Six-Part Ricercar

Achilles:

It’s most perplexing how the characters in my dreams have wills of their own, and act out parts which are independent of MY will. It’s as if my mind, when I’m dreaming, merely forms a stage on which certain other organisms act out their lives. And then, when I wake, they go away. I wonder where it is they go to…

Author:

They go to the same place as the hiccups go, when you get rid of them: Tumbolia. Both the hiccups and the dreamed beings are software suborganisms which exist thanks to the biology of the other host organism. The host organism serves as stage to them — or even as their universe. They play out their lives for a time — but when the host organism makes a large change of state — for example, wakes up — then the suborganisms lose their coherency, and cease existing as separate, identifiable units.

Achilles:

Is it like castles in the sand which vanish when a wave washes over them?

Author:

Very much like that Achilles. Hiccups, dream characters, and even Dialogue characters disintegrate when their host organism undergoes certain critical changes of state. Yet, just like those sand castles you described, everything which made them up is still present.

Achilles:

I object to being likened to a mere hiccup!

Author:

But I am also comparing you to a sand castle, Achilles. Is that not poetic? Besides, you make take comfort in the fact that if you are but a hiccup in my brain, I myself am but a hiccup in some higher author’s brain.

Achilles:

But I am such a physical creature — so obviously made of flesh and blood and hard bones. You can’t deny that!

Author:

I can’t deny your sensation of it, but remember that dreamed beings, although they are just software apparitions, have the same sensation, no less than you do.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, GEB pp.725–6