John Smith was an average man in every way. He had graduated in the exact middle of his class, gone on to two years at college, and was now a low-level manager in the local grocery store, "Joeez Grocereez." He had a wife named Jane with a part-time job in the drug store, and two children, Michael and Lauren. Michael was 16, and Lauren was 10.
Their family was in every way the perfect example of normality. Michael was a typical teenager who loved to take chances, especially with his car. He drove insanely. For some reason his parents didn't try to put limits on this, but instead simply accepted it. This bothered him immensely. He got decent grades, and his parents consoled themselves with the thought that at least he was not stupid, but he certainly liked to take too many risks.
Lauren was a perfect conformist, perhaps in rebellion against her brother. She was the kind of child every parent dreamed of having. She had perfect grades, she played the piano, and it was generally unthinkable that she should get involved in trouble of any kind. Of course, the children always teased her for being such a goody-goody, but they never disturbed her.
The Smiths lived in a modestly sized home in the suburbs. They owned two cars, a 7-year old Accord and a 2-year old Corolla. They got up in the morning at seven o'clock and went to bed at ten. They watched about four hours of TV each day. They ate out about once a week, showered daily, watched their health, went to church on Sundays, and in general did all the things that an average family was supposed to do.
Then one day, the Smiths' lives were turned upside down. John went to sleep one night as normal. Right before waking up, he had a dream which was, for him, very unusual. Normally his dreams all concerned cabbages, or eels, or eels with cabbages, or cabbages that looked like eels, or underwater cabbages with eels swimming through them, or winged eels flying through cabbage patches, or something of this genre. But this dream involved only a single white piece of paper. Mr. Smith could read, but the paper was in Japanese.
The dream was very confusing to Mr. Smith. This impression was further reinforced when he awoke and found himself clutching in his hand an exact copy of the paper he had seen in his dream. He could not think of any way in which that paper could have reached his hand, nor even why it should have entered his dreams.
When he arrived at work, he asked his co-worker Mr. Abe, whose parents were originally from Japan and who had thus learned the language in his early childhood, if he could figure out what the paper meant. Mr. Abe replied that he was not terribly good at written Japanese, but that he would attempt it. When John saw Mr. Abe again in the afternoon, Mr. Abe said that he had deciphered the paper. Here was what it said:
The world is all a dream of Mr. Vernon Drake. When he awakens, all creation shall cease.
John was understandably quite befuddled, not least because it seemed to him that the paper had contained a good deal more writing than that. He mentioned this to Mr. Abe, who became pensive for a moment and then said, "Well, you do of course realize that in Japanese there are many honorifics that are not traditionally written in the English. For example, the actual phrase, translated literally, would be 'the most high, honorable, perfect, exalted Mr. Vernon Drake, by, for, and through whom the world, light, life, and all creation were made.'" This, of course, befuddled John further, yet the content of the message was more puzzling yet.
"Who is this Vernon Drake?" thought John. "What does he want, and how can our world be merely a dream of his? And what's all this business about creation ending when he wakes up?"
The events of the next few weeks tore the Smith family apart. John insisted on his version of the events. Jane would not hear any of it. She tried to shove John's "revelation" under the carpet in the hopes that he would forget about it. The kids also uneasily sensed that something was wrong, but they could not quite figure out what. Eventually, Jane's scheming and the children's seeming apathy forced John to leave. He went to a place he had never been before -- the worldwide center for cults.
John had never understood or trusted cult members. They always seemed so sure of themselves, and their theories were always far-out and involved at least three things from the list of Elvis, Jesus' reincarnation, little green men from Mars, little green men from much further than Mars, the divinity of light, the practice of meditation, the worship of inanimate objects, the re-enactment of ancient religious rituals, and Cheez Whiz®. But now John was sure he was right about the dream and the piece of paper, and he trusted the information it gave about Vernon Drake. So he turned to the religious freaks because they seemed to be the only ones who would believe him.
He founded his own cult. As the one who had been inspired, he ran the place, which was a good thing since he was the only one there with enough common sense to keep it going. He had two main underlings who managed those affairs which they could.
The first was named Jessie Huntington. She was in her early twenties, probably just out of college. She continually questioned all of John's revelations, and in fact seemed more than likely to be a Southern Baptist in disguise. But whenever anyone called her right to remain into question, she grew teary-eyed and said loudly "You are all my family. Without my family I have no reason to live." There was no arguing with such tactics, so she stayed despite her odd perspective on the cult.
The other was a man named Justin Bell. He was middle-aged and fervently respected the rules of the religion. Furthermore, he sometimes tried to make up rules of his own, such as forbidding the eating of beans, in line with the ancient society of Pythagoras. John promptly put a stop to that, as he rather enjoyed beans; and such was the fate of all Justin's ideas, which were as a rule somewhat half-brained. Nevertheless Justin was a workhorse who could be counted on to do what was necessary when he was told to do it, which was more than could be said about the rest of the members.
John and his crew continued to live as normally as possible for a cult, until one day a man in a suit decided to pay them a visit. This was exceedingly odd, for until now every single person who had joined the cult had been poor, or at least not very well off. John told the man to take a seat and he would explain the mysteries of life, the universe, and Vernon Drake, but the man said he was from the government and that he would like a word with John in private. John acquiesced and led the man into his private room.
The man explained that he was a representative of the military. They had previously been investigating aliens, crop circles, killer bees infected with mysterious diseases, and the like. But when they had heard about John's cult, they had rushed to him. The President, who was now three months pregnant, had demanded it, saying "If I must bring a child into this world, I should know its nature." Many arguments were presented to her showing her why John's particular worldview was not very useful and in fact rather inconsistent and shaky as a whole, but she was insistent, and she had always been known as a woman who got her way.
The man in the suit then asked John for a brief description of his revelation. John unfortunately could not provide much information beyond what we have already seen, though he did turn over the paper to the man in the suit. He was asked to travel with the man in the suit to the White House, which he promptly agreed to on the grounds that he needed some time away from those nuts, anyway. He thus told Jessie and Justin that they should take over until his return, and quickly departed in a black helicopter.
When he arrived at the White House, he was immediately greeted by the president, Ms. Rebecca White. She explained that she thought the theory that the world was a dream to be infinitely superior to all the other crazy people's ideas. It explained, for example, why her cat had been acting so strangely lately. John secretly thought that she had only been elected because she was a woman in a country with more women than men, and because her opponent had been an incompetent idiot, but then again wasn't that how all presidents were elected? In any case he held his tongue, since he was now being treated with serious respect by someone who, if a little crazy, was still looked up to by most Americans.
The military man (he never gave his name, and no one ever bothered to ask) explained how due to the incredible boredom of being in the military with no real enemies to fight, they had begun researching various pet projects. Some had looked for aliens, while others created fake aliens, thus leading to a vicious cycle. Many took great pleasure in making crop circles and laughing when the common people tried to explain them. Some created bioengineered monsters for no reason other than that they were pretty to look at. But the very highest level of secrecy -- which even the president had not known about -- had been the spoon-bending experiments.
In the days of General Potzz, he continued, the military had employed large numbers of spoon-benders, who they had paid by pretending that a wrench cost about $850. Soon after General Potzz left, the new commanding officer had simultaneously realized that the spoon-benders could not, in fact, bend spoons, and that it was anyway of dubious value to be able to bend spoons in the first place. Thus, that was the end of the spoon-benders. But some new project had to take their place, and that project was telepathy.
The military man now got to the gist of his argument. He said that, essentially, if the world were all the dream of one Vernon Drake, it was imperative that he never wake up, for in so doing he would cause the world to cease to exist. The plan was to cause a major nuclear war, thus keeping Vernon interested enough that he would perhaps resist the temptation to get out of bed for a while longer; and then, to contact him through the psychics they were training, and trick him into waking up in their world.
At this point, the President seemed a bit skeptical. She remarked that it did not make sense to her that one could wake up in the land of one's own dreams. The military man insisted that this had been proven by all of his psychic research to be the only possible way to achieve permanent status for their world. After a while, the President relented with a bit of unease. She didn't understand big words like "subconscious" and "psychoanalysis," but this all somehow seemed strange to her. But of course, she would not contradict an undisputed expert on the subject.
The next week warnings were sent out to the Chinese to the effect that a nuclear war was necessary to preserve their universe by maintaining the interest of the person whose dream they were living in. No one expected the Chinese to believe them; the communications were simply intended as a courtesy and a desperate plea not to retaliate. Strangely, not one of the Chinese protested, and when they saw the incoming missiles, they did everything they could to protect themselves, but nothing to take revenge on their known attackers. No one could explain this fluke except to propose some kind of mental anomaly in Vernon Drake. Since the world's condition had become universally known, this was emerging as an increasingly common excuse -- "it was Vernon's fault," said housewives who forgot to pick up the milk -- "Vernon made me do it," said children who hit others, in the same tone that some would have previously said "God made me do it."
In any case, the telepathy experiments were proceeding exactly as planned, though the plan was anyone's guess. Purely mental communication between human minds had been established as fact, and it had also been proven that it was possible to "remotely hypnotize" someone -- a necessity if they were to control Vernon Drake. The implications of these discoveries were far-reaching, so it is perhaps best that the poets and scholars had little time to consider them before the Day of Judgment would come.
Then one day when the aftermath of the attack on China had started to die down, and thus could no longer be relied on as an attention-getter, it was decided to begin the psychic attacks -- they called them "necessary alterations" -- on Vernon Drake's mind. They had gathered all of the best psychics, and the rest had all come, largely because the power of that many psychics was too great a lure for one with any hint of mental powers to resist. In the end the military decided to let them all participate, so that those who would have been disenfranchised would not disrupt those who so carefully plotted in hopes of maintaining their own existence.
When they finally succeeded and Vernon began to wake up, he started to materialize in front of them. It was not that he faded in out of the dark or the light, not that he faded from transparency to solidity, not that he came from far away and found himself close; some would later describe it as a combination of all this genre of experience, but they knew they were somehow mistaken.
Curiously enough, it seemed to everyone that nothing had changed since the Awakening. Actually a small society of ants living in the desert who had discovered the secret of calculating pi to an arbitrary number of digits and were intent on the 10,289th digit vanished abruptly from existence, but no one had known of them and thus it seemed that nothing had changed. In any event, Vernon seemed just like any other ordinary person.
As they talked to him, he noticed how very odd it was that he was in the same world he had occupied in his dreams. He mentioned this to them, and they questioned whether he would have rather stayed in his same waking existence. He responded that it was probably better this way, as he would simply have had to eat more eel and cabbage for breakfast when he had awoken. The military scientists noted every detail of what he said with their stenograph machines, and John also marked what he had said. He thought it quite a queer coincidence that he had dreamed of the same things Vernon had previously eaten, but he said nothing.
When he first entered the world Vernon was treated like royalty, but gradually the people forget that Mr. Drake had ever been anything special. After all, what did it matter that the world had once been a dream of his? He still had to earn his living, which he did and did well as a bioengineer specializing in farm products. His chef d'oeuvre, thereafter known when placed inside a hamburger roll as a "Drake burger," was a crossbreed between eels and cabbage. No one quite knew how he had done it, but it tasted surprisingly good.
For a while the name "Vernon" increased remarkably in popularity, and cabbage, eel, and Drake burgers came to be known as delicacies, but otherwise the Awakening, as it was called, seemed to have little significance to the people. As Vernon grew old, no one noticed any changes; and when he died, they gave him a great funeral, but the world did not cease to exist. Actually, it seemed not to have changed in any way. In fact, the society of ants had come back into existence and promptly resumed work on the 10,290th digit, but no one knew about them, so it still didn't matter.
But one day, one of the children named Vernon -- whose last name, by a queer coincidence, was Drake -- had an unusual dream. He dreamed of cabbage and eels, which was unusual because he had always dreamed of pieces of paper in unrecognizable scripts. His impression of oddness was further reinforced when he awoke to find a cabbage in his left hand and an eel in his right. He pondered this unusual development for some time, and finally decided that there was only one explanation for what was occurring. He demanded an audience with the President to reveal his discovery, which was granted for reasons never fully explained.
He proclaimed loudly "I can explain why the world is the way it is now. The only possible explanation is that we are the work of a fiction author with a strange temperament. Yes, that's right, we are nothing more than thoughts in this creator's mind. We have no existence except on paper."
He was of course greeted with hideous laughter. This lasted for several minutes, until it started to rain cabbages and eels, by the hundreds and thousands. He then said "Is that not proof enough for you? What other explanation could possibly suffice?" At this the crowd oohed and ahhed, and then there was a moment of silence as a hundred thousand butterknives flew over their heads at two hundred thousand miles per second. No one noted that this was beyond the speed of light, since they now realized that the entire world was nothing more than a fictional creation, and the laws of physics were naught compared to the laws of ingenious plot devices.
He then said "Now that we understand the true nature of the universe, we can finally rest, my brothers and sisters." To that there was widespread assent. The whole world rejoiced at having finally discovered the immutable secret of their existence. Their party lasted several millennia, which was obviously a suitable exaggeration to advance the plot. Curiously, no one had died or been born at the end, which evidenced the inconsistencies all too often present in even the best writers' work.
All of a sudden, when the party had ended, the entire world turned to cabbages and eels except for the people inhabiting it. They had but a few seconds to decide that the writer had finally become bored with his task, and then they too were cabbages and eels, drifting in the vast emptiness of space for an eternity or whenever the writer decided to pick up his task again, whichever was longer.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: 1998?