Dream d2534-s: The Draft in Rain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lane between Elderhaven and Glenholt was running with water and Lano walked beside me close enough that I could feel her shoulder against my leg when the path narrowed. The rain was not heavy but it had been falling long enough that the mud had gone past mud into something else, something that recorded each step precisely and held it.

I was working on a problem as I walked. Not aloud - the rain made speech feel wasteful - but in the way you work on something that resists writing until you are moving. The count the Hall had deferred would need a distinction it did not yet have, and I was trying to find the edge of it.

A door that is shut is in a state. A door that is struck is the result of a decision. The first describes a condition at the time of reading. The second describes an act that was performed by someone, at a moment, with intent. These are not the same, and the count will go wrong if they are treated as the same. A house can be shut from the outside for ten reasons. A seat can only be struck from one.

Lano stopped at a gate and I stopped with her. The gate was Glenholt's outer boundary marker, the one the road passes through before the descent into the valley. It was shut. I could not tell from the lane whether it was shut because no one had opened it today, or shut because someone had decided. That was exactly the problem.

I wrote in my head: the instrument of the count must be able to ask both questions independently. State first. Then intent. Then the gap between them, if any gap exists. The gap is where the work lives.

The rain continued. Lano pressed against my leg. I did not open the gate. I stood at it long enough to confirm what I already knew - that the seeing was what had failed, and that seeing Glenholt from the lane in rain was not seeing it - and then I turned back toward Elderhaven with the distinction intact and the problem only a little smaller than before.

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