd find that people who live in complete isolation would be able to set the rules of their own personal reality to anything they wanted. Maybe that how hermit magic was supposed to work once upon a time, but isolation certainly wasn't enough to allow one to disregard physics in our time, right? Here in Gensokyo though, that isn't true. I don't know what Kasen's capable of, exactly, but living alone seems to have granted her some measure of supernatural ability."
"Alright, so subjective views on the nature of reality are a little stronger inside the Great Hakurei Barrier than outside. I still don't see your point."
"Well, what if there were a world where subjective experiences and expectations of reality were much stronger? A world where every individual shaped reality based on their own subconscious interpretations of how things should work. Do you think it would be possible for a superposition of consensus to form in a place like that?"
"No, because everything would act differently for each individual. You're suggesting that the world of dreams is a real place, but it works like that?"
"Really, I'm suggesting everything is like that. We all live in slightly different parallel worlds constructed by each individual brain's unique neurology. In some states those parallel worlds draw close enough together that we can achieve superposition with the worlds of others, and in other states our realities remain far apart. Its just like how in a particle system superposition can only be achieved under very precise conditions which limit the amount of entropy... am I getting that right? I'm trying for a physics metaphor Renko, but I have to go off of what I remember from high school."
"Well, you're simplifying things a little overmuch and not taking into account the affects of imaginary time on the probabilistic nature of quantum states, but I see where you're going. You're suggesting that a potential dream world is equivalent to an excited state in which, rather than travelling to a different world, we're entering a different phase in which our subjective reality is more divergent from that of others than would normally be the case."
"Exactly. If you think of our individual subjective experiences of the world as individual strings, then in waking life, all of those threads are bound together like a rope. When we dream, each is twisted apart. Generally, those threads never intersect while we dream, but there's always the chance that two might coincidentally collide and get tangled up, resulting in the phenomena of multiple people dreaming the same dream in different beds or at different times."
"In this case though, we're not talking about individuals having the same dream. Me, you, Meiling, the tengu who created that manga all had dreams that were similar, but we didn't see each other in them and they weren't exactly the same."
"That's where the increased power of subjectivity in the dream state comes in. If there were something like a rock in the dream world, then if you and I both came across it in our dreams, we might not notice the presence of the other and we might not interpret the rock as a rock. The next morning though, we might both say we had a dream about something that was hard and heavy. The differences would be due to our unique subjective experiences of the same phenomena. Similarly, in this case we each encountered something in the dream world that had the shape of an impostor posing as an acquaintance, but each of us interpreted that differently or encountered it at different times."
"That sounds like Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, or maybe Sheldrake's theory of morphic fields, but applied to concepts rather than organisms."
"Well maybe we're talking about organisms. This is Gensokyo, after all. We've had conversations with several people who are more or less personifications of a specific concept. And with that in mind, it would make sense that there are probably youkai who can access or perhaps even live in this dream world, or if we go back to the physics metaphor, beings who permanently or at least typically exist in the excited state we would call dreaming."
"Like a baku or something. right?" I nodded. When thinking of a youkai that interacts with dream, the nightmare-eating baku was the first to come to mind.
"With so many people having a similar dream -coming to the same place in the dream world so to speak, and then encountering the same stimulus there, I think its reasonable to assume there might be some sort of interference going on. Some entity either leading us all to the same place or else bringing a dream-thing in the shape of an impostor into all of our dreams."
"Well that's a heck of a hypothesis, Merry. It's a real tower of sand, supposition on top of supposition on top of supposition. I know we're talking about dreams and subjective realities here, so it's not something we could gather empirical measurements about, but it seems like a long shot. For the time being though, lets consider the implications. If you're right, or something close to right anyway, then it would mean that someone was intentionally interfering with our dreams and the dreams of several others. What would be the purpose of such an action?"
"Well, the tengu responsible for the manga and I had the dreams first, it would seem. The tengu created a manga about it, and I've been known to write and publish my experiences, (such as in the case of this very book you are holding, dear reader.) Could it be that whoever is doing this wanted to get their message out to the public?"
"Maybe, but if that's the case why go after myself and Meiling, especially after we had already read the manga?"
I thought for a moment, then turned to Renko. "All I can imagine is that it might be intended as a warning, an admonition to be wary of an unseen danger close at hand. And if whoever is responsible went out of their way to make sure you two were warned, even after you had already seen the manga, then I would guess the warning applies specifically to the both of you."