CERN Zoo

I first misread it as CERN 200 but I soon realised this was the city-centre zoo I had once mentioned in a different work. It was an area eventually with many potentially  empty cages, as well as one enormous enclosure that seemed to be some sort of stable, now deliberately uncovered. By simply entering this zoo zone as a whole, meanwhile, you were allowed to differentiate, so to speak, between dream and reality with certainty. It did not prevent you sleeping as well as dreaming within its precinct, but it definitely gave you the knowledge of exactly when you were dreaming, indeed a psychologically healthy knowledge, even when dreaming of the feral animals that once populated the zoo’s cages, and its once moving model of the Collider within the large  enclosure as part of some makeshift science block created from an erstwhile stable. Today, then, when you dream within the zoo, you recognise — and fully deal with — any miscellaneous personal dreams as well as the involuntarily shared dreams with others of your ilk. So, to further summarise, dreaming was not banned in this derelict zoo, but you simply knew you were either dreaming or awake in it, dreaming of the zoo’s past or of its eerie present, and this was quite different from the areas around the zoo, to which you returned at night, when the prevailing dream-sickness would return to you, one symptom of which sickness was that you did not know whether you were dreaming, or not!  This being an insidious mix of waking and sleeping with sickly visions, a state of life’s instability, dreams and nightmares that seemed just as real as the still busy city around you seemed utterly real wherein you held your appointed backstreet billet. You may ask why you were not allowed to stay within the zoo grounds permanently and the answer was you had to take it in turns to optimise advantage of its sleeping facilities within the cages as supine figures of curiosity. We all loved to go and see and poke fingers into the cages to touch you as you slept. But there was room for only a couple of hundred of you at any one time from the vast city outside, to take turns to become this finite number in this way. These prodding and prying spectators themselves were simply ghosts, death being the only way that the zoo’s turnstiles could be cheated into turning for unofficial visitors such as us, inward as well as out. I  was one such unofficial spectator along with some others forced, piecemeal, to sleep when night unexpectedly overtook us, indeed to sleep within the open enclosure described above,  if ghosts can actually ‘sleep’ at all, while our spinning could not stop, and our molecules could not divide or coalesce. The God-particle, you see, was born Instable.

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My 200 fiction miniatures of which above is today’s miniature: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/08/31/fiction-miniatures/

And also see first comment below!