Nick's dream

You are standing at the start of a storytelling journey. Your responses will contribute to a story that will tell itself. The story will be made by many minds...woven into a pattern that no-one can foresee...the unthought tale…

There will be questions and challenges.

Let them echo in your memory. Use that memory as your starting point.

Challenge Number One

Please answer the following questions:

Cautious or risk-taking? < Nick chose Cautious

Nature or gadgets? < Nick chose Nature

Birds or fish? < Nick chose Bird

Arriving at a small hotel in the middle of the night, you take a room on the ground floor. In the morning you wake up early to the sound of bird-song. You step outside. A bird watcher stops and asks you for a story. What do you tell them and why?

Nick wrote

60 miles of ragged road I have walked to get far away from myself; the bird song continues for an eternity, it tells me I can only stand so much reality; who are you to make me lie? You want a story? My trembling heart beats for no one but me. What should the story include? Devastation, Salvation, Redemption - watch as steely sapphire stars fall from the sky and morning delivers me only into a world that denies me, again.

And so the rain falls…. and the face of the Watcher is turned towards you….what lies in that face? What beats in the heart of the birdsong around you? A destination rises...first as a faint notion...then as a word an image a direction…..Where is it you must get to before the miles blur into infinity and time becomes eternity?

Nick wrote

I watch the gentle rain fall, it rolls off my skin, it cannot be absorbed, just like the memory of yesterday and the dreams of tomorrow.

You turn to me, the watcher and the watched, from your face emerges an iridescent bird, its feathers are streaming spectral colours, the rhythm of its heartbeat absorbs with mine, the bird moves towards me and me towards it. The heartbeat of the bird and mine rises and rises, pounding into life and beyond life, our hearts race towards time.

The bird spies a matte marble lying without witness on the road I walked, collecting it in its beak the road blurs into the landscape, the marble opens into coruscating colour and becomes the world, hold it, it’s hot, my arms stretch with the wings, reaching towards infinity, the world becomes the universe, the universe becomes us, we become two trillion galaxies colliding, all in my arms which become the outstretched wings of the soaring flightless bird.

Subsumed into its breast the spectral colour suddenly becomes darkness and I see it, a turbulent space, a place of nothing into nothing, this is how it is.

From the beginning comes….what? There is seething turbulence here, potential that separates, grows, then in a flicker cancels itself again. But there is a field of chance that snatches these brief moments and gathers them together into something. What? What is the shape of this nothing, what plus and minus emerge from this place of nothing. What does the plus look like and what does the minus look like? How are they opposed to one another?

What are the polarities of this world?