Mathematics and Fireworks

When you dream, things can be incredibly surreal and weird compared to the fairly stable life in the real world. Things that you would gape at in amazement while awake can in a dream seem unworthy of even a raised eyebrow. If you fly in a dream, you don’t stop doing because you know it’s impossible, you keep doing it because it’s fun.

In the Astral, things are much the same, only you are awake enough to realise that what is happening is only happening because you’re in a very different world.

So when I entered the Planes and immediately had to duck to avoid being hit by several self-propelled springs bouncing off every available surface, I didn’t stop to say “no, springs don’t DO that”, I just visualised a glass dome around myself.

Now protected, I took a look around. I was inside a very big room, empty and grey apart from hundreds of brightly-coloured springs, all of which were rebounding continually off the walls, floor, ceiling, and even each other, all the while making little giggling noises. Apparently, it doesn’t take much to make a spring happy.

Eventually, I managed to locate a door, not easy as it was so similar to the walls: I only spotted it because it had a doorknob. Most Astral rooms will have a door, or exit of some kind. Presumably this is because we rarely find ourselves in rooms with no doors in the course of day-to-day life, and this carries over to the Planes.

Not too surprisingly, the door seemed locked. There was no sign of a keyhole, so I fell back on the only other resource in the room: I grabbed one of the springs, and asked it how to open the door.

It burst into tears and started wailing in distress. Alarmed, I dropped it, and as soon as it started moving again, it burst into a fit of giggling again. It appeared that the springs didn’t like being immobilised.

Oh well, there were a few other things to try. A few moments of concentration, and a keyhole appeared in the door, and a key in my hand. I put the key in the lock, turned it, and tried the door again.

This time, it opened. I pushed it wide, and took a step through.

Laughing hysterically, the springs stampeded towards the open door, and I slammed it shut quickly. A few of them managed to get out, and they ricocheted their way down the corridor, becoming quickly lost to sight.

Shaking my head at how weird things can be on the Planes, I walked down the corridor until I reached another closed door. Once again, it was locked. This time, I only needed to create a key: There was already a keyhole.

I opened the door cautiously, only just wide enough to peep through. There was an immediate clattering and clanging of metal on metal, and I saw a huge number of metal cogs rolling all over the floor, heading towards the door and bashing into each other. I quickly closed the door again, but a few tiny cogs managed to get through even so, and rolled quickly down the corridor, with the same giggles that the springs had made.

I resolved to leave all the other locked doors well alone in this bizarre house. I continued along the corridor, trying the other doors I came to, until I found one that opened as I turned it.

Inside was an elderly man, with a bushy grey beard and an eyeglass in his left eye. He had a variety of metal springs, cogs, and other shapes pinned down on his desk, each of them sobbing and wailing at being held immobile. As I watched, he freed one, and placed it in a wooden box with a great deal of precision.

“What are you doing?” I asked him curiously.

Without so much as glancing at me, he replied “His lordship wants a new clock!”

Well, that made sense. An Astral clockmaker, and I’d been in his storerooms. I stepped closer and watched as he fitted more and more of the pieces into the clock. As far as I could tell, he was putting in one piece, keeping it pinned down with his tools, until he could put in another piece which would wedge in the previous piece. The new piece, he would then hold in place and look for another piece, and so on.

Eventually, with a satisfied grunt, he closed the lid and held the clock up to the light.

It had five hands, all of which were moving at a different speed, some clockwise, some anticlockwise. It was also ticking, but in a very irregular fashion.

“How exactly does one tell the time with it?” I asked curiously. He made no answer, merely carried it out of the room, through a door which vanished behind him.

“Never mind, then.” I said to the wall the door had previously been in.

Turning around, I saw only one means of exit left in the room: A spiral staircase leading up into a room above, tucked away in a corner. I went up, and found myself in what seemed to be a private library, with another grey-bearded old man. There was a table in the middle of the room, with a huge pile of books on it. He was taking the books off the pile, and shelving them.

I picked up one of the books, and tried to read it, but I couldn’t understand any of it. The man snatched it out of my hands and placed it on a shelf.

On examination, I noticed that all the books looked identical. It also seemed to me that however many books he moved, the pile on the table never grew smaller, and the space on the bookshelves never grew smaller. I decided to leave him to it.

There was a door on one side of the room, and a window on the other. Knowing full well that buildings on the Astral tend to be almost infinite in size when you’re in them, I decided to go for the window. Which, of course, wouldn’t open.

Sometimes, you get fed up of being clever and subtle. I conjured up a hammer, and smashed the window, then flew out. Once out, I turned around to fix the window, but it was already back in one piece. The hammer vanished as I stopped concentrating on it.

After a moment, I noticed that I was falling downwards. Despite there being no real gravity in the Planes, you spend your whole life under it’s influence, so if you don’t concentrate, the habit of obeying gravity can make you sink downwards. It took me quite a lot of practice to be able to fly properly, rather than just do big jumps, when I was starting out.

Rather than return to the ground, I decided to step outside for a while. I flew upwards as fast as I possibly could, my destination fixed in my mind. The whole world became a blur as I sped upwards, until I was surrounded by blurred colours streaking past. I kept my mind focused on where I wanted to be, and the blurs finally resolved into my chosen location: Totally outside the Astral Planes.

The Between is a Plane which is found, as the name suggests, BETWEEN all the other Planes. But, there is also an Outside to the Planes. To use an analogy: If the Astral Planes were a house, each individual realm would be a room. The Between would be in the walls, while the place I was in now was the equivalent of standing in the garden and looking at the house’s exterior.

Although there are a limitless number of sub-planes, they are all contained within the seven major Planes. And it is possible to travel outside of all the Planes, and observe them from the outside.

Seen from outside, the Astral Planes are a limitless plain of squares, forming a grid. In each one is a large, many-coloured geometric shape, repeated exactly in each one. In each corner of each square there are smaller shapes of various colours, which are different in each square. Each of these small shapes is a gateway to one specific Plane, and if you pay close attention to the shapes and colours surrounding the gateway, you can use them to find your way back to the same Plane any time.

I always arrive at the same place when I go to the Outside. The squares immediately surrounding the area I arrive in tend to be the same kind of places that I go to when I randomly travel. The further squares tend to be more unusual places.

I decided that I wasn’t in the mood for the usual Planes, so I starting flying over the eternal landscape, heading away from the normal and towards the distant Planes. After a while, it got boring: The landscape never changed, the same square pattern with the same pattern in the middle.

Rather than surrender to boredom, I decided to try and get to the other type of Outside: The Tunnel.

While you’ll usually come across the Outside as being a vast Plain, you can also find yourself in a tunnel, with the squares forming a tube you travel down. The best part is, the tunnel isn’t straight: It bends and flexes and moves. Much less boring to travel through.

So, as I flew across the Outside Plain, I started spinning round as fast as I could. I very quickly became disoriented, unsure of where up and down were, and just trying to concentrate on watching the squares.

The more I span, the more I saw the squares all around me. Until finally, there was no break from square to sky to square, and I was in the Tunnel.

Cheered that it had worked, I set out along the tunnel, as fast as I could. This made the journey more challenging, trying not to let the twists and turns catch me out, so I had no risk of being bored.

Eventually, I came to a turn that was sharper than I had expected, and I hit the tunnel wall. And passed straight through it into a new Plane.

I was floating in a black void, filled with patches of cloud. Lightning almost constantly arced between clouds, and both the clouds and the lightning were all different colours.

Weird place, I thought. Usually, Planes will look like fairly normal landscapes. At the least, they tend to have floors. But no, there was no ground in any direction. I was also having trouble keeping my Thoughtlock centred on this Plane: I was able to tune into it, but it wasn’t easy.

Concerned that I may not be able to stay too long, I dropped a Beacon so I’d be able to find my way back later, and started flying around. A few times, the lightning that leapt from cloud to cloud came very close to me, but it never struck me.

I was hoping to find something. Instead, something found me! With a ‘whooshing’ noise, a cloud of sparks overtook me, and started dancing around in front of me.

It was like a cross between a firework and a galaxy. It seemed at times to be symmetrical, but then the order I saw dissolved suddenly.

I was sure there was some kind of order in there, though. Fascinated, I tried to work it out, but the sparkles were just too many in number. I couldn’t keep track of them.

Thinking hard, I remembered something an old maths teacher had told me – when you have too much data to see patterns by working them out, put them in a graph. You can see relationships more easily when they’re visual.

Obviously, the sparks were already visible. But the patterns they were tracing weren’t. I conjured up a glowing patch of mist, and blew it into the centre of the sparkles. It didn’t affect the sparks themselves, but when a spark moved through it, it left a glowing ‘vapour trail’, allowing me to see the patterns the sparks were drawing.

It was amazing. The sparks were drawing incredibly intricate, three-dimensional patterns. Radially symmetric, the reason I had thought the symmetry vanished was simply that the patterns were spinning round as well.

After a while, I began to wonder if the pattern the sparks were tracing repeated, or whether they changed all the time. I puffed a little more mist into the cloud of mist and sparks, and watched.

The vapour trails stopped fading away. Instead, they changed colour gradually, from red to orange to yellow, and so on. Eventually, I saw the pattern start to repeat. It was an amazing design, that would have made a fantastic Christmas Tree decoration. If you’ve ever seen one of those bits of artwork where they hammer nails into a board, then connect the nails via threads, and make images out of them, convert one of those into three dimensions, and you may have some idea of how it looked.

I had thought that the repetition of the pattern meant that this was simply an impressive thoughtform, with no intrinsic intelligence. But I wasn’t sure – it was far too impressive for me to label it as mindless. So, out of interest, I tried creating a spark, and adding it to the cloud, to see if anything would happen.

Instantly, the pattern changed completely. Still symmetrical, but a totally different shape was being traced in the air. Enchanted, I carried on watching, as more and more lines were traced in front of me.

Then another idea struck me: I remembered that sound could be represented on a graph, and that a three-dimensional shape could be represented as a sound as well. I concentrated, and the vapour trails being left in the mist faded away, and were replaced by music. Every sparkle was generating one note, which changed pitch with the spark’s position.

It was a wonderful sound, with hundreds of sparks in harmony with each other. Sadly, as the pattern repeated, so did the music. So I added a new spark, and the music changed. Removing the two sparks I had already added made the music alter again. It was an amazing experience.

Sadly, I felt my Thoughtlock getting harder and harder to maintain. The beacon I had originally placed, I called to me, and left it marking the spot where the sparkles were dancing. Then, I opened a doorway to a place I knew well, and left.

The place I had come to was a large, empty room. It was created by a group of online magic devotees as a meeting place for when they were lucid dreaming or Projecting. With a large group of people conjuring the room up all the time, the room had become stable, and was now a permanent feature on the Planes. I hadn’t been there in a while, tho.

Thinking back to the Plane I had just come from, I felt that the likeliest explanation for the Plane I had just been on was that it was mathematical.

Since all thoughts have their reflection on the Astral, it is perfectly logical that the thoughts we think when we’re faced with a mathematical problem must also be reflected on the Planes somewhere. I felt that the Plane I had been on was a representation of mathematical thoughts, and the sparks I had played with were some kind of mathematical formula, quite possibly one that had evolved from much smaller, simpler formulae.

Remembering the Star Trek concept that they could communicate with new races by a language based on pure mathematics and other such constants, I couldn’t help but wonder how the sparkles would have reacted if I had said “Hello. One plus one is two”.

I decided not to return to the Plane again for a while, certainly not in this projection, anyway. Instead, I’d continue with my exploring the Planes.

Another method I’ve used in the past to go to a random place is the CorriDoors. It was inspired by a comic book I read a few years before I took up projecting. Simply put, you conjure up a doorway that leads to an endless corridor filled with doors. About half the doors have windows, through which various Astral locations are shown. The doors with no windows lead to more corridors filled with more doors. And so on.

I wandered down the CorriDoors for a while, but none of the Planes shown in the windows interested me much. So, just to see what would happen, I decided to give the doors a miss and plunge through a wall.

I fell. For some strange reason, yellow cubes were floating all around me, but I was dropping. Acting on a sudden impulse, I called up a Spiderman outfit, fired a line of webbing at a nearby cube, and swung myself onto a cube.

The cube was about four feet wide. It was steady as a rock, but was not supported by anything. All around me were other cubes.

Bo-ring, I thought, and jumped back off the cube.

After a second or two of dropping, I was jerked to a stop. I looked at my arm, and realised that the Spiderman costume was still there, and so was the web line I had anchored myself to a cube with.

Oops.

I released the line, and started dropping again.

Still, the costume remained there.

“This is getting silly” I thought. I was about to will it away, when I realised it was some time since I’d changed shape on the Planes.

Habit forces us into a human shape on the Planes. But our more natural shape is as a tiny point, with spherical vision, i.e. we see in all directions at the same time. Tricky to master, but amazing when you can do it.

A few moment’s concentration, and I was a tiny spark of light. A little longer, and I was able to see everything around me.

And then an amazing idea occurred to me.

Though I had planned on not going back to the Mathematical plane during this projection, I couldn’t resist going back there. I focussed on the Beacon I had left there, and pop, I was there.

The Formula was still there, dancing away.

This time, instead of creating a new spark and adding it to the Formula, I entered it myself, since I was currently a spark myself.

As soon as I entered the pattern it was tracing, the Formula included me in its pattern. I was swept in one direction then another, and I could FEEL the other sparks as they traced patterns. Impossible to put into words, I could actually feel the Formula in my mind. It was like a dance of light in my head.

I tried to change the pattern I was moving in, but just couldn’t bring myself to ruin the perfect symmetry in my mind.

Unfortunately, I heard a beeping noise that signified the end of this projection: My alarm clock.

Regretfully, I focussed on my physical body, back in the physical Plane. Regretfully leaving the dance, my last thought of that projection was, I’d never view mathematicians as boring again. Not now that I knew the fireworks that were living in their minds.