Dream d2592-s: Three the Column Would Not Take

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came back over the ridge as the valley filled with dark, the notes folded and tucked under my arm, Lano padding at my heel with her nose near the ground. The new column had been cut at the margin of the page for places neither running nor gone - a box for the middle state, the suspended. We had walked fifty-eight places in eight nights. The column had been useful in thirty-one of them.

The three findings I carried back did not go into it.

The first was a place that had been cold, then lit briefly by someone passing through, then cold again before the counting closed. The column asks for a state. This place had three. I recorded the last and noted I was recording the wrong one.

The second was a place where the building stood and the sign remained and the path to the door was swept, but nothing inside moved. Not cold, not warm. Something else. I left the column blank and underlined the name in the margin.

The third was roads: not Eldergate Town, which is already its own known kind, but a different unfinished - paved over and then dug up and then begun in a different direction. You could not say stopped or ongoing. The column asks stopped or ongoing. I wrote "both, sequentially" next to the entry, which is not a valid entry.

Lano sat down on the ridge path while I stood looking at the three pages. Her ears were up and her tail was low, reading the wind from the valley. Rurik appeared from the scrub at the path marker and washed a paw on the flat stone, taking the last warmth of the day. Neither of them moved until I folded the pages again.

I wrote at the bottom of the night's notes: three places in which the column could not hold the answer as designed. The column was cut for a binary. These three were not binary. This is recorded as a finding.

The lights of Emberford sat behind the eastern hills by the time we came off the ridge. The overgrown ground was behind us, the eighth night done. I held the notes close and we kept walking.

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