The Blue Dot

A Short Story By Adam Furgang — September 1, 2020

We all sleep every night. The same location. The inner mind. We ready ourselves. Wash up. Brush teeth. Get comfy. Wind down. Unspool. Crawl into bed and turn off the lights.

Soon your eyes grow heavy. Soon sleep overwhelms your consciousness and bathes it in a broth of darkness that closes rational thinking down and opens up the surreal world of the inner mind. This is a world where you have no control.

You have no say.

You have no choice.

And yet somehow you are the one generating the narrative that you become overwhelmingly and inescapably entangled in each and every night. Or are you? No matter how often you visit the boundless landscape of the mind filled with Sisyphean tasks, endless warrens of muddled rooms and locations, and people you engage with irrationally, you still, despite your rational mind accompanying you, fall victim to its trappings each and every time.

You drive off narrow bridges that lead nowhere and sink into a swamp.

You crawl curiously through the inner walls on the upper floors of a massive decrepit skyscraper hopelessly trying to reach ground level during an apocalypse.

You ride up a vintage escalator that’s oddly out of place in a forest.

You engage in all manner of odd and disparate behavior with any number of people. As you shed the day world you know and vividly recall, you encounter an ex, an old teacher from grade school, a dead aunt, a stranger you somehow know intimately, and a girl from Target you occasionally glanced at months ago who suddenly becomes your lifelong companion.

Time obliterates and ages magically change. You spontaneously jump from place to place and narrative to narrative without a second thought. The world before you becomes like a jumble of books, graphic novels, art, and films, all flickering before you chaotically and incoherently but somehow you don’t question any of it.

You loose your wallet, phone, clothes, children, or your teeth. You quibble with a stranger before they fall off a cliff. You drink black water because you are thirsty. You inhale sweet smoke as a fire engulfs your home while you casually eat spaghetti from a box.

People dance. They smile. They sing. They observe you. They engage you.

You find yourself nude, flying, running, swimming, floating, or drowning.

Your house is suddenly by the edge of a massive sea encroaching the front rooms as you hopelessly attempt to remove wet sand and fight the waves back.

A gun is fired. A limb disconnects. A path is lost. A window breaks. A rock is thrown. An accident occurs. A mob forms. A tree falls. A sinkhole opens.

A plane crashes.

A fire erupts.

A moth enters your mouth.

A dart pierces your eyeball.

The moon is way too close to the Earth.

You discover hidden rooms.

You find stolen treasure.

You flee from authorities.

You have sex.

You bathe in front of a crowd.

You fall into a dark crevasse.

And then you begin to awaken, and before you open your eyes you see the dreamworld. It’s an endlessly complex swirling darkness that fills the gulf between your eyelids and your mind. The images generated by your unconscious mind collapse as you try to hold them together. A trillion shades of black dance and swirl before you.

And then you see it. Briefly. Fleeting.

A blue dot.

A light?

A pixel?

What is that?

How is there a blue dot on your field of vision?

It’s only there briefly, but now that I’ve seen it I know it’s there. It’s there as I observe the darkness before I sleep. It’s there as I wake at 3am. And it’s there as I become aware before morning.

It’s a blue dot. And now that I’ve seen it I know it’s there. A connection? A portal? A gateway? A link?

The blue dot is there.

Look for it.

You’ll find it between consciousness and unconscious.

It’s evidence of more.

It’s evidence we know nothing.

It’s a blue dot.