Dream Registry Procedural Manual

The Dream Registry Procedural Manual is the standing instructional text governing the daily conduct of Dream Registry personnel in the receipt, classification, and reconciliation of non-consensual oneiric phenomena. It is issued in loose gatherings rather than bound volumes, so that individual sections may be withdrawn and reissued without disturbing the remainder; the current edition runs to eleven gatherings and is, by the Registry's own count, incomplete in at least three places. The Manual is not a Concordance and carries no adjudicative weight, though in practice a procedural irregularity noted against the Manual is treated by most hearing officers as though it were one.

Copies are held at the primary administrative nexus on Spiral 7 and at the intake desks of the reading galleries. Personnel are reminded that the Manual is a working document and that annotations in the margins are permitted in pencil only. Ink annotations are removed at rebinding and are not returned.

Issue and revision

The Manual was first assembled under the authority of Concordance 44-C, which directed that "the practices of the Registry, being many and unwritten, be set down in order for the correction of newcomers and the comfort of the elderly." The drafting was assigned to a committee of five Dream-Scribes and one supervising Librarian whose name is recorded in the preamble only as "the Scribe of the Second Gallery." No further identification is offered, and none has been found.

Revision proceeds by gathering. A gathering found deficient is recalled to the scriptorium, amended, and reissued with a raised numeral stamped at the foot of the last page; older gatherings are not destroyed but retained in the annexe for reference, which means that the eleven current gatherings exist in a total of thirty-eight recensions. Newcomers are instructed to consult the highest numeral and to disregard the rest. In practice most desk copies contain a mixture, and the Registry has never resolved whether an irregularity judged against a superseded recension constitutes an irregularity at all.

Structure of the text

The Manual proceeds in the order of a report's life. The opening gathering treats ingress and the swearing of the intake clerk; the second and third treat the taking of the wake-trace and the operation of the Oneiroscone; the fourth through sixth treat classification under the Oneiric Taxonomy, including the special provisions for Oneiric Fugues under Class 3(b); the seventh treats the forwarding of scrolls to the Register of Reported Oneiric Phenomena; the eighth and ninth treat Oneiric Cross-Contamination and the standing one-hour reporting rule; the tenth treats the Dream Canals; and the eleventh, which has been reissued four times and is still considered provisional, treats the disposal of residues at the Furnace of Quiet Oblivion.

The Manual's own account of its arrangement is given in its preface:

"The reader will find the sections placed in the order in which the Registry encounters its business, and not in the order in which the business encounters the Registry, which is seldom the same and cannot be provided for."

— Dream Registry Procedural Manual, Preface to the Sixth Recension

Notable provisions

Section 4, paragraph 12, known at the desks as the "quiet clause," requires that a clerk receiving a report of a fading or chromatic wake-trace notify the Registry by the fastest available means and then remain at the desk until relieved. The clause was added after the winter of the long intake, when a single clerk on the fourth gallery received nine hundred and six fading traces in eleven days without relief and thereafter declined to leave the building. The Manual does not name the clerk, but the marginalia of the surviving desk copy do.

Section 7 sets out the form of the interim finding to be committed to an Oneiric Scroll, and is unusual in specifying the weight of the paper, the number of lines to the page, and the permissible methods of correction. Erasure is forbidden. A struck line must be struck once, horizontally, in a single stroke, and the substitution written above it; a line struck twice is read as a line intentionally abandoned and is not transcribed at all. The distinction has produced at least two disputes referred to the Manual of Adjudicative Protocol.

Section 9, on cross-contamination, is the most cited and least obeyed. It requires that any suspected contamination be reported within one waking hour and that the reporting clerk record the hour of waking, the hour of report, and the interval between them "in figures, without rounding." Clerks returning from the Canals frequently cannot establish the hour of waking with the precision the section demands, and the Registry has declined to say what should be done in such cases, on the ground that to say so would encourage them.

Disagreement over the Manual's authority

Concordance 44-C, Annex 2, states plainly that the Manual "is advisory in all its parts and shall not be pleaded in any proceeding." Concordance 61-F, issued nineteen years later and never formally repealing its predecessor, states with equal plainness that "a practice set down in the Manual and departed from without recorded cause shall be received as evidence of neglect." The two have not been reconciled. The Registry's own position, stated in a circular of the seventh recension and repeated in every reissue since, is that the Annex governs proceedings and the Manual governs desks, and that the two need not agree because they are not about the same thing.

The Manual of Structural Documentation takes no position on the dispute but cites the Manual's paper-weight specification as a model of clarity, a compliment the Registry has never acknowledged.

Use at the desks

The Manual is kept open at the desk, face up, and is not to be closed while the desk is staffed. A clerk going off shift leaves the gathering open at the section last consulted, so that the relieving clerk may see where the work had reached; this is the only handover the Manual recognises, and it has been the cause of at least one misclassified fugue. Copying from the Manual into the Register is permitted. Copying from the Register back into the Manual is not, and the reason for the prohibition is not recorded.