[Dream Report] The Empty White Hell of Infinite Indecision

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Couldn't find an accurate image for this one. That happens to me pretty often. I've had plenty of nightmares that rattled me, but most of them would also scare anybody else. This is one that I don't think I can describe to another person in a way that will fully communicate why it affected me the way it did.

There were no concrete ruins. No abandoned factories, no pipes or gears or the other usual trappings of my nightmares. There was simply an endless white expanse, and a walkway. The walkway was also made of some solid white material like ivory. I could see nothing like a sun or other light sources, but everything was adequately illuminated somehow.

The walkway was about six feet wide and extended all the way to the horizon in both directions. I was naked but not cold, and mystified as to how I got there. I did not realize it was a dream, but I did sense that I wasn't in reality as I knew it. There was air to breathe, there was gravity, but everything looked unnaturally clean. Brand new and unblemished.

The white void was featureless. The walkway absolutely straight, uniform and perfect. I could make out nothing in the distance except more of the walkway. Unsure what else to do, I began walking in hopes of finding an exit. Only then did I begin to comprehend.

Because before long, it occurred to me that I might be going the wrong way. Maybe the exit was in the other direction? Maybe this direction goes on forever. The bigger problem is, I couldn't know for sure whether it went on forever or just very, very far unless I followed it to the end.

So if I just assumed there was an end to it, I might keep walking for days. Weeks, months, years, decades. All the while, only getting further from the exit. Now unsure of my decision, I doubled back. This is when something even worse occurred to me. I'd lost track of the exact place where I started.

That was the only place of any significance. The only thing I could think of as a mid point. Now I had no way to measure how far I've walked from my point of origin. Every stretch of walkway looked identical to every other stretch. There were no fixed points of reference by which to establish that I was making progress. I may as well not be moving at all.

Anxiety mounted. I convinced myself that I should go the other way. I walked in that direction for about an hour, but doubts bubbled up more and more. What if my first instinct was correct? What if this direction was the wrong one? Eventually it got the better of me and I again reversed direction.

If only I knew where I started. That would be something. If only there were any clue at all as to which direction to go, how far I've gone, or whether either direction ever ends. What would I find? A wall? Or just the end of the walkway, like a diving board? I hung over the edge and saw nothing holding the walkway up.

But then, with no points of reference, for all I knew the walkway was in infinite freefall. That didn't seem right as the air wasn't rushing upwards around me, but it could be moving down at the same rate. There was just no foothold for my mind to latch onto in order to begin figuring this place out.

A test, maybe. To see whether my mind can make a decision based on nothing at all. If your decisions are just the result of your circumstances and prior experiences, are they really decisions? Or just the inevitable outcome of a brain made out of atoms, the interactions of which are in principle as predictable as falling dominos.

I agonized over it. I roasted in my own anguish, caught in a thought loop. I should go this way. But is that the right way? Is it possible to know? I don't see how. Then I should go the other way. But I also can't know if that's the right way! The worst was yet to come.

The final horrible realization was that I'd turned around while pacing so many times that I'd lost track of which way was which. But then the absurdity of it dawned on me. There was never anything to distinguish them from each other in the first place. They were effectively identical, yet this did not comfort me in the least.

Only when I modeled the situation completely in my head did I figure out that there weren't only two choices. Not just two directions I could go in, that I must select between. There was one more. With that, I stepped off the walkway and plummeted into the endless white abyss.

...But I only kept falling. In my excitement, though mania may be a more accurate descriptor, it didn't occur to me that falling forever was also a possibility. The walkway, which had been above me, now approached quickly from below. That answered that. The whole place repeats itself. Stepping off turned out to be the only way to discover that.

It sailed past me, then once again receded up into white nothingness. For a while, I just cried. Convinced this was to be my life for eternity...until by moving my limbs around, I worked out that I could steer myself. Like a sky diver, I could control my direction of descent.

I steered straight into the walkway the next time I spotted it below me, and abruptly awoke upon impact. What does it mean? That life is an endless grind and death is the only way out? I don't think so. I am probably just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks here.

That said, it does seem similar to how when you're banging your head against a wall trying to figure out a solution to a problem, and you're convinced you've tried every possible solution already, it's the one you've ruled out as being obviously wrong that often winds up working. Otherwise you would've tried it sooner.

Most of the really significant breakthroughs in history were made by slightly unhinged people. isn't all innovation also deviation? Revolutionary discoveries, as opposed to evolutionary incremental improvements on what is already known, require going in what appears very convincingly to be the wrong/absurd direction at the time. Otherwise it's something we'd already have found.

I didn't know I could escape by falling into the walkway. I just knew the two sensible choices weren't getting me anywhere, so I tried the insensible one. That didn't turn out to be right either, but it led me to the right answer simply by breaking me out of the fruitless dichotomy I was stuck in.