Escher

I have an idea for a short story, which takes the form of an Escher painting. 

Alright, how goes it?

In the 1930’s an English archaeologist is working on an excavation site in Egypt. They discover a hidden tomb and force it open. The tomb hides invaluable treasures. When he is alone in the treasure chamber, a falcon statue starts speaking to him, without moving head. The falcon tells him that the tomb is protected a spirit, and that he is to be subjected to a curse for breaking the peace. The punishment is that he will start doubting reality. He is spooked, but convinces himself that it must be heat stroke. The following nights, he has feverish dreams that he is very ill, but when he wakes up he feels no pain. One night, he dreams that he wakes up in a hospital bed, surrounded by a team of doctors. 

As we enter the second chapter, the main character is referred to as “the patient”, and not “the egyptologist”. The doctors tell him carefully that he has suffered from a total psychosis, and he has hallucinated vividly for several days. He spends the whole day recuperating in his hospital bed, eating food and reading the paper. The year is 1931, in England. As he falls asleep, he dreams that he wakes up and is an Egyptologist. 

So it is a dream within a dream?

No, it is not a double abstraction, or a mirror image of a mirror image. When the Patient dreams, he is the Egyptologist, to the fullest and without loss of detail. When the Egyptologist dreams, he is the Patient, also without loss of detail or internal logic.

So the question is: which one is real?

Yes, precisely. The normal way to tell between dream and reality is that reality has an irreducible core of self-consistent logic. After a while, a dream starts contradicting itself in a way that cannot be explained in another way than that the events in the dream world are simply being made up on the fly. When a world has a simple internal logic, then it is a computationally simple task to answer pretty much any question about the world without contradiction. When things are just being made up by a brain without a core idea, the constraint of being self-consistent becomes computationally intractable after a while. 

So the problem for the main character is that both worlds seem to contain a natural explanation for the other world?

That’s exactly the kicker. The Egyptologist’s world explains the Patient’s world as a part of the Ancient Curse. The Patient’s world explains the Egyptologist’s world as a figment of a psychotic mind. 

Now I understand your reference to Escher: it’s like one of the drawings where the white and black fields are the complement of each other, but they are also both motifs by themselves. So how do you make a story out of this?

I figure the conflict should be that he resolves to learn the truth. He reasons that there is another asymmetry: when a dreaming man dies, he simply wakes up. But when a waking man dies, he will never dream again. So if he can commit suicide in the false reality, then he will know which one is true for certain. The risk is of course that he will mistake himself and commit suicide in the true reality. So he must know for certain. He uses the above reasoning about self-consistent reality to figure that if he goes to a place with a lot of things going on, then he will start to notice cracks in of one of the realities. So he resolves to go to central London. The Patient feigns health and convinces his doctors to discharge him. The Egyptologist manages to get a work leave and heads back to England. The Patient arrives in a hotel near Trafalgar Square on, say, the 2nd of July. He spends the day walking around and chatting with people on the street and notices nothing out of the ordinary. He goes to sleep in his hotel room. He wakes up on the 3rd of July as the Egyptologist whose boat arrives in London at lunchtime. The Egyptologist goes to the same hotel and finds a room booked in his own name. 

And he meets the Patient there?

No, the Patient is not in the room. The Egyptologist spends the afternoon likewise walking around and talking to people on the street. His reality is indistinguishable from the Patient’s. He goes to bed and wakes up on the 4th of July, thinking himself now again the Patient. However, he is no longer so sure. Items that the Egyptologist has moved in the hotel room have been moved in the Egyptologist’s reality as well. In a mysterious way, they have become the same man. If you have seen a few Escher paintings, you know that in some of them, the white fields and the black fields to join up together in the bottom of the painting. The worlds that seemed to be complementary to each other do turn out to be part of the same reality in the end.