Here I am on Day One of the exploration mission. I was shocked to discover that I’ve been kept in hibernation for over two years, a disturbing kind of fact to uncover on waking. I had been warned of course that this ship which drifts through the spaces between dreams – the “Inspiration” – was fickle and unknowable, with an alien mind and mysterious purpose all of its own. I had nodded as if understanding during that training, as if agreeing, but it wasn’t until now that I truly grasped what this meant.
To my surprise, the ship had stirred me from sleep not for some sweeping vista of majesty and complexity, but instead some gentle nebulous cloud of quietly glittering particles that wrapped around the ship in a soft embrace. It was near formless, shapeless. I felt a pang pang of disappointment, but only for a moment; soon the slow pulse of our surroundings relaxed me, and before I knew it I had been staring out into it, content and quietened, for quite some time.
I appreciated then the wonder of this phenomenon and no longer found it in some way inferior to the places I had pictured us visiting. I saw the value, the purpose, of spaces such as this.
And so with a smile I had begun the measuring, the recording, capturing the essence of it in our log to preserve it and convey it to others.