It's 4am and I saw a post and now I'm thinking about dreams again, so I'm gonna ramble on here.
I have narcolepsy, which beyond being the 'fall asleep a lot disease' is actually a disorder of REM sleep - it can be simplied as my brain wants to do way too much weird REM sleep and do it at weird times and is just generally a bit hazy on the difference between REM sleep and being awake. Naturally, this means my dreams are weird - they're super vivid, and super frequent, can happen even in the shortest of naps or while dozing, and I'm almost always aware I'm dreaming.
There's a bunch of interesting things that dreaming a lot makes me think about - like how being aware you're dreaming doesn't necessarily exempt you from dream logic, and how the brain can be horribly inventive in constructing nightmares and stress dreams that are effective even when you're aware you're dreaming. I think a lot about how you could ever translate a dream into art, what artform you could possibly choose, how you could do it and whatnot, and how it relates to art ends up being a limited transcription from the inside of someone's head.
I also think a whole lot about this one really specific dream I had. It had a very defined narrative and themes, they weren't necessarily groundbreaking and certainly not entirely factual, but they were weirdly developed and coherrent.for a dream - humans have always been curious about the deep sea, and have studied and told stories about the things that wash up, but deep sea creatures are fundamentally different when on the surface, the pressure differentials mean not only is it incredibly hard to keep them alive - it's not about the water, some of them need the pressure to keep them from falling apart - but even dead the act of removing them hugely changes them (see: blobfish). Diving suits are used to maintain a certain air pressure, take a pocket of the surface into the sea to let people observe and explore these creatures in ways impossible otherwise, that can be the same thing, but look unrecognisably different from what washes up on the surface. (My thematic dreams apparently do not care that pressures high enough to do sufficiently interesting stuff would require a sub, or even an unmanned one. They seem to not care about a lot of factual concepts) And as people completely alien to the deep sea, it's also possible to mess with deep sea life with stuff entirely normal for us - a torch's worth of light in the mariana trench would be incomprehensibly brighter than anything down there has ever seen or would ever see again.
And my tired brain reversed that. Humans and pieces of humanity that drifted to the bottom, unrecognisable, certainly not alive, and the what could be known about them limited to glimpses of an entirely, inconceivably, alien world through fragments long dead and divorced from context, and already utterly changed from the journey down. To the deep sea, how would the organic matter of a human differ from wood?And then humanity built vessels, sending people further down bit by bit. This perhaps made more sense, the sea knew crustaceans, and how much do metal and leather shells, hiding a precious bit of life-flesh inside, unable to survive without. And yet when they broke, to touch even just the fresher aftertastes, their fading, rotting memories and unfamiliar shapes of their minds were so rich, so much stronger, so *different* from within the sea. Over time the vessels grew stranger, new propulsion mechanisms, larger, one shell housing many, and blinding overwhelming, full with something that could not be called bioluminescence. They grew sturdier too. The souls within in them lived more frequently, left to the surface, not relinquishing their last living moment to the sea's curiosity. And then the shells were empty, moving on their own power, defying the current, but not living. And the deep got lonely and bored, so took one of the empty shells, the earlier, familiar shapes, to contain and maintain it's pressure and take a pocket of itself to somewhere impossible, and went onto land in an old copper diving suit, made brand and just as it was all those years ago - when it first hit the ocean floor.
I'm tired and running out of explaining braincelld, but like, from there it walked out of the beach into like, one of those tiny beach towns with a caravan park and a visitors/info center with a tiny museum (on the history of deep sea diving), and was just observing, with like, moments like it in the visitor centre after dark in the 'new' but used and being used diving suit staring at a replica of said diving suit, all new and visibly different because for at the point a diving suit hits the sea floor it's already used and changed from the journey. There was also a whole thing about how the 'pressure' leaking from the deep and how way of perceiving things fundamentally could not fit with the surface, like text it read would become unreadable to everyone else in brain twisty ways like when you have a concussion, the pressure and magic black hole nonsense of it being the entire mass of the sea but only the depths but also like just in a diving suit meaning when it focused on or perceived things it would literally draw in consume the meaning of what it percieved and draw it into itself. The reason it was at the visitor centre is it walked out of the sea and it's desire and pressure compelled someone in a beach front house to walk to the beach in the middle of the night. The deep has no idea it's doing this, or that any of this is not normal at all, or even emotions about this in a recognisable form - fundamentally alien. They recognise the diving suit from a distance and are confused, and think about the visitor centre, which the deep sees when it 'looks' at them, and slurps all their current brain content - so everything about why they're on the beach, but also stuff like the knowledge of their mother because they were half thinking of her, leaving her standing on the beach, no idea how she got there, weird gaps in her knowledge from her entire life in weird ways. She's still the same person that her mother contributed to make her, but the actual meaning of her mother, the memory of her mother is gone. After it goes to the visitor's centre, and messes with the words and leaves a guy investigating the break in with only the haunting, contextless memory of the suit looking at the suit that was formed while the suit wasn't aware of him, and wasn't in his mind during the memory slurp plus some other holes and nothing really else from the night but the sensation of a whole lot of fear, because the deep simply wasn't looking as hard at the fear because it was more familiar and less interesting (people are often terrified when dying due to sub implosion) the deep keeps just wandering around observing, literally not doing anything, but the way it percieves cannot coexist with the surface and humanity. Not innocent, not guilty, no moral weight, just there. Meanwhile, the people of the town are in a psychological eldritch horror with first a few, and then more and more people randomly ending up places with no memory of how they got there, and it becoming increasingly more and more apparent that not just that, but completely random hunks of people's pasts and knowledge and concepts are just gone from their brains, more and more as the deep unknowingly and instinctively adjusts to 'see' better in the new environment and has its conceptual knowledge expand (meaning consuming happens within a certain radius, stronger toward the centre, and the deep's ability to think and percieve the concept of existing things can memory slurp em)
Eventually the whole town is abandoned - people leave because it's spooky, or they simply forget. The deep also eventually leaves, there's no more people and that's less interesting, and it has seen enough to go back and sit and think for a century. But because the deep was there so long and thought so hard about the town while in it, the town is suffused by pressure to the point that all knowledge of the town existing has been consumed (which isn't a huge huge amount, it's a beach town with a 3 digit population), including off maps and whatever. The pressure decays very slowly, stops being so concentrated and diffuses, getting spread so thin it effectively ceases to be a thing. People never regain their lost memories of the town, but they do eventually start being able to get new ones and the town becomes a mystery/conspiracy when people come across it, remember it, and go 'why is there a completely unrecorded unremembered beach town that looks like it was randomly and suddenly abandoned decades ago?'