Milky white, but not as harsh as the screen on his phone, the man marveled in wonderment. The whiteness must have gone on infinitely if he didn’t reach around to touch the walls that camouflaged together, verifying that he once again found himself in the white room. While the man tried to feel for anything he might have missed on the ground or on the walls, a door swung ajar with an individual popping out.

“Hello!”

“Hey,” the individual responded back.

“Are we drawing again?”

The individual paused before revealing in somewhat cryptic lines, “All of us are different shades of the ideal form. Not surprisingly, we can be mistaken for each other despite each of us possessing our own unique identity.”

The man squinted in confusion. Not only did the individual speak differently, but the aura they exuded expressed a sharper intuition that wasn’t there before. Walking closer and blinking, he realized not only the individual, but he himself looked entirely different from what he remembered. Both of them were completely white from head to toe in the same exact milkiness as that of the room. They had no features or clothes or even distinct dimensionalities and proportions. Standing in the room were two plain, smooth white mannequins you would see in shopping malls-- one the man and the other the individual-- that could not be spotted by the naked eye in the background of white, let alone distinguished from each other.

How could this be?

The man pondered further. If he couldn’t see but only feel the boundaries of the walls and ceilings, how did he even manage to spot the individual to begin with? He could have sworn they looked like normal human beings just moments before. So where did all their features go?

Oblivious of the man’s internal inquiries, the individual walked over to one of the walls and pressed the tip of their fingers against it. Pulling their arm back, an extruded torus emerged.

“A doughnut?” the man asked.

“It can be.”

Unlike the wall, the torus appeared light blue and translucent like aerogel. With a malleability of playdough, the individual telekinetically dilated its size while its thick circumference congruously shrunk down to no larger than the width of a corn snake. It effectively transformed into a hoop.

The individual concentrated with a deadly focus. Two more blobs flew out of the wall. The individual continued to manipulate the blobs until they had molded a sculpture.

“Okey-dokey.”

The man stared. “What am I looking at?”

“Does it not look familiar?”

“It looks like modern art.”

The individual laughed. “Yeah, it does. It’s a physics problem that you gave me from a long time ago.”

“A problem I gave you?”

“The rising hoop problem.”

The man approached the creation. A hoop balanced perfectly on its edge, its height reached up to his chest with two spherical beads resting at the top, both strung through by the hoop.

“Shouldn’t the beads slide down?” the man asked, “Unless there’s friction holding it in place.”

“I’m holding them in place. No friction. But watch what happens as I let them go.”

Right on cue, the two beads slid down from the very top, one on each side. When the beads reached a certain point while sliding down the upper semicircle of the hoop, the hoop did something out of the man’s expectations. It jumped up before toppling over.

The individual erected the hoop upright once more, sliding the beads back to the top. As they let go for a second iteration, the hoop once again jumped up on its own as the two beads slid down due to gravity.

The man smiled in incredulity, some of it coming back to him. “I remember doing this problem a long, long time ago. I almost forgot how strange it initially appeared.”

The individual smiled, too.

The man requested, “Can you make it such that the beads are lighter than the hoop?”

The individual nodded. Instantly, the beads grew much more transparent, indicative of a reduction in density. The individual proceeded to repeat the experiment. This time, the hoop did not leave the ground before falling over.

The man recollected, “We want to find the minimum mass ratio between the beads and the hoop such that there is an upward net force.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you manage to figure it out?” the man hopefully asked.

“Considering the amount of time it has been since we’ve last met, most definitely yes.”

“Didn’t we meet yesterday? We painted together.”

“Not yesterday!” the individual impatiently emphasized, “That wasn’t me. That was someone else. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things we don’t remember once we’ve grown up. It’s really a shame.”

The man couldn’t make sense of the individual’s words and decided not to delve further into their identity. He instead looked around, requesting, “Are you able to spawn in a paper and a pencil? Wait, am I able to do all the stuff you’re doing?”

“In principle, you should.”

“Can you teach me how?”

“No. It should be an innate ability. It’s like breathing. You just do it without thinking.”

“Umm, alright.” The man closed his eyes, attempting to attain a meditative state of nothingness. Yet his thoughts bombarded him like torrents crashing into the side of a rocky cliff. At times, it felt like he spectated himself in the third person. He could see both himself and the individual in the white room, together, waiting there motionlessly. At other times, he could feel the gentle pressure of his eyelids over his pupils. With his mind aloof, he realized there appeared to be strangeness in this whole scenario.

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Despite the room of whiteness bearing its white inhabitants, featureless and smooth, there existed remarkable detail. For example, the wall undeniably presented itself in full white yet the chunks of material that the individual extracted from the wall to mold the hoop and the beads looked light blue, delicate, and brittle. The individual themself did not actually look featureless when he tried remembering them but indeed had the full appearance of a human with a face he had seen from somewhere before in his life. Perhaps if he opened his eyes, he would discover that there were no white mannequins, that it must have been an illusion, and that in this room, there were undoubtedly two normal human beings tackling an old physics problem.

In anticipation, he opened his eyes to confirm his thoughts.

The sunlight shone on his dried face. Crusted with rheum at the corner of his eyes, with chapped lips and traces of saliva down his right cheek, he slowly sat up. Without thinking, he clumsily walked over to his small wooden drawer, retrieving a sheet of printing paper. He then picked up the dull pencil on his desk and brought the two pieces of stationary with him out onto the round table of his balcony.

Sketching out the hoop with its two beads at different points in time on the piece of paper, he began scribbling lines of math.

“Hey dude! Aren’t you cold?”

The man lifted his head and peered down, locating the voice who had called out to him from the ground below. It was his neighbor from next door who he had never talked to.

Not quite registering what his neighbor had just said to him, he awkwardly waved back before resuming his work. After a few minutes of calculating, he brought everything back inside, slamming the paper on his desk in triumph.

“I guess I solved it,” the man shared aloud. Hearing only the weak rumble of his heater through the ceiling vent, he quickly spun around, expecting the presence of the individual. But the dream had already ended. He looked into the closet mirror door to see himself in only his underwear. He then made eye contact with his own reflection.

“I am all here,” he murmured in concern.

Who was the individual? Were they one person or multiple? Why did he feel like he’s known them all this time? He seized his phone, frantically searching on Safari, “What does it mean when I dream of an empty white room?”

“An empty white room means a lack of love and emotion, inadequacy, or feeling overwhelmed with life.”

The man’s left eye twitched. “That’s not true. Everything is great in my life.”

He had a low rent apartment all to himself. His job as a sandwich maker provided a relatively stable source of income as he never splurged or bought unnecessary things… although, he definitely needed that new computer he had his eyes on for over a year. This is all I need, he thought. Just me and myself. It was just a weird dream, a coinkydink for it to have happened two consecutive nights.

Coughing from the cold, he properly dressed himself and headed over to the kitchen. He wanted to eat something hot and soft. Steamed egg will do.

He cracked two eggs and beat their yolks and whites into a slurry, adding in a pinch of salt and four eggshells full of water. Carefully lowering the bowl of emulsified eggs and water into the steamer, switching on the heat and sealing with a lid, he sat at one of the two chairs in his dining room, listlessly watching as soon, wisps of steam from the steamer rose and escaped up into the fume hood. The steam, indifferent and evanescing, twirled unpredictably without worry. It unknowingly reminded him of an allegory he had heard from some place peaceful and loving, from someone important. It centered on a pioneer named Ku who stumbled upon steaming hot springs at the heart of a mountain. Feeling himself relaxing for some reason, he allowed the story of Ku to unfold in place of the mysterious dreams he’d been having for the past two days.

…

Once upon a time, there was a traveler named Ku, who journeyed up the Mountain of a Thousand Dreams. The mountain had earned its appellation from its perpetual fog shrouding the base all the way up to the dreary gray clouds that obscured the peak. Rumor has it that many of the missing people reported in the nearby villages had simply gone up and left to ascend the mountain, seeking a dream they dearly desired. Thus, the fog and clouds represented these innumerable dreams, each as tiny as a star in the boundless night sky, each as mysterious and hard to interpret as the next.

Paired with a proclivity in the belief of the supernatural, whenever purple and green lights danced near the peak like phantasmagoric auroras, the villagers concluded a dream must have been granted to someone up in the mountain. As successive generations passed, the story of missing people ascending to the peak would evolve into a story about the afterlife. For when you die, the villagers believed your spirit would march up the mountain’s slope, wishing to reincarnate for the better. After all, the villagers were poverty-stricken and didn’t have much to work with. What better option did they have, with their uneducated views and lack of knowledge of the outside world, than to toil in the fields and tend to the livestock day after day while dreaming about the good things that would likely never happen to them?

When Ku was born in one of the villages surrounding the base of the Mountain of a Thousand Wishes, he cried loudly, defiantly almost, as if rejecting the world around him. His parents, their ears ringing from the shrill cries of their newborn, thought their child must have been extremely bitter.

As a youth, Ku learned fast and managed to speak intelligibly by the age of two. By the age of four, Ku had been enrolled into the local school.

Unlike his peers who were at least two years older than him, he diligently studied, wishing to know more about himself and the world. When he went home after a long day of school, he would help out his mother and father with the chores. With his two little hands, he scrubbed their dirty dishes and clothes as skillfully and expediently as he could, making sure they were spotless and squeaky clean. This way, with chores and duties done and dusted, he could spend more time with the people he cared about.

But Ku cared maybe too much for his own good. His peers despised him. He noticed the adults stared at him as well. They would either talk to him in rude or condescending tones or simply ignored him when it was his turn to talk.

This wasn’t out of order. Ku was the type of person to always openly speak his mind. Oftentimes, he could be brutally honest to those he knew including himself. Ku was a child who held everyone to excellence. He did not tolerate laziness and those who gave up easily. He believed everyone to be capable. Naturally, Ku overexerted himself at times, always trying his very best. Thus, Ku’s way of living evoked the wrath and bitterness of those around him, especially those who wanted nothing more in life than the easy way out.

But despite making enemies with the rest of the world, his parents always smiled and laughed when Ku ate dinner with them, crowded around the small table inside their hut. They couldn’t have wished for a better son and placed all their hope in Ku’s education. To them, Ku was their hopes and dreams.

One morning, Ku learned in language class about the mountain. He had heard the stories many times, told to him as a baby before bed every night. However, he never quite understood their significance until that day. As his teacher asked each of them about their dreams in life, the students’ answers all seemed rather disconnected in the sense that they were not a community, but rather a poorly congregated group of impoverished individuals who only lived for themselves and only helped others out of a mutual interest to survive.

So when the teacher asked Ku what his dreams were, Ku determinedly answered, “I want to find out what lies in the Mountain of a Thousand Dreams.”

The teacher asked what he meant.

“I want to climb the mountain and see if our dreams are really in the fog and in the clouds.”

Ku distinctly felt he had crossed a certain line. He could feel a collective hostility in the room honing in on him. His teacher sternly informed, “It is an indisputable fact that all our dreams sleep on the mountain. When someone in the village dies, their dream will be granted. Their spirit summits the mountain, passing into the gates of heaven, where they shall be reborn.”

“Where’s the proof?”

His teacher savagely replied, “The proof is Ku, you are always sticking out like a sore thumb. You should really focus on being more acceptable as an individual. Perhaps try making some friends. Or else the Mountain of a Thousand Dreams will likely be one dream short.”

Some kids snickered.

Ku went home later that day, telling his parents what had happened.

His parents guffawed and explained, “You have rejected our culture, our sweet Ku.”

“But why? Why does no one else think this way? What if your dreams aren’t fulfilled and you don’t reincarnate after you die?”

“And what if we happen to reincarnate? How would you know?” his father countered.

Ku expressed bitterness and frustration. His mother smiled and suggested, “Why don’t you climb the mountain someday so you can come back and tell us what you saw?”

Ku listened to his mother’s words with revelation. In his glassy gaze, there seemed to be a light that radiated with a will of glowing iron. He firmly nodded with a “mm!” before eating with gusto, tears welling up in the corner of his eyes.