The images inside the sphere are shifting, changing, filling my vision. It is all I can see now, and the light is growing stronger. Without warning the vision breaks over me. A sudden burst of light, and all at once, the cavern is ablaze with sparkling images. They fly past my dazzled eyes in a flurry of beams, a veritable blizzard of brilliance, each image a burning spark striking deep into the soft tissue of my brain. Each blazing particle is part of a greater whole, merging and coalescing as they accumulate in my mind.

Individual fragments are swallowed in the gradually emerging whole, and I begin to see-not broken images now, but a portrait entire. With the crystalline clarity of a dream, I see it all. More, I behold. I have become part of the dream, living it even as it is played out in my mind.

Still, the dazzling fragments, these scintillating shards of dream, fly at me, piercing my senses, embedding themselves deep in my perception. I am defenceless before the onslaught. I can but gape and surrender to the dizzying torrent. But there is so much! The scenes cascade into my consciousness, and I am a man drowning in the onrushing flood.

I can derive no sense or understanding of what I see; the dream is too vast, too chaotic, too wild. It is all I can do to take it in. Yet, there is meaning here. I feel it. This dream is no hollow hallucination, the shadow-play of a drugged and fevered brain. Indeed, irresistibly, I am impressed with a grave and terrible certainty that the tilings I am seeing, however bizarre and chaotic they may seem, actually happened. The dream is authentic. It happened.

Oddly, it is this awful certainty which overwhelms me in the end. I cannot endure the frenzied onslaught, and I fall back. A man drunk on an impossibly rich and heady elixir, I slump against the wall, blind and insensate. Resting the metal rod across my lap, I press the heels of my hands to my poor eyes. Instantly, the images cease. Upon releasing the rod, I have broken contact with the source of the dream, and am myself released to the blessed, soothing darkness of the cavern.