Wormholism

I dreamt I was foraging through the woods, close to the sea. The ground was strewn with flotsam, rotten chunks of wood cracking under my feet, some trees flattened, reminding me of the Tunguska event of 1908. I wasn’t alone, but I can’t remember who I was with. Quite a few people, wandering.

Looking around, I noticed strange structures, somehow like trees, but different, not artificial, yet not entirely natural either. Very delicate, filigree, yet brittle, like a tree imitating a double helix model by Crick and Watson in 1953. What was clear was that they were made by subtraction, as if termites had consumed, like sculptors do, all that was superfluous to reveal only the form that had always been there. An immense density, however still immensely ephemeral. We walked on.

They reminded my of fractals, too. From a distance, they seemed enshrouded in a light haze, maybe minuscule creatures swarming about them. It seemed clear that if one could get closer, the intricacies would collapse into themselves, into their self-similarity, deeper and deeper. I was sure one could enter them, but did not try. At some point, through the trees, I could see what seemed like a giant factory building hovering in the same kind of Tarkovsky-like mist. A ruin, certainly. Upon closer inspection, however, I realized that it was of the same nature/non-nature of the structures I had just encountered, only incredibly bigger. A ruin, erected by some insectoid work force, consisting more of empty space than of matter, made of pores and holes, material invisibility, an ecology without nature, the ruin of a factory of technostalgia.

As one does, in my dream, I took out my phone to snap some pictures, so I could inspect them more closely after waking up in the morning. The rest of the dream, I cannot remember.

When I woke up, there were no pictures on my phone, unfortunately. What I did find, however, was a book which was recently sent to me by my mother. She had found it in her deceased parents’ library, and it had belonged to my great-grandfather.