Time Will Tell - Pt 5

Time will tell

By Evalyn A

Rating: T POV, G. May be archived, just let me know.
Disclaimer: Not making a dime off of this, they belong to Paramount, they don’t belong to me, although finally they’re starting to act as if they did.

A/N: This is part of a continuing series of personal log entries made by T’Pol during her time on Enterprise, starting with season one.

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Part 5

My thoughts are fractured. I find concentration difficult. Sleep eludes me, for although I have meditated, and purged my emotions, the irrational belief persists that it will once again bring dreams. Perhaps if I speak the words aloud, I will find an extra meaning that has escaped me in meditation.

How do other species bear the dreaming? The disorder, the meaningless series of improbable events, the desires that do not reflect reality. What purpose can they serve other than to bring panic and chaos into the mind of the dreamer?

I am told that the process of dreaming actually orders the memories of humans, permits them to file and store information appropriately during the period of sleep so that the next day, trivial events are largely forgotten while important events have been filed into their proper locations for later retrieval.

Vulcans achieve this same process through an ordered, reasoned reworking of life’s events, that is achieved during the meditative state -- where distractions such as emotion are smoothed away and all is seen through a serene and distant eye. How could dreams begin to achieve the same effect? Did we once rely on this same apparently random, subconscious process?

Does that reliance on dreams to achieve what we have since learned to do ourselves through meditation explain the behaviour of the man who has violated my mind and invaded my dreams?
Meditation has at least achieved forgiveness for him. But if the role of meditation, or sleep for that matter, is to ensure events are placed into their proper perspective and filed away in proper compartments, then both have failed me.

And while I may have forgiven Tolaris, time will tell whether I will be able to forgive myself.

Continue to Part 6

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Three people have made comments

Short but succinct, I liked this. A very nice piece of introspection on T'Pol's part. I never would have compared Humans' dreaming with the Vuclan need to meditate. I thought that was very creative and plausible. Thank you, Ali D :~)

Nicely done. T'Pol did say to Archer that "I envy you" regarding the ability to dream. It would be nice to know exactly how and why T'Pol came to that conclusion. I assumed that it was because we humans could experience the sensations of emotions (such as exhiliration that T'Pol felt at the nightclub in San Fransisco) and dream about it without ill effects. Supposedly T'Pol needs to meditate. If Meditation achieves the same as dreaming....why does T'Pol envy our ability to dream?
Your short retro-insight raises these interesting questions again. Great job.

My take on that, Rocky, was that she envied the human ability to be able to dream without experiencing all of the negative feelings that T'Pol did when she dreamed -- for example, what if in the future some circumstance prevents her from meditating and she again dreams? The whole experience was pretty much designed to put her off experiencing emotions and dreams, in my book.