The Meadow, an Introduction

“Just focus on the sound of my voice. You feel yourself becoming more and more relaxed...”

I awake in a lukewarm pool of water. I look about, squinting in the midday sun, taking in my surroundings. I appear to be lounging in some sort of lazy stream, in my clothes. I don't remember owning these clothes: black v-necked shirt, leather belt with pouches, black pants, brown leather boots. I'm aware that I own the boots, at least here in this reality, but I don't think I'm wearing them. No matter, I probably left them near the tree. I look around beyond me, and an external view of myself fills in all I need to know: this is The Meadow.

The Meadow is a place I seem to have borrowed mostly from a Hayao Miyazaki film; it's actually animated. The blades of grass have outlines. The snow-capped mountains in the distance are a cel painting. The trunk of the tree to the viewer's right is impossibly brown; its leaves impossibly green. There is a nigh-constant soft breeze, blowing at about the pleasantly lukewarm air. Somewhere downstream from my original position I am vaguely aware of a beautiful blonde elven woman, lying dead in a wooden boat with a dagger in her heart; I dismiss this as something I will investigate later. The stream is somewhere in the front of my current (third-person) view, and the moment I become aware of this, my view shifts back to first-person.

My head is resting against some part of the stream's bed. I cock an eyebrow, wondering if the ground immediately surrounding a stream is called a bed, and decide that whether or not it's called a bed, I'm definitely as comfortable as one laying in a bed. I drape my arms out in either side and close my eyes, letting the sun greet me with its warmth.

I decide this is probably one of the only situations I enjoy the warm sun in my face: when I'm wet. Without a conscious decision, I get out of the stream and flop down onto my back just outside the shade of the large tree, arms spread wide as I allow the lazy water to evaporate in the happy sunlight. Justin, a hypnotherapist and a fast friend, is on the ship, in my stateroom, trying to help me relax. Instead of relax, I'm too busy processing everything around me. There's a constant voice in my head, my homunculus, narrating everything I'm seeing, hearing, processing, down to whether or not my eyes are twitching.

Ah, my eyes are twitching, that means I must be processing and storing, or dreaming, or both. This is cool, it's like a daydream. Wow, I'm so relaxed right now. So very very relaxed. Wow, it's like maybe I could move parts of my body but I'm not going to, because that would ruin it right now. Or maybe I can't move them because I'm too busy being relaxed!

Absolutely terrible. I try to push the voice away, but it's not going away, only getting quieter. I grin with my eyes closed and go back to the sunlight. I shake my head slowly, realizing that the voice might never actually go away. The more I try to quiet myself and listen to everything else, the more loudly it returns after only a brief respite.

“You see in front of you a filing cabinet, which is where your mind files things away.”

Crap.
Now I'm wearing a burgundy tie, decent brown shoes, and a gray suit. My hair is gelled and business-casual. There's some sort of gray cubicle-area with tile floors and tile ceilings apparently on the edge of The Meadow.

  Maybe I should have said something out loud about where I was. Then again, he told me not to talk constantly this time. I'm still talking constantly, but he can't hear it.

  I sigh and look at a folder in my hand, which has an 8x10 glossy photograph of The Meadow and a few pieces of paper with text more than likely concerning the same. Crouching down, I first reach for the bottom drawer. Then, thinking better of it, I stand up and open the chest-height drawer, for easy access. I don't think I'm keeping anything important in here, but it's impossible to tell with the amount of clutter in my mind. I shove everything in that drawer back, and it all compresses with a satisfying scrape of metal and slight rustle of papers. I put the folder, clearly marked now in bold, black marker “The Meadow,” in the front where I can pull this out later.

You can come here any time you like, the voice says, and I grin like an idiot, as if I hadn't even considered this. Maybe I haven't. The other voice, the constant rambler, tells me of course I can come here any time I want, I knew that, but even the Rambler has to admit it was a pretty good idea that somehow wasn't entirely my own.

"As I count slowly up from five, you will start feeling yourself becoming more and more alert.”

No, I don't want to leave, I think loudly, pulling the tie off of my neck, turning as if to run out of the disedificed filing area with its tile, cubicles, water cooler...

And it's too late. I'm already floating away, and there they go, my eyes are open.