Down in the palace basement, they had the holy-fire machineries partly stoked and lit. The dream machines. They were supposed to do certain highly arcane things to the vision sites in the brain and the auditory processing centers. You would sort of look at them and sort of hear them, and yet it never felt much like anything. Human consciousness couldn’t perceive the deeply preconscious activities of the auditory and visual systems, any more than you consciously felt photons striking your retina, or felt the little bones knocking the cochlear hairs in your ears. The installations weren’t blurry exactly; they simply weren’t exactly there. The experience was soothing, like being underwater. Like twilight sleep in the color factory. To a semi-inaudible theme of music-not-music.