This Morning In Dream Theatre:

I was working on a tech project, mostly working on putting hardware together and connecting a complicated private network. Not that many machines. I had been working on this project for awhile now, months … The project needed funding so the project’s creator, a guy named Merc, found funding through SONY. So the setting of this morning’s theatre was in the SONY offices and I guess we were doing a demo for some bigwigs, because we were setting up a demonstration booth in the lobby of the office building.

I wasn’t super concerned with the big picture of this project (how unlike me in waking life!) and pretty much kept to my own tasks at hand.

Before we could get the project up and running though, and without announcement, the SONY big wigs came over with gun toting security officers and said that we couldn’t do the demo and that they were confiscating the project – including the all the tech involved with it.

Me and the few others working just sort of stopped and stammered, like, “what is going on?”

I saw Merc slyly take a shiny storage briefcase off of the table and walk away – going out the front doors and onto the street. Nobody seemed to notice him.

I said, “fine” to the bigwigs and let them take the tech and the equipment and I casually left the building to go find Merc.

I found him down the street at an outdoor cafe. He said, “I could just plug it in here …” pointing to a wall outlet near the ground, or I could go hide out at one of my Merc Hostels and work on it there.

I asked, “what is this? what are we working on?”

Merc just looked at me, and said, “it’s the biggest thing ever. It’s something I couldn’t just give to them, no matter how much money they paid me. It’s awake, or alive, it’s more than just a computing device.”

I asked Merc a series of questions. All of which he answered with his eyes in a continued stunned silence. “What is in the case? Is it alive? Does it speak? (Yes) English or intuitively? (Both) Telepathically? (Yes) Did you create a consciousness? (I think so) Did you create a person, a god? (Not sure yet) What will happen if we turn it on? (That’s the unknown, until we flip the switch) What does it feel like? (I don’t understand) I have felt the Universe and I know what that feels like, what does this feel like? What does it look like? …”

Merc cracked open the case and inside I saw what looked like one large silicon neuron with a port to connect to the network. It was nestled in a protective bio-gel foam pad.
It was about this time that I realized that visually everything that was in front of me in the dream was “normal” looking like in our world, but if I turned and looked to my left or behind me, there was the open Universe. – black space with stars and points of light.

I woke up about this time. I realized that I had had dreams with Merc before, that he was an entrepreneur and we had worked together on other projects. He first became known for starting a chain of hostels and I think one of my first jobs for him was managing one of them up in the mountains.

After waking I went through a series of my own questions – what *would* have happened if we had turned on the device? Would it have been a “big bang” and created a Universe? If so, would we be able to turn it off?

And what would happen if we did turn it off – would it go into stasis or implode? And then that made me think about our own Universe – if the big bang was like someone flipping a switch, maybe we aren’t billions of years old, but only seconds old – only in this moment old. Our Universe hasn’t started to implode yet, so maybe someone hasn’t flipped the switch off – yet. So many many things to thing about. Am I 14-billion years old, 63-years old, or a moment-old?