UR SLATE / SECTION VI - 17463.space/ur_slate_sec6.png

UR SLATE / DISTRANS TELEKOMM REPORT - 17463.space/ur.txt

2021.06 OBSERVATION REPORT: I'm not feeling too well as I type this today, so it might end up a bit light in the details. My sleep schedule has become even more irregular since last month's entry, and to add to this fact, I've been having vivid dreams almost every time I lie down. They're immensely unsettling, but also incredibly specific, and they recur enough that I've now got some certainty of what I'm seeing, and I may as well write that down here.

It begins with a sensation that my bed is slowly being tilted forward, vertically, only instead of sliding off, I begin to feel as if I'm frozen in place and gradually melted off of this angled slab. As this process happens, my visual awareness becomes more abstract - I can see above and behind myself - until somehow, I'm completely flat on the floor (though it isn't a solid floor, but just some type of not-bed space) and I'm able to look up at the bed, which is now replaced with the Ur Slate. The Slate seems to look back down upon me, having done this to my body and mind deliberately (one of those moments where you just understand certain things to be utterly true without any rational facts to back them up - the "world state" of my dream, if you will), and in its alien and unfathomable judgement, it begins to fill the room with blackness. Not darkness, but black fluid fullness, a heavy and inky new reality that blots everything out, and feels more like oil. As the room fills up, I realize that I can no longer sense where my body ends and this blackness begins - I am simply a part of the greater volume of whatever this is. I begin to panic, and fear what it may feel like to lay my "body" up against the Slate, but there's no stopping it, and oddly enough, this sensation terminates with a blurry warmth, not unlike being drunk. A lucid moment returns, and the realization that I am no longer breathing terrifies me. I feel suffocated and trapped, and in that moment, at what feels like the last possible second I can sustain this assault before perishing, I begin to glimpse a single point of white light above me in the blackness. I instinctively move myself closer to it, despite having no real sensation of limbs or lungs, and just as I am able to get near enough to it, I can glimpse things moving inside that light, but I'm again plucked from this state and my body returns to me, now floating upon the surface of water. I wipe the oil out of my eyes and look back at the light, which is now a massive building fashioned out of pipelines and girders, with two clay-colored towers jutting up from inside all of the winding lines. I am only able to comprehend what I am looking at, for scale and distance, for a couple seconds, because it is then I am jolted awake, shaking and covered in cold sweat.

I can't help but feel like the obvious must still be stated, that I've been consumed by my work on the Slate, and this is now permeating into every aspect of my waking and sleeping life. I wake up feeling so exhausted, unable to eat very much, and have mostly been getting by on coffee or tea, with the occasional piece of buttered toast. I know what I'm doing to myself isn't good, my clothes are already feeling loose and I'm plagued with headaches most of the time. If I wasn't drinking so much coffee and tea, I'd worry about dehydration too. I know I should be working on the Slate's texts, but between the constant complaints from the dig-site crew and the brass at Distrans Telekomm, my motivation has become depleted.

I do still want to learn about the Slate, though. Part of me feels like, if I'm going to physically deplete myself studying this, why should I share it with others? I'm already staggering these reports to buy myself time and I'm not even conscious that I've been doing it. I just need to get myself grounded and renewed - who knows if I just need time away. That's just it though...every time I think about leaving, I can't. I start to feel flooded with guilt, as if I'm not just abandoning the Slate or my work or my responsibilities, but I'm neglecting my actual self.

What's worse, I can't stop thinking about touching it.