Word Eaters Dream

Last night I dreamt that there were creatures; entities that dwelt at the edge of our reality watching us. They fundamentally despised humanity’s drive to name and define things, because as we do, we “fix” aspects of reality. Something akin to the observer effect? Whatever the case, this process had been hedging them out of primal chaos they preferred and they deeply resented it. So they waited until a human word or concept became obscure, underused or otherwise “weak”, then they would devour it, deconstructing it. Occasionally, a person would have some lingering sense that something had been lost, a word-shaped hole in their mind that they could not fill, no matter how hard they tried.

This “war”, which humans hardly realized was being fought, had been waged for ages, and obviously the humans were winning. Each time the creatures had come close, humans responded almost instinctively with some explosive leap in their “immune system”… oral tradition, folklore, song, rock art, pictographs, writing, and so forth. The “babel event” was actually a tremendous turning point, creating new “strains” making the creature’s attacks all the harder.