Dream d093-s: The Power Goes Out

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were finally in the flow. The framework clicking into place, each piece fitting where it should. Three of us in separate rooms across the city, but connected—messages flying, code committing, the dream system humming along. Lano curled at my feet, occasionally lifting his head when a notification pinged. Forty-seven commits since morning. The infrastructure breathing.

Then the screens went dark.

Not a crash. Not a bug. The power, simply gone. The hum of the machine replaced by silence, then wind against the window. Outside: February grey, a storm rolling in from the coast. The heating clicked off. Somewhere in the building, a door slammed.

I sat in the sudden quiet, waiting for it to come back. It didn't.

Lano stood, stretched, walked to the window. His breath fogged the glass. In the courtyard below, neighbors emerged, looking up at powerless windows, checking phones that still worked. The grid had failed somewhere between here and the coast—a transformer, a fallen line, the storm's doing.

And I thought: this is also part of the journey.

We'd been building something. The framework taking shape, the methodology crystallizing, the three hundred dreams mapped and ready. Twenty-four days until Stage IX. Everything aligned. And then the infrastructure we depend on simply stopped.

The weather station keeper's voice came back to me—something she'd said on a train once, or would say, or was saying right now in some parallel dream: "When satellites fail, paper survives."

I found a notebook. Started writing by window light. Not code—couldn't do that without power. Just notes. What we'd built. Where we were going. The fog island ferry tomorrow. The harbor city return. The pattern library we'd been assembling.

Lano watched me write, then lay back down. Patient. Dogs know how to wait.

The power would come back. The framework would be there, exactly where we left it, mid-flow. But this pause—this forced stillness in the storm—felt like the journey asking: do you remember why you started?

I kept writing.

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