You awaken in a grassy field, back stiff and head hurting. By your count this is the sixth year have awaken in this way amid an endless grassy plain.
Six years since you ignored the warnings of your colleagues at The Academy of Natural Philosphy and procurred the forbidden Abhandlung uber Traum, from a less than reputable source. Within its faded, worm-eaten pages you located a nearly complete Traumzeit-Tee formula. According to your research consuming this tea would transport you to the Plane of Dream for short time, where time is mutable. The research opportunities would be priceless.
Unfortunately after finishing the last line of the formula the text flared in magical fire knocking you unconscious. You awoke here. Fortunately it seems you need not eat or drink here, but the infinite, identical features have driven you to near madness on more than one occasion.
Edited by: John Smith on 10/4/15
Grey stared into the distance, his eyes seeking the horizon. Like everything else in this cursed land, it was indistinct and poorly defined. He had long ago given up attempting to influence the land around him by thought or dream alone -- evidently that technique wasn't going to work for him. "Plane of Dream", indeed... what trite nonsense.
He cleared his mind while performing his morning calisthenics. He was uncertain of the exact nature of the relationship between mind and body, or consciousness and matter, but he was sure that a connection existed. In order to preserve what remained of his sanity, he must maintain his matter as well. Especially important as he aged...
Some time later (who could tell how long?), covered in a light sheen of sweat (where did the replacement water come from?), he consulted the marks he had made in the earth the night before and began walking once more in the same direction. He had chosen the direction long ago, at random. had been traveling in this direction, as best he could tell, for eight-hundred and eighty-seven days. Today would be the eight-hundred and eighty-eighth. He briefly considered the auspiciousness of this number, and then set out.
As he walked, he regulated his breathing and turned his attention to the one frontier of science remaining to him -- his own mind. "Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power." The great masters had trod the internal paths he traveled now for centuries. And yet, he thought that he was making some progress. Surely there had never been a man who lived and studied so free of distraction as did Benedict Grey. He had discovered several interesting properties of his body that he might control through will alone -- need for oxygen, the passage of time, vulnerability to toxins and infectious agents. His inner eye could almost see the minute machinery of his internal workings, and he approached his studies with genuine enthusiasm.
Edited by: Grey on 10/7/15