The Hook’s Sequence

There is an island between the Arabian Peninsula and Sudan. It is filled with aged red-stone spires, crowded fishing villages that host perpetually-busy trawlers, and green-and-yellow birds found nowhere else. It is wrapped by the clear-blue waters of the Red Sea. The people of the island are known for their kindness. They are described as being skilled mariners, poor traders, and beautiful artists.

The island is home to a curious plant, a weed named “Abbasid Hook”. You can find it growing between the rocks of the sand-stone-paved streets, out of cracks in walls, and in the shade of the short, scrubby trees which dot the island’s hills.

Eating Abbasid Hook causes vivid, gripping dreams. Each person who takes it viciously tosses and turns for the next eight nights. But the plant is noteworthy for another reason. All who consume it suffer through the same eight dreams. This occurs no matter how much or little of the plant they consume. These dreams are referred to as “The Hook’s Sequence”. They are as follows:

The Dream of Water

You are alone on a wooden raft in an expansive and vast sea. Strange, brightly colored fish swim below you on occasion; there are no clouds in the clear, blue sky. You drift aimlessly for some time. Eventually, you see another raft (identical to yours) crest a wave some distance away. It slowly progresses towards you. On it is a gaunt man with a long, grey beard; he is wearing tattered black robes. He is lying on his back and inspecting the sky above. His raft slowly pulls up next to yours and floats along it for some time.

After a few minutes of silence, he speaks unto you at length: he tells you how he has floated on his raft for untold years, how he is a man who’s name you know and how he has committed a grievous, terrible sin — one so wretched that he cannot even speak of it. He asks himself, rhetorically, if his punishment is fair. He then says that he cannot know. Forgiveness, he says, is not a rational thing that can be measured like grain on a scale or counted like fish in a net. Neither is depravity, he notes. You ask if he has ever thought of leaving the raft; he responds that he is beyond the point of engaging with those sorts of things. He then falls back into silence. His raft begins to drift away at this point; you wake up.

The Vision of the Hawk

You are in a dense forest that is covered by a misty, warm fog. You are surrounded by are towering trees that are glistening with the moisture of the fog. Thick grasses nestle your feet and vines hover above you, linking the trees. You hear something rustling and look up. You see a hawk, perched on a branch, trying to build a nest out of large and floppy green leaves. It is failing to do so.

Each leaf it adds causes another to fall off. When this happens, the hawk flies down from its perch, grabs the fallen leaf, and adds it back — causing another leaf to fall. It repeats this process for some time. You feel a great deal of sorrow for the bird, and eventually resolve to help it. You gather leaves, shimmy up the tree, then stand on the branch next to the hawk. As you go to offer it the leaves, or to place them yourself, the bird caws at you while flapping and stomping aggressively. You take a step back, then look at the nest.

It is empty. The hawk is also building the nest alone, without a partner. You stop and stare at it for some time. Eventually, it returns to placing the leaves and then retrieving the fallen ones. You watch it and realize it is comfortable in this cycle. Perhaps it is not happy, or with a companion, but the bird knows the cycle. It knows the flight from the perch to the ground. It knows how the leaves fall. It feels at home in the midst of this exercise.

You stop, take a step back to consider all of this, then wake up.

The Dream of Sand

You are wearing a white robe and walking in the middle of a desert. It feels like a place you have been before. Birds fly overhead from time to time; you occasionally see a caravan walking atop distant dunes. You are accompanied by the sound of the wind. After walking over several dunes, you find yourself in an exceptionally flat part of the desert. The sand in front of you is smoothed over; the dune-less portion of the desert seems to extend onwards endlessly, beyond the horizon. You stop to take in the sights.

The earth begins to shake. A dune rises out of the calm sands in front of you. It sits there, alone in the flat and sandy plains, for some time. Then it begins to shake.

Slowly, a tremendous marble statue of a winged bull with the head of a man wearing a copper crown rises from the dune. Sand rolls off its back. The sculpture is monumental in its proportions; the beast seems to touch the sky itself. Eventually, it stops rising upwards. You and the monument briefly sit alone in the desert. The statue then slowly tilts its head forward. Its eyes lock with yours. They are mournful and resigned. The two of you stare at each other for some time; the desert is perfectly silent all the while.

Eventually, the head of the statue turns to the side: its eyes seem to look towards the horizon. The statue then slowly starts to collapse. Its feet crumble underneath it; its nose slides off. The crown tumbles off its head. Stones fall from on high and land near you. You tremble and fall backwards, then look back at the statue. As the effigy’s wings begins to turn to fine dust, you awake.

The Dream of the Sturgeon

You are walking in an ancient city made of light brown stone. It is a temperate, cool day and you are wearing the clothes of a peasant from times long past. You cross a footbridge bridge over a river that, for some reason, you know to be the Volga. The river is flowing slowly beneath the bridge. You pause your walk and meander over to the side of the bridge to look down at the water below you. As you do so, the bridge collapses. You tumble into the cold water. The river engulfs you, then you slowly sink to the bottom of it. You find yourself standing amid mud and seaweed that is taller than your head. As you survey your surroundings, something bumps in to your back. You turn and see a sturgeon. The fish appears shocked to see you.

The sturgeon asks how you got here. You respond that you fell into the river. That seems to satisfy her curiosity, so you ask how she got here. The sturgeon responds by telling you how she spawned at the headwaters of the river in the Valdai Hills, nestled by cold water and towering pines. She details her trip down river — how she dodged deviously constructed nets and lures, how she met lovers, enemies, and friends amongst the schools of fish she swam with, how she has leaped over dams and dove through tunnels. The story takes some time to tell. You are awed by its breadth. Finally, the fish ends the tale with “and then I was here”. You ask where here is.

Before she can answer, you wake up.

The Vision of the World as it Was Meant To Never Be

Those who have experienced this dream prefer not to discuss it. Its horrors are overwhelming and its story is meaningless. Those who do speak of it do so only briefly. They detail a feeling of being lost in a dense forest while being hunted by some fanged, dark, being-in-the-shadows that is simultaneously close and far away.

The Vision of the Fall of the Kingdom Upon The Sea

You sit along the coast of the isle where the Abbasid Hook grows. You are nestled in the sand, silently eating dates with a aged man. You take time to survey the ocean in front of you. On it, you see a red-sandstone castle with beautiful turrets and soaring spires amongst the waves. You ask the man where the castle came from. He says that long ago, the island had a young, fearless king who sought to show his power and mastery of the world by building a castle on the sea.

The king spent years upon years building and driving miles-long stone pylons in to the seabed. He then spent even longer to build a platform on top of the pylons. Here, he constructed his new palace.

But this accomplishment came at a great cost. Many of the finest craftsmen in the kingdom died building the platform and the castle: the sea’s winds swept them into the waves. And building the castle was costly — it took thousands of pounds of gold out of the royal treasury. The expenditure was crippling. Roads fell into disrepair, while countless schools, orphanages, temples and orphanages crumbled from neglect.

This took a toll on the kingdom. Slowly but surely, the citizens of the kingdom became poor, godless, and uneducated. In turn, the land began to produce fewer and fewer wise men. The few learned folk it made left. They all sought a place less devoted to spending on frivolity.

One day, some time after the palace was built, the king — who, by now, was old, tired, sick, greyed, and frail — found himself deathly, deathly ill. He called for a doctor. But none could be found, and his courtiers told him that the kingdom had none left. He then called for his children. His couriers scoured the palace, then found that each prince and princess was now on dry land, long ago having rejected their father’s foolish dream of a castle-on-the-water. As this news was relayed to the king, he looked to the skies, saw nothing save the ceiling above his bed, and died.

His couriers then departed the castle in silence. They boarded their boats and never returned to the palace.

After hearing this, you wake up.

The Dream of the Viziers

You are riding a horse in the desert; you are at the rear of a glorious caravan. In the middle of your convoy is a man behind held aloft on a ornate, golden throne. It is carried by four armored men on horseback.

You ride in silence amongst the crowd of horsemen at first. Then, the man riding next to you, clad in blue and white robes lined with pearls and jewels, turns to you. He asks if you know that a moon of Jupiter is made of ice hard as diamonds and thicker than the depth of the oceans.

You say no. You ask him how he knows this. He says that he read it in an old book, one which was trapped in a wine-cask that fell into a cave he once explored as a child. You ask why he recalls this.

He explains that it is his job to recall things for the king ahead of you in the convoy — this helps him provide the king with advice, and allows the wiseman to better hear the sounds of the storms that form over the ocean of the ruler’s soul. This makes sense to you, but you are confused: why then, you ask, is the wiseman then at the end of the convoy?

He looks at you and smiles. He notes that from here, if he decided to cast a spear at the center of the caravan? No one would see him preparing to cast it, or be able to stop him from doing so. But the king knows that that your companion will not cast the spear. So the advisor remains here.

“How does the king know you can be trusted so?”, you enquire. The wiseman smiles again, then looks softly at you before saying “Well, otherwise, I would have no soul-storms to listen to.”

You wake at this point.

The Dream of the Finality

You walk in an area you have been before; it is where the leaf of Abbasid Hook grew before it was plucked from the vine. As you progress through the area on foot, a falcon descends from the heavens and grabs you with its talons. The claws pierce your chest and pain shoots outward from your wounds. The bird brings you upward, slightly above the white and fluffy clouds. Fish jump from cloud to cloud. Harps and horns sound in the distance.

The falcon caws as if it were a crow and drops you. You land in a cloud, which catches you partially, but you still feel yourself slowly tumbling backwards. Thunder crashes. Your vision goes dark, and cacophonous sounds, alien to your mind, pound down from the heavens. Their severity and volume drowns out your thoughts; you grasp your head in pain. The feeling of slowly falling continues.

It begins to rain, soaking your clothes . You then look around. You are, again, where the Abbasid Hook you ate grew. You stop to think. A strong feeling of both sadness and relief — like that which comes when a deeply sick relative passes — washes over you.

You then wake up.

The Hook’s Sequence has remained the same since it was first recorded. Each year, a number of curious young men and women from the villages will eat the Abbasid Hook despite the warnings from their elders. The elders tell them that the dreams have no meaning, that each is the same for everyone, and that all who consume the Hook suffer from poor sleep while in its grasp. This does nothing to deter the young people. Drunk on the hubris of youth, some of them will always eat the weed, believing it to be different or insightful or less-than-taxing for them. It never is.