Oneiric Scroll

The Oneiric Scroll is the collective designation for a body of pliant recording media — principally prepared dream-vellum and laminated reed-paper — on which the Dream Registry commits interim findings of oneiric classification before their transfer to permanent codices. An Oneiric Scroll is distinguished from the Unfurling Scroll by its function rather than its manufacture: the Unfurling Scroll is a single instrument of progressive disclosure, whereas an Oneiric Scroll is any scroll of the Registry's working series, numbered by batch and annotated in Oneiric Blue wherever it records a deposit of Oneiric Ores. The distinction is frequently lost on visiting scholars, who are asked to state which series they mean before they are issued a reading desk.

As of the most recent collation, the working series comprises 4,112 scrolls, of which 391 are held as palimpsests and may not be unrolled in a room containing an active Oneiric Hum reading.

Manufacture and marking

Oneiric Scrolls are produced at the vellum works on Floor 218, where reed is pulped, pressed to a nominal thickness of 0.4 mm, and cured for eleven days in the low-humidity galleries adjoining the north stairwell. Curing is the point at which most defects enter the record. A scroll cured in a gallery where an Oneiric Ore deposit lies within four floors will take up a faint resonance in the substrate, and every subsequent classification entered upon it will read, to a trained auditor, as though it had been made by someone slightly asleep.

Per Concordance 44, Annex 2, every scroll must be marked at the head with its batch number, the sigil under which its first entry falls in the Oneiric Decimal System, and the name of the clerk who cured it. The last requirement was added after the Winter of the Wet Batch, when 60 scrolls cured during an unseasonable damp were found to have transferred their entries onto neighbouring scrolls in the press. The clerk responsible, Aldemar Voss, declined to sign the annex on the grounds that naming a scroll's curer encouraged the curer to feel responsible for what was later written on it. His objection is recorded in the annex's minority note and has never been withdrawn.

Relation to the Oneiric Register

The Oneiric Scroll is an interim medium. Entries are made in soft graphite, revised in ink only after a second reading, and transferred to the Oneiric Register once the classification has survived one full cycle of the Registry's auditors. The purpose of the scroll is to keep the Register clean: where a classification is likely to be disputed, or where the content recorded under a given sigil may intersect with content recorded under another — the condition that produces Oneiric Feedback — the Registry prefers that the mistake be made on vellum, which can be scraped, rather than in the Register, which cannot.

"No finding shall be entered in the Register until it has lain upon the scroll for the space of one audit, nor shall any scroll be scraped before its graphite is read aloud to a witness."

— Concordance 19, clause 7

Scraping is consequently a formal act, requiring a witness and a notation. The notation is made in the margin and is itself read aloud at the next audit, so that a heavily scraped scroll carries a marginal chorus of corrections running the length of its reverse. The practice is defended by the Registry on the ground that the corrections are the most reliable part of the record.

Dispute: the status of the palimpsests

The 391 palimpsest scrolls are the subject of a disagreement between the Registry and the Office of Substrate Integrity that has run, in one form or another, since the recension of Concordance 44. The Registry holds that a scraped scroll retains the residue of its earlier entries in the substrate and may therefore be used to reconstruct withdrawn classifications; the Office holds that a scraped scroll is a new scroll and that to read the residue is to read a document that no longer exists. Concordance 61, clause 3, supports the Office. Concordance 61, Annex 5, appended eleven years later, supports the Registry. Both are in force.

The practical consequence is that the palimpsests are stored in a room to which both offices hold a key, and that neither office will permit the other's clerks to unroll them alone.

Incidents

In the winter of the third audit of the present cycle, a junior clerk, Miren Ostrand, unrolled a batch-7 palimpsest in a room adjoining an active deposit and recorded hearing a voice reading back her own entry in her own cadence, one word behind her. The scroll was removed to the sealed stacks and the incident entered under Oneiric Resonances. It was later reclassified as an Oneiric Fugue on the ground that the reading answered itself rather than merely repeating, and the reclassification is the standard citation for the distinction between the two phenomena.

A separate and unresolved matter is the Affair of the Misbound Scroll, in which a scroll from batch 12 was found to have been bound into the wrong cover and to have recorded, for some forty years, classifications belonging to a subject the Registry has never been able to identify. The scroll has been returned to its correct cover. The classifications have not been removed.

Inventory of the working series

The series is presently distributed as follows, and a reader wishing to consult a scroll should quote both its batch and its head sigil, not its cover number, which is unreliable.

• Batches 1–9: active, in daily use at the reading desks.
• Batches 10–14: closed, pending the resolution of the misbinding.
• Batches 15–22: palimpsest, sealed stacks, two keys.
• Batches 23 and following: reserved for classifications that cannot yet be given a sigil.

The reserved batches are the largest and the least used. A scroll may not be opened on the anniversary of its curing, a rule introduced after the Winter of the Wet Batch and observed without exception.