The Science Behind "Who"
The big reason I love Dreamland and why I keep trying to find a way to make it sellable is because of the layers. In another chapter, Ikari mentions that everything in Dreamland is simple, yet complicated.
Who was the first concept I came up when I first started telling these stories to my kids. It was how I explained how I could find them. It didn’t always work, but I can typically find people by following a pull inside me.
Ms. Think asked me what that was when she was four, I think. Now that I’m thinking about this, this is probably the reason it’s so simple yet complicated. Most of these concepts were given to a small child.
Intuition
Initially, I thought this ability was pure intuition. The more I researched it, the more I realized that the two halves of the brain work pretty seamlessly together, at least for me. I can’t create well unless I know how things work. I can’t figure out how things work if I’m not allowed to be creative about it.
I read papers about how intuition rises when stress levels increase.
That made sense. Because when my kids were playing hide and seek with me in Walmart, I couldn’t find them. They were safe. I was safe. Everything was fine.
But as soon as things started to get dangerous, my “spidey senses” would kick in and it was like a magnet. I knew right where my kids were.
Right Brain Feeding The Left
My mother poo-pooed the idea that I could find my kids when they were trouble. Well, she poo-pooed a lot of things. She would go out of her way to prove that I couldn’t.
But then I discovered that even without a great deal of danger being involved, I was still able to find them. Sometimes.
My theory is that I was taking the information I knew about my kids -
Where would they be at this time?
Had they complained about being hungry?
Had their personalities started melting?
Were they bored?
Had they been dancing before they left?
- and applying that using deductive reasoning to determine a logical guess. In essence, using grey matter to figure out where they most likely were.
It became a little more complicated when I also had to factor in things like:
What was the reason for my mother trying to hide the kids?
Had she yelled at me for being "smarter” than she was?
What was her mood like? Was it an up day or a down day?
Effect of Stress On Intuition
One of the things that was made clear through most of the research was that when the stress rose, intuition did as well.
That’s something I can relate to. When my mother was getting abusive, I could read the room for days. I could read hairs on dogs. My alertness was ultra high. I was aware of shifts in tone, vocal intonation, word choice, brain function, smell, facial expressions. I could read micro expressions, a skill I’ve since lost. Not entirely, but I’m not nearly as good at it as I was.
The Birth Of Who
There were a lot of papers and conversations had as I developed the Dreamlander ability to travel following a Who, and how the Who can change.
Also, the people who can travel via Who effortlessly are those who are under stress. Dream hunters, for instance, were basically tormented as children. Dream runners are literally being flayed each time they stop moving. Dream skinners were broken while very young.
And Harley was given a chance she should never have taken. She was born a cleaner with the gift of a mechanic. She was never supposed to have been given the mechanic apprenticeship, but she was, and she’s about to lose it all. So, watch her ability to travel by Who as the story progresses. It will not be the same every time.
And why?
Because traveling by Who is an intuitive function, and intuition doesn’t perform the same every time.
