Who Shakes the Hourglass in the web
A cosmic meditation on reflection, the dream‑web, and the question of who truly shakes the hourglass.
In the dark as you tumble through the void, where do you go in your dreams? you fall not through emptiness, but through reflections of reflections, each dream a pearl in the web showing you a thousand versions of yourself all dreaming you back.
A grain of sand falling through time, the hourglass shaken by the hand, the hysteria begins, but in the web, every grain reflects every other, each fall echoing across the void suspended by silver thread, a tremor felt by all the selves you have ever been.
You place your faith in the hand of the one being to whom you give your control, to not shake too hard, you wince through your contorted face, but whose hand is it? The demiurge? Or another reflection of you, shaking the glass from a different node in the web?
Who shakes your hourglass, the demiurge, guided by its ignorance and delusion, or the consciousness that sees that the shaker and the shaken are mirrors in the same infinite constellation of cosmic web?
Do you land in your web, the unpolished pearl, the limescale of life eroding your shine, or do you remember that every pearl reflects every other, and your dullness is only the shadow of a forgotten brilliance shining elsewhere in the web?
In your dream as you fill the void with the replay and rerun of the day, is there anything there to learn, or are you simply polishing the same reflection while a thousand others shimmer with truths you haven’t touched yet?
Do you close your eyes and drift through the void between the seconds that tick tock your sleep awake, those hidden chambers where the pearls whisper to each other, exchanging light faster than time can measure?
The emptiness within the time measured by the seconds you create to measure your place in this world stretches as you reach to scrub the screen through which you see the web, but the screen is another pearl, and the one who scrubs is reflected in it, and the one who watches the scrubbing is reflected in that reflection, and so on, forever.
Contained within the billion pearls, suspended in their space, you measure your shine and compare your worth, no ripple flows, until one smile, one laugh, sends a tremor through the entire net, illuminating the chord between you and me.
Who shakes your hourglass is up to you, the demiurge or consciousness, the blind and the ignorant or the one that sees through the game of the dream you contain yourself within, but in the web we call reality, even the demiurge is just another reflection that forgot it was a reflection.
Hapless abandon shapes your day, you bump into life and blame the space within it, but the space is you, and the bump is you, and the one who blames is another you watching from another pearl.
You smile and float and claim you created the day, you did, because every pearl creates the whole web from its own point of view.
Where is the balance that fills the void? Equanimity through struggle, there will always be opposites to everything, but the middle ground in the dream is the centre of the net, the still point where all reflections meet, the place where the Hollow waits and sees the whole web at once. The illusion, the hologram, the dream, its all you and yours and me and mine and all at the same time.
