Somnus-Ipse Hall: The Dreamer’s Final Waking
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Somnus-Ipse Hall was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry textiles, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining sleep/dream with self/the subject, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of identity, now embodying its own absolute termination of self-awareness. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled introspection, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated sensory deprivation pods, climate-controlled sleep cells, and meticulously designed light-blocking systems intended to eliminate all external input that might corrupt the inner experience.
The final inhabitant was Oneiro-Theorist Doctor Ego Mundus, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master philosopher and consciousness theorist of the late 19th century. Doctor Mundus’s profession was the study of dreams, self-perception, and the stability of the subjective mind, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent self. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero Self’—a single, perfect, flawless state of being that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known psychological principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of identity, free of all memory, emotion, or subjective experience. After realizing that the very act of observing the self created a dualism (observer and observed), shattering his faith in a singular, pure identity, he retreated to the manor. He dedicated his final years to resolving this single, terrifying goal, believing that the only way to achieve the Zero Self was to understand the ultimate absence of all consciousness. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of inconsistency, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of subjective finality.
The Subjectivity Chamber
Doctor Mundus’s mania culminated in the Subjectivity Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not dreaming, but deconstructing the act of being aware itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no subjective residue. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex equations concerning memory erasure and the theoretical limits of self-dissolution, were found sealed inside a hollow metal pillow frame. He stopped trying to define the perfect person and began trying to define the un-person, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero Self was to eliminate the need for any conscious identity whatsoever. “The memory is a delusion; the feeling is a flaw,” one entry read. “The final self requires the complete surrender of all awareness and all identity. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect stillness.”
The house preserves his clinical rigor structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated humidity controls and white noise generators built into the walls, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-stimulating environment within the manor.
The Final Identity in the Abandoned Victorian House
Oneiro-Theorist Doctor Ego Mundus was last heard working in his chamber, followed by a sudden, intense sound of shattering glass and heavy springs snapping (from the mirror and the dream recorder) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the chamber was cold, the subjectivity room sealed, and the man was gone. No body was found, and the only evidence was the singular, physical alteration to his final philosophical work.
The ultimate chilling clue is the small hole in the silk. It is the final consciousness—the Zero Self achieved, representing the cessation of all subjective identity and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute non-being. The broken mirror and blank silk ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, conscious world. This abandoned Victorian house, with its silent chambers and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master theorist who pursued the ultimate, pure form of existence, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Self, vanishing into the un-aware, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure truth.
