Simulacrum’s Last Dream

When I sleep, I dream an entire lifetime.

I don’t mean that lightly. I mean that I go to sleep and eight hours later I have dreamed every moment of a person’s life. Their birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, twilight and death. If the average mortal lifespan is sixty years, then I dream seven point five years per hour. That’s forty five days a minute, eighteen hours a second. Not that it matters; it doesn’t feel faster. Nor does it feel faster when I dream a lifespan which is eternal - that of an immortal. An infinity of time, for which mathematics cannot calculate the number of aeons per moment I’m dreaming. As with any illusion, impossibility poses no barrier.

Always eight hours.

I’ve lived the lives of painters, businessmen, astronauts, dictators, slaves, concubines and visionaries. Their parents, children, friends, friends’ enemies and their teachers. I’ve cured diseases, invented the wheel, levelled nations and posed as the saviour. I’ve been Gabriel, Beelzebub, Adam as he saw the apple and Eve as she ate it; and even though these people still live, I have seen their end. I’ve been Ezekiel Ahmontep, the last human to die and last angel to be born, though Ezekiel Ahmontep does not yet exist. I’ve also been you.

So many lives.

Have you ever heard the expression, "before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes"? It’s true. Even for immortals, at the paradoxical ends of time, the entire infinity of their existence flashes through their mind; just as impossibly as their lives can flash through my head in eight hours. I have dreamed countless lives and the entirety of each flashes through my mind as they end. When I wake, it’s all fresh in my head.

Every single moment.

Do you know how tiring that is? To experience every memory of someone’s life in a single moment? It’s as though someone’s taken a sledgehammer to your mind, exploding it into countless shards, of which all are seen simultaneously and clearly. It overloads your senses with such totality that you can’t direct yourself to scream. I lie there, as though dead, but alive with such intensity that I’m aging ten, sixty or an infinity of years in a moment. And then, I just want to die. I attempt to commit suicide. Of course, I cannot die. But it doesn’t stop me trying.

This is how I wake.

Then, they come into my cell and drill through my skull in seven places so they can push electrodes into my brain. This is done carefully, so as to inflict the right amount of pain – enough that I cannot sleep again, but not enough that I pass out. They store my memory away, into vast computers, a complete record of the life I just dreamt. That’s why they keep me here. To complete their museum, their catalogue of every life lived and to be. They call it the Museum of the Eternal Census.

By its nature, it cannot be completed.

My name is Tobias, though they call me Simulacrum. I must be the only person in Hell to remember their mortal name, and only because I have seen my mortal self in dreams. Through its own eyes, as well as the eyes of others. The girl I loved – Emily – is in most of these. Any dream which features her makes me happy as I wake, even if she was only in the momentary peripheral vision of a child rushing by her on a busy street. I have also dreamed her life. When I woke, I loved her more completely than ever. Then they drilled me and stored her away, along with the myriad other people, archangels and demigods that I have dreamed the lives of.

Maven Crowe set this all up. He is a scientist. He has an ugly, ballooning head perched on a disproportionately small body and he scuttles rather than walks. For the first few millennia of this study, he used to come to my cell and inspect my dreams himself. Now, almost a million centuries later, he rarely shows himself. The last time I had his company was when I dreamed a man named Mussolini. He stood watching the banks of monitors around me, each playing segments of Mussolini’s life as they were extricated from my brain. Maven Crowe has strange interests.

My keepers sometimes ask me, if dreaming the life of a fascist dictator constituted a nightmare. It does not. A nightmare, for me, consists of dreaming the life of the man driving the car that hit mine and Emily’s on the M1 up to Watford. The man who caused the accident that left Emily unable to bear children. That is a nightmare. To witness every event, coincidence, tap of fate and slope of luck that led to his car overlapping space with ours at that precise instant in time. It terrifies and amazes, and though this nightmare has recurred three or four times, I’ll never get used to the feeling as I wake and realise simultaneously every event that led to the accident. These are what constitute my nightmares.

Curiously though, as I dreamt that man’s life, the ones of those that affected him, and so on, cause and effect became more and more circular. Though I eventually forget most of the lives I dream, at some points I glimpse the tapestry of interwoven events which shape our lives. It is only ever a glimpse. But you start to acknowledge that it exists. The mechanic that replaced his front right wheel with a nut which was forged wrongly by a child worker in Taiwan because his father could not work due to the… Blame diverges and dilutes throughout the cosmos.

There is a truth in there somewhere.

Maven Crowe says that one day I will dream the dream that will let me see the entire tapestry at once. When I will be able to see everybody’s life, mortal and immortal, in a single moment, clearly and conclusively. The day when I will see, as though god, the vast and ultimate truth. He says it will happen when I dream my own immortal life.

It was what he waited for.

Eight hours it would take, to dream my own immortality. And with it, every life, including my own again. I would dream the lives of all, each an infinite number of times, before I woke. And in the instant I did, I would see everything. Every event, thought and sensation in existence. The life of every human, angel and demon. I would have read every book ever written, and written them too. I would speak in tongues. I would see the end of time from every angle. I would know how everything connected, from start to finish, with no gap unfilled, no nuance unaccounted for.

Everything.

Maven Crowe was right. I don’t know this because I have dreamed my own life, but because I have dreamed his. On the day it happens, Maven Crowe is called by one of the technicians that spear my brain with electrodes. “There is an increase in data, by an infinite order of magnitude. It’s happened,” the technician will say. Maven Crowe will race to my cell before pulling at my lifeless body, demanding to know what I see, demanding to know everything. But I am dead. Even though it’s impossible, I have died the death beyond death. The banks of monitors show nothing except a single image. It’s the single, simple thing which interconnects everything I saw. Maven Crowe will think it’s god, but I know it’s Emily.

The single thing I saw in seeing everything.

Nobody will observe my memory of Maven Crowe’s life - the Museum has a rule that only records of the dead or unmade may be viewed. People know better than to look into their futures and I know better than to tell them.

The irony that I know my own, is not lost on me.