Pathic Loci
Source Room
The Source Room’s entryway is arched, and one steps in through a doorway that seals behind the viewer soundlessly. One finds themself facing the right side of a circular pool. On the right side of the viewer, along the back wall of the room, there is a banquet table laden with consumable goods in pristine condition. Overtop the pool is an armchair on a metal dais. On the right side of the armchair from the perspective of one seated in it, there is a wheel crank which raises something from the water. The basket is down.
To the left of the viewer is a both long and wide hallway, lit by recessed lights. At the end of the hallway, there is a lever in the front wall of the Source Room. It moves vertically, and is currently set a quarter-inch from its bottom. The tip of the lever is adorned with a polished silver eyeball.
A hand reaches out, mine, through the viewer’s torso. It pulls the lever up to the very top. There is an audible clicking and whirring in the walls throughout the space. To the attentive ear, the walls are revealed to be fiberglass insulated brick coated in oil-painted drywall.
The viewer has turned around, and catches a glimpse of me before I fade. Dark hair- light green eyes. I’m smiling.
All lights go out. There is a shifting glow from the pool, different colours glinting as luminous fish swimming to the surface.
They are not fish. They are glowing outlines of killer whales.
One may enter the water, if they so desire.
Stone Library
The Stone Library occupies the Source Room’s abyssal pool and reaches to the sandy bottom of the ocean. It has shelves arrayed in a classic circular labyrinth, three walls thick, with a central pillar that supports the armchair dais. The whales are mood sprites: orange for hosting, blue for sadness, yellow for pride, red for id, green for composition, and purple for insanity. These are my primary moods.
The books on the shelves are made of stone paper, and are thus perfectly legible as well as waterproof. They detail the contents of my hard-coded memory. The sprites are my pathos: externalized-while-internal visual guides to what my moods are up to based on my life’s recognized and internalized data points.
The killer whales swarm around the viewer in their colour-coded glory, an innate defense mechanism. Orange, orange, blue, green, red, blue, red, orange, red, green, green, green, green, green, green. Then, from the sand beneath the viewer’s swishing feet, a full-grown purple behemoth launches, jaws open. The viewer is swallowed, but no sensation is had, and, indeed, the purple whale passes through without leaving a mark.
The central pillar was once encrusted with a cubic zirconia gem three inches in diameter, set at eye height. It sparkles with the six mood colours and now adorns the forehead of my main avatar in the Mind Palace, which is made of sand, jellyfish, and seaweed. The gem serves as a representation of my third eye, which processes the data it is assigned antipathically. The gem acts as a headlamp as well as a source of insight on the likely effects on my daily life of my doings in the Mind Palace.
Ocean Floor
Upon exiting the Stone Library, the vast and murky Ocean Floor occupies one’s view. The Mood Sprites act as will ‘o the whisps, just over the next dune, leading the viewer on to greater adventure. Following them, I encountered the Mind Dragon. Ignoring them, and instead walking towards the distantly visible Seaweed Forest, I found the Pathic Loci.
Halfway between the Stone Library and the Seaweed Forest, I laid my first meditation disc. I was exhausted by the labor of vividly simulating the force of gravity on my steps due to the imagination required, given I have never physically walked on the bottom of the ocean at such a depth. However, my waking world being what it was at the time, I was not about to leave this place. Instead, I practiced transcendental meditation within my vision quest meditation, seated in easy pose on the ocean floor. This first disc is made of whale bone. All the meditation discs are in fact rings, with empty centers, so I can feel the dream-developed ground.
This form of meditation within meditation has proven to be the quickest and most effective way for me to reach full emptiness of thought.
By this point, I have experimented with co-animating multiple avatars of me synchronously meditating in transcendental fashion. I manifest them one by one, already seated, assigning avatar to meditation disc, and I reach emptiness in that thought-well before manifesting the next avatar. I have manifested up to seven avatars of me, and co-ran these seven thought processes for approximately five continuous minutes. Six were meditating, anchoring in antipathic flow one active avatar reading books in the Stone Library as the most-mundane (outward) me dealt with a complex psychiatric appointment.
Seaweed Forest
The Seaweed Forest grows around the oceanside half of the Pathic Loci. I walk through it sometimes. Other times, I meditate as a seaweed strand. Other times, I meditate as an aquatic ladybug nesting on a strand. While occasionally dark and menacing, the Seaweed Forest is largely a place of tranquility in obscurity. Most often, I observe it swaying in the currents from the stone meditation disc in the sandstone roof of the Hosting Room. It has a metal balustrade through which I can watch the dark greenish-black fronds undulate.
A few times, I’ve used it to express rage. In that circumstance, the weeds emanate bursts of spiky red energy. This energy flow tenses the fronds, and they stand on end, filled with a stronger energy than the ocean currents can bend.
Getting up, facing the forest and the balustrade, I move to the right and down a metal ladder to the Ocean Floor. I can fall through the sandy ground into an Oubliette to the Pride room, or, facing the ladder with a hand on a rung, I can crank open the reinforced steel door to my left into the Hosting Room, the only Mood Room accessible directly from the Ocean Floor.
Mood Rooms
Hosting Room
The hosting room is carved by water into orange sandstone. A giant red carnivorous flower grows from the ceiling. There are smooth walkways ground out of the cavern. There are three destinations possible from the entryway, which is a reinforced steel door with a circular porthole. There is a wheel crank which opens it from the outside. An attentive eye will notice the emergency escape latch in the right jamb of the inside doorway.
As the vestibule to the other Mood Rooms, this is also the decontamination chamber. The viewer may not notice, distracted by the path to the springtime cherry tree, but their darker essence is drawn down to the tar pit, in the center-floor, while their lighter essence is drawn to the flower, in the center-roof. With nothing left but curiosity, the driving force of antipathic action, the viewer arrives at the springtime cherry tree, in partial bloom. Embedded in the ground next to it, there is a tarnished silver meditation disc. If one sits on the disc facing the entrance to this room, the tree is on the right. At the same altitude as the mouth of the tar pit, but without so much as a ledge to reach it by, there is an archway. It leads into the purification cavern, though this entrance is black as the pitch of the pit.
« Oh! Dryads of the Wild Wood of my Mind, will you take this cherry tree into your grove? », I spontaneously ask the static-charged air of the Hosting Room. The tree disappears, loose petals drifting to the ground. There is not so much as a dip in the sandstone to show the tree was ever there, gnarled and aged as it was.
Sadness Room
The Sadness Room is lit by large glowing pale blue crystal stalagmites. The stalactites of the Room are made of the same dark sedimentary rock as the rest of the cavern. Orange goldfish of varying size swim in schools around the Room. At the opposite end of the Sadness Room from its entrance, a giant stone full-body statue of me sits in easy pose, eyes closed, with its arms outstretched. I advance across the broken ground towards the statue. I know this Room has a meditation disc inside the statue but I am shy to demonstrate its usage, since the entrance is indeed where one might suspect. A gothic archway encrusted in cubic zirconia between the statue’s bent legs is reserved for the passage of only a select few. Unworthy invaders will find themselves back in the Hosting Room upon trying to pass through, after having been thoroughly and entirely antipathically processed by the cubic zirconia gems. With that in mind, I pass through the archway and am seated upon the pink granite disc.
Pride Room
The Pride Room’s floor is hidden under golden mounds of sand, each grain representing an unprocessed moment I was proud of myself. There is a stepped stone stairway in the center of the Room leading to an equally stony throne. When I sit on the throne, I fidget. I am ill at ease feeling Pride, as so much literature paints it as a cardinal sin.
I walk through the mounds of sand to the stairs and climb up. There are 49 steps. I sit on the throne, and tell the cubic zirconia gem in this avatar’s forehead to process these grains of pride. I feel a moment of ease and comfort while the gem does its work. I do not think of anything. The memories do not cross my mundane mind’s eye, though the smile appearing on my face tells me I am hiding something quite nice from myself.
I do not get up until the floor is clear. As it is revealed, it turns out to be shiny and a whorled brown. Epoxy finished maple.
Id Room
Id is a giant magma baby that takes up all the space in the Room assigned to it. There are lava vents all over the Pathic Loci, I presume, but I have only moved through one such vent. It was to reach the Composition Room.
Composition Room
The lava vent from the Id Room pours out of an iron dragon’s mouth into the large pond at the base of the giant waterfall, producing large quantities of steam amid the spray. Through the waterfall, there is another monumental statue of me. This statue stands guard with a spear. Behind it, a meditation disc is in a cavern, which is not formed by erosion but is actually a gap between several massive stacked boulders that leak light from all sides. The disc is in the middle of that space, made of titanium, set into the ground.
All around the viewer, who has not made a move towards the cavern from the pond, tropical vegetation abounds. The Composition Room is a closed cavern underwater, but it has a magical ceiling like Hogwarts’ that mimics the above-water weather conditions. Though Composition is still Pathos, a form of emotional torment, I have habituated myself since childhood to exteriorize it rather than suppress it. I do not resist its torrent as I do the other moods, and this eases the pressure, which, when present, creates a countering tension in the body, which is the root of pain-type feelings.
Insanity Room
The Insanity Room is the closest to shore amongst the Pathic Loci and so, depending on the tide, may or may not be underwater. At this time, the tide is in. A rune-engraved stone outcropping projects from the ground to the center of the spherical space. It is inlaid with a white mother of pearl meditation disc. The Mind Dragon nears, making its way speedily towards this place.
The Dragon arrives from a pit I cannot see below my stationary outcropping. As it once did, that first time activating this Room, the Mind Dragon hovers before me and requests my consent to perform its duty in making me temporarily insane.
This time, I do not give my consent, so the Dragon flies around and, with its long razor-sharp fins, slices right through the stone debris as it normally would- but this time, the pieces do not rise up to spin chaotically around me. Instead, the Dragon minces the rock to ever smaller grains of sand, moving so quickly I feel the water currents form whirlpools. Sucking the sand up into underwater dust devils, the whirlpools grow heavier. With more mass behind their motion, and the Mind Dragon still slicing and swirling, they grow so tall they reach the surface and turn into waterspouts. I contemplate the view from the disc, still meditating. The pieces of buildings shoot out of the spouts and build things I am not yet aware of in the Memory Palace.
Oubliettes
The Oubliettes are functionally limitless. They appear anywhere as needed and remain upon creation; they are the most readily available of pathways. They are tunnels built of varied substrate. Each component making up a given Oubliette is a manifestation of me I have rejected to be recycled and reintegrated into myself. These components serve as substrate for the variety of living entities that inhabit the Pathic Loci. The Oubliettes are decomposition loci, and when I am moved to visit, it is to recollect and then release into compost material a once-but-no-longer charged personal memory.
Tide Pools
I return to an above-water path I had walked once in a new session. The protective magic is no longer there and the path no longer leads to the purification cave. Instead, it leads to the top of the rocky mount, where I find the Tide Pools. Tide Pools fascinate me, and always have, for the way they make accessible to the terrestrial self a microcosm of a body of water.
The Talking Bench
Every ocean has a shore. With this rationale, in a new session again, I manifested on the beach of my mind’s ocean. The sun was setting and the sky was overcast. In an effort to process both guilt and grief, I walked away from the ocean into the forest that borders the beach. I found the largest tree in the wood and cut it down with a Japanese saw my father once loaned me in the mundane world. I dragged the tree’s monumental form to the beach and built a pyre onto which I laid the tree’s body, which I set ablaze and watched until nightfall.
By night, the tree had not been consumed and the fire had died. I dragged the charred wood to the water and pushed it afloat, hoping it would sail away into the distance over the horizon, never to be seen again, but alas. The tree came back to the shore as a log, which I collected and brought up onto the beach as The Talking Bench. I sit on it and a hologram of my oldest friend appears to counsel me.
Chess Board
Underwater and in the middle of the Pathic Loci, which are arrayed circularly around this area, is the Chess Board. It represents the game the sentient universe I believe in plays with me. I play white; my universe plays black. I have not yet seen a game end- presumably, this one round lasts my lifetime. I have witnessed moments of game-play.
Antipathic Loci
Mind Dragon
I initially activated the Mind Dragon in an Oubliette off the Pride Room. I wanted a pathway to the Sadness Room from Pride. I slipped down through the sand into a newly formed Oubliette which led me to a ledge over an abyss. Across from the ledge there was a statue of a dragon with its mouth open.
I floated myself across the gap, battling vertigo, and sailed into the dragon’s mouth. I found myself walking a magically protected path, above water for the first time. The sky was blue with fluffy clouds, and the path was leading uphill. The magic around the path was spiky and red, like fire mixed with electricity. The path led to a cave in a rocky mount.
I could not see into the blinding light which emanated from the cave. Nevertheless, I entered, and felt a purification process I was not ready for begin. I was swiftly ejected from the cave at great speed and altitude. As I tumbled through the air, I saw a dragon outline made of purple light around me like it was my aura, like I was the dragon.
The Mind Dragon is indeed one of my avatars inside the mind palace, and it contains a memory palace of its own. Its loci are detailed over the next two pages.
Mind Dragon Loci are a layer of mundane further from the rest of the Mind Palace, which is to say they are more cognitively developed than intuitively. It is accurate to say that the Mind Dragon is part of my defense mechanism array, as are the Mood Sprites, as is my reflexive choice of setting: the murky and mysterious Ocean Floor.
Mind Dragon Loci
Entryway
Black and white diamond checkered tile. Gas lit. The Mind Dragon was lying belly-down on the sand, mouth open, with a lit torch next to it, when I found it.
Mezzanine
Overlooking the bulk of this palace within a palace, the Mezzanine maintains the checkered tile of the Entryway and has numerous balustraded lookouts and alcoves. The alcoves are populated with greenery and the ceiling is loose wicker matting through which plants also grow. A diffuse blue light emanates from the glass ceiling which may be seen past the greenery. Over the Workshop, the Mezzanine spans the space horizontally, bisecting the Dragon. Inlaid in the floor in this middle of the Mezzanine is an aluminum meditation disc.
Orange Library
The first library in from the mouth is upholstered in floral orange over vermillion. It contains my memories of family. There is a wooden wingback sitting chair in the far-left front of the room. The wood is honey-stained oak. The curtains have tassels. The windows lead to sunshine over the rocky ravines I know so well as being local to the Saint Lawrence estuary. We are shortly from the Tide Pools.
Red Library
The Red Library is cozy couches and endless serpentine bookshelves. The books contain memories of knowledge and wisdom.
Pool of Sadness
Shaded by the Mezzanine and down a few steps from the library, on the same level as the Workshop, the Pool of Sadness is always cold, and contains the wailing souls of humans I have shunned from my light, as well as broken glass. To walk the Mind Dragon past this point requires entering the pool and wading through it lengthwise.
Workshop
A small iron cauldron simmers over a low-lit hearth; I am focussing. This is a scrying cauldron, and all it contains, has ever contained, is Sewer water.
Cellar
The cellar door appears on command from the Workshop. It leads through the intestines of the Mind Dragon, a progressively tighter and unpleasant squeeze, until the viewer is excreted into the Sewer.
Sewer
The Sewer is the Mind Dragon’s Oubliette. When I walk through this particular locus, it is invariably because I am in need of insight on past events that is unclouded by pathos. The large network of tunnels that make up the Sewer are dark where shallow, but as one heads deeper underground, fluorescent lighting heralds the transition into the Subway System. All Sewer tunnels give to the same underground exit: a person-sized crack in the outsized information desk of the Subway System’s atrium, conveniently obscured from view by a large potted fern.
Subway System
I am always alone in the Sewer, but the Subway System is full of other humans and humanoids. I may or may not interact with them; it is much the same as the Mundane realm in that respect. Exiting the Sewer tunnel and brushing through the fern, my back is to the Atrium information desk’s front and I am facing the yawning archway which gives onto multitudinous overlapping subway rails.
In the Subway System, one must cross over the electrified rails and negotiate various gaps and chasms between platforms without help or supervision. The various trains all have the same driver, whom is not duplicated but is rather a time-traveller. The destinations are dreams I have had, and I have dreamt of the atrium itself, as well as negotiating the Subway System in between more traditional dreamscapes, several times.
I once dreamt of a place called the Nexus. I believe it is located somewhere near the atrium of the Subway System, if it is not the atrium itself in a different and more orderly guise. It felt of the same flavour of reality as that area- more real than imaginary. I believe the Nexus and the Atrium are both spatializations of a state of stable juxtaposition between the mundane mind and the dreaming mind. Dreams of either location feel real, and mundane meditation in this vision-quest style there feels more fruitful than any other locus in terms of the quality of my thinking during and afterwards.
Dream Destinations
Nexus
I was in a throng of people who were mostly wearing a commemorative-style lapel pin with a picture of a person I knew distantly in university, who had the same first name as me. I excitedly commented to the nearest human wearing the pin that I knew her in the real world. Within a few seconds, everyone wearing the pin in the vicinity had turned to face me with condemning eyes. For an instant, I was still in the dream, aware I was to be kicked out of the place, and then I was awake, with the certainty I would never again unwittingly dream into that region of mental processes.
Mattress on Stilts
As a child, the dream I always wished would re-occur but which never did was one where I was in a giant warehouse where I found a mattress on multiple-story-tall stilts. I remember in the dream after the warehouse eating macaroons in the adjacent restaurant.
Carnival
The first lucid dream I remember having, I was about 6 years old. In this dream, I was walking home from my primary school at dusk and as I walked up a street, in front and to the left of me was a park. There was a long throng of masquerade-looking individuals slowly circling around it. I stared at them for a time.
Escape
The second lucid dream I had was in high-school. I was running through a forest from a SWAT team sent to eliminate me when my lucidity manifested and I swapped my left arm for a chainsaw. I was then able to cut down trees as I ran to create obstacles for my assailants and get away, to the courtyard of my primary school, where I turned a ventilation shaft into a porthole to a dream paradise with my classmates, though none of them would speak to me.
Fae Tournament
The culmination of my lucidity was to realize that lucid dreams, perhaps all dreams, as well as serving to process waking events, are competitions between the mundane and dreaming selves for dominance over the body’s control systems.
This became literally true for me, taking the form of a tournament created by the fae folk of my mind to test my abilities on the dreaming plane- their home territory. I do believe I proved my worth as one of their avatars in the mundane world.