Oneirologic Absorption

Oneirologic Absorption is the branch of Absorption concerned with the capture, binding, and subsequent dissipation of dream-states — the residue of sleeping cognition — into stable archival media. It is distinguished from ordinary documentary conservation by the fact that its subject matter was never, strictly speaking, produced: a dream is not recorded when it is had, and the oneirologic archivist therefore works with a material that must first be coaxed into existing and then prevented from unexisting. The discipline is old, thinly staffed, and unusually litigious even by the standards of the Tower.

The field's authority derives from Third Concordance, Annex 9, which assigns "all unclaimed dreamings occurring above the two-hundredth landing and below the eleven-hundredth" to the standing Oneirologic Remit. The Remit has never been audited. Its clerks maintain that the assignment is territorial and that a dream occurring on an unnumbered stair between landings is thereby unassignable, a position disputed at length in the marginalia of Floor 464.

Principle and mechanism

Oneirologic Absorption proceeds by the introduction of a receptive substrate into proximity with a sleeping subject, most commonly through Condensation Folios, which take up dream-matter much as unsealed paper takes up moisture. The substrate is left in place for a full night and a second morning. What condenses upon it is not the dream itself but the dream's vellum — the shed outermost layer, which retains shape and sequence but carries no conviction. This is considered a feature: an archival dream that carried conviction would be a liability, and the Remit has ruled twice that it would also be unreadable.

The rate of uptake is governed by procedures borrowed almost unchanged from the White Noise Absorption Chain, which Eloise of the Unspooled Chain codified and which the Remit was permitted to consult "for vocabulary only" under a strained reading of the Third Concordance's sequestration clause. That the borrowing was never regularised remains a grievance of the Remit's senior clerk, Perpetua Vane, who has petitioned on eleven occasions for a formal instrument and received on eleven occasions a receipt.

Substrates and resistances

Not every medium accepts a dream. The Remit grades substrates by an uptake value known as the somnia coefficient, expressed in parts per thousand. Lament Marble, for reasons of its own, refuses nearly all oneirologic uptake, while the softer folios take it greedily and must be restrained. The Remit's standing table lists the principal materials in descending order of receptivity:

• Cotton-rag folio, unsealed — 812
• Vellum of second cut — 604
• Layered slate, thin — 390
• Lament Marble — 0

Lament Marble's refusal is not passive. Slabs left overnight in the sleep-halls have been found in the morning moved slightly, which the Remit attributes to thermal settlement and the night staff do not.

The sleep-halls

Absorption is conducted in the sleep-halls of Floor 301, a designated dissipation node whose tenancy is shared between the Remit and the White Noise Absorption Chain. The sharing is uneasy. The Chain's apparatus requires a low and continuous hum; the Remit requires silence and, since the winter of the year the halls were renumbered, a prohibition on the ringing of any bell between the hours of Compline and Prime. The two requirements were reconciled in Third Concordance, Annex 9, clause 4, which permits the Chain's generators to run provided they are padded with the discarded bindings of the folios already read out. The Remit's own reading of that clause is that the padding must be replaced each quarter; the Chain's reading is that it must not.

"Where two uses occupy a single node, the quieter shall prevail, and its quiet shall be furnished by the other."

— Third Concordance, Annex 9, clause 4

Dispute: the counting of a dream

The central scholarly disagreement in the field concerns whether a single dream may be absorbed more than once. The Remit holds that a dream is spent on contact and that a second absorption yields only the impression of the first, which is why its registers count entries rather than dreams. The Bureau of Luminous Equilibrium, whose officers audit the sleep-halls quarterly, holds that a dream is a persistent condition and may be drawn from repeatedly until it thins, and has back-dated three of the Remit's registers accordingly. The dispute has not been resolved. It has instead been scheduled: a joint recension was ordered in the year of the second renumbering and has been in preparation since, its drafters having disagreed first about the title page and then about whether a title page was required.

A parallel argument attaches the field to the work of Hieronymous Selvage, whose account of active digestion — that a thing absorbed is not destroyed but set to work — has been read by one party as a description of Oneirologic Absorption and by the other as its refutation. The Remit's position is that Selvage was speaking of nutrients and that the analogy fails at the point where it becomes useful. This has not stopped either party from citing him.

Hazards and standing orders

Absorbed dreams retain a weak tendency to re-enter the halls from which they were taken, particularly in the third and fourth hours after matins, and particularly in the case of dreams about the Tower itself. The Remit's counter-measures are lay, not procedural: a Counter-Narrative Serum is applied to the folio margin before shelving, and no folio is shelved facing the sleeper. Sleepers are woken in the order they fell asleep. The halls are swept at midday and not before.

Between the years of the first and second renumberings the Remit recorded fourteen incidents of re-entry, all in the east gallery, all involving the same sleeping clerk, whose name has been struck from the incident register at her own request. The register is otherwise complete.