During my ordeal — I think it was in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but since the days all kind of blurred together, I can't be entirely certain — I had the following dream. Amazingly, it has stayed vivid in my mind, so I set it down here.

All is darkness. I am in a large space, though I cannot see its extents. I feel the presence of others: hundreds, thousands, perhaps more; I cannot tell.

There is a glimmering in the air. Diaphanous swirls of glowing mist encircle a large space, though they shed no illumination. There are golden flashes within the white mist. Some time later, I see a flat, wide pedestal on the ground. It is made of a black rock, resting on a patch of ground upon which once stood a building. I don't know how I know this, nor what building it was, but I know it as firmly as I know that beyond the darkness, those others whose presence I felt sit surrounding the stone, as if seated in an amphitheatre. They take no notice of me; I did not bring them there, and they are not here to see me.

We perceive a voice. It is not a physical voice, and it uses no words; rather, it is merely our perception, our interpretation of stimuli which we have no physical apparatus to receive in its natural form. We interpret it as a voice, and at the same time it is a vibration flowing around and through us.

You are unsatisfactory, it tells us. Your world had the potential for greatness, yet you squander it.

I realize that the multitude hidden in the dark around me are the world leaders, the scientists, the philosophers. I am not seated among them; I observe from the floor, bearing both witness and culpability along with the rest of my race. A glowing point hovers above the dais. As the Voice continues to resonate through the (chamber? open space?), arrow-headed lines radiate from it in all directions.

You lack Unity. You struggle in different directions, moving always apart, never together. (I/We) (the Voice used a pronoun meaning both, and neither) shall tear down your world and build it anew. You shall have a single reference, a single standard by which all things are measured.

What about the Metric system? I thought, but even as I thought it, I knew that America — the self-proclaimed "greatest nation" — eschewed that, for the most part, in favor of an ancient mish-mash of measurements. Yet as the Voice went on, it became clear that it was speaking of more than scales and rulers.

Distance, weight, time, volume, ideology political and religious: you cannot agree on anything, and therefore (I/We) will mold you into One.

The swirls of mist solidified, into a helix a mile wide, reaching upwards into infinity. It was made of brick and masonry, steel and glass, twisted fragments from millions of buildings torn out of hundreds of cultures: here the corner of a German apartment, there a Russian minaret, there a grass hut. The light brightened, barely illuminating the faces beyond the helix: not seated, but simply hanging in the air. One by one, the faces brightened into a green haze, and disappeared; a glowing crystalline shape above the dais received each one, as the leaders and thinkers of humanity were fused into a single organism.

Faster and faster they disappeared and were merged into the great pulsating white thing above the dais, which now exuded tendrils of mist like ectoplasmic tentacles. Then they were gone, and I was caught up with the rest of humanity. My sight faded as a green glow washed everything out, and I felt my head separated into a billion slices, like the scan-lines of some great computer monitor, but instead of pain I felt only the searing cold of space.

I awoke from the dream, stared sightlessly around the dark room, and felt my head. I was soaked in sweat — but the swellings under my jaw, and in my right cheek, were as cold as ice.