The Translator of Dreams

Dr. Esme Cardew had spent her career reading languages that no living person spoke, and she had taken the job at the Hale Institute because it was, at last, a language that no living person had ever spoken — not a dead tongue but a private one, the idiolect of a single sleeping mind.

They explained the technology to her on the first morning, in the glass conference room above the white sublevel where the machines hummed, and she understood perhaps a third of it and the philosophy of all of it. For nineteen years the magnate Cassius Hale had lain in an irreversible coma in the facility his own fortune had built, and for the last six of those years his estate had been recording his dreams. The recording was not metaphor. The oneirographic array — Dr. Reyes, the institute's director, said the word with the reverence of a priest naming a sacrament — could resolve the neural correlates of dream-imagery into a stream of discrete symbolic tokens, a corpus of glyphs that the sleeping brain generated and recombined according to its own grammar, and which no off-the-shelf algorithm had been able to parse, because the grammar was not a human language at all. It was the grammar of one human being, evolved across nineteen years of solitary unconsciousness, a system of meaning with a vocabulary of one and a readership of none. They had tried machine translation and produced gibberish. They had tried neuroscientists and produced statistics. What they needed, Reyes said, was a philologist — someone who knew how to enter a sealed system of signs with nothing but patience and the assumption that it meant something, and to learn it from the inside the way one learns the language of a vanished civilisation: by living in it until it speaks.

Esme had decoded the funerary script of a kingdom dead three thousand years from four hundred surviving characters. Hale's corpus ran to nineteen years and several hundred thousand tokens. She had said yes before they finished the offer.