Swed-yo

     There are two worlds, one we have explored, mapped, and come to know well and one the existence of which we have only been able to infer from our explorations of the first. Occasionally, we have argued about those inferences and the plausibility of that other world's existence or have told a few fantastic stories about it. When we do think about it, we try to reason out its strangeness, but only end up shuffling likenesses to the world we know. Mostly, we haven't given this real, second world much thought at all and have preferred making up worlds entirely of our own contesting imaginations--heavens and hells, alien planets, fairy kingdoms, utopias, dystopias, endless silliness. Of course, it's hard to know, given there's reason for uncertainty and nothing much to help it except imagination, whether an unvisited world is real or nonsense like all the rest of our foolishness.
     But there is a world. We visit it every night. We know, don't we? But we never bring back the proof. We never document the news of discovery. We forget. All our waking lives or almost, all we do is forget. We take the flotsam of dreams we find washed up on our waking awareness for the whole of the other world, a weirdness we barely try to explain except as more weirdness within the world we already know so well. At best we turn it over as evidence. What is this? Where did this disjointed monstrosity half washed away and rotting quickly in the morning sun come from?
     Past the dreaming and the nonsense, the theories, the electrodes, the fluorescing images, and the bon mots about our nightly lunacies, who dares to set sail into a total darkness? Who would want to try to go there to where that must be but where there may be nothing?