A New Model of the Slumberverse™

This is a non-consensual reality wherein all the inhabitants are fully enclothed (as in, no skin showing) in layers upon layers of dreams, beliefs, theories, ideologies, fables, myths, and other assorted fictions that can assume a minimal degree of realness, but only when "present"; meaning, when it is "active in the mind of the inhabitant". This activity creates a short-term state called Nearly Awake, and they can think it, talk about it, act upon it... and then, almost immediately, it goes inactive again... back to the Slumberverse™ children, until another arises to take its place... usually in mere moments... wait for it... wait for it.

To all the inhabitants, it is like a light-switch being flipped on-off-on-off, a few times a second, like a strobe at an underground rave, leaving all the inhabitants DRUNK by their confusion, writhing about on the floor in pain. This is called, the Suffering of Not-knowing.

Put enough people in a dark box [room, planet, solar system, what-have-you], and feed them an unbroken stream of Slumberverse Stories™, and they can actually stay relatively occupied trying to "figure it all out", for sixty or seventy or more years without experiencing the "Flinch of the Nearly Awakened" - believe it or not!

Earth is such a place - a Slumberverse™ - and the chief commodity of the inhabitants is language - "The Language of Dreams" and all the rest of it - in a continual in-out-in-out flow of partially digested mental excreta - from one to the others, and from the others to one - which, to the more-sensitive noses of the Nearly Awake, smells like the other kind of excreta they know so well.

Their motto, en masse - sounding a bit like the background HUM of high-tension electrical wires overhead, that can be heard for miles - is: "Does anybody really know what's going on here?" (And by "here", they actually mean, "in my mind.")

The antidote to this sorry example of a civilization is the aforementioned, "Flinch of the Nearly Awakened", which can be the beginning of one's complete disconnection from the Slumberverse™, and a few have actually flinched it. It is a shaking off of the layers and layers of "personal" histories, and getting Stark Naked in the face of a pained and writhing populace. But you can handle it. That is what turns "Nearly" into "Permanence".