The Unbound Scepter
Nobody warns you about the dreams. Not properly. Yesterday I killed my inner Necron — wrote the whole thing by voice from my hospital bed, felt the deepest peace of my life, went to sleep on whatever cocktail of post-op medications they had me on. Seroquel and Xanax, among other things. Doctors mention "vivid dreams" as a Seroquel side effect like it's nothing. Vivid. That word is doing an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting for what actually happened to me last night.
Content warning: this post documents a medication-induced nightmare and gets into some heavy territory around belief systems, vulnerability, and psychological symbolism. These are prescribed medications, not recreational substances. If you're not in the headspace for this right now, it'll be here when you are.
Last night I had a dream that was structured enough to have a narrator, a symbolic child heir, and a thesis statement delivered directly to my face before I woke up. I'm not exaggerating. I'm treating this as a trip report because honestly that's what it was. The details are already going fuzzy but the core of it burned in hard enough that I'm typing this up before it fades.
Here's what I remember.
The dream opened in a mall. Fluorescent lights, tile floors that went on forever, the works. There was an Old Navy ahead of me. But the world had gone full Purge — total lawlessness, everything collapsed — and the Old Navy staff had barricaded themselves inside and were defending it. Like, actively. With the energy of a last stand. My brain decided that in the post-apocalypse, the hill worth dying on was affordable basics.
I was naked. Completely exposed, standing in the middle of all this, and I needed to get into that store. Not like "oh I should get dressed" — the desperation was animal-level. Find clothes. Cover yourself. The staff wouldn't let me in.
Every step felt like wading through mud. You know that dream thing where your legs just won't work? Thirty feet to Old Navy and I could not close the distance. It was right there.
At the center of everything stood a child. A boy, maybe eight or nine, but carrying himself like royalty. In the dream's logic he was the heir to Old Navy — I know how that sounds, but the dream was completely serious about it. He was the successor to this throne. Around his head he had this triangular scepter that worked as both crown and weapon. He kept showing up ahead of me, always blocking the way forward.
The scepter was sealed. The triangle was closed — every vertex connected, no way in, no way out. And I just knew what that meant, the way you know things in dreams without anyone telling you: his belief system was a closed loop. Totally self-referencing. Nothing could get in and nothing could escape, and he had no idea, because from inside a sealed triangle there's no such thing as "outside."
This maps to what epistemologists call a closed epistemic loop — a belief structure where all evidence gets interpreted through the existing framework, making disconfirmation structurally impossible. Conspiracy theories work this way. So do certain theological traditions. So do some software architectures, honestly.
Standing near the child was a black mage. And I mean the Final Fantasy kind — tall, robed, face hidden in shadow. I'd literally been writing about Final Fantasy yesterday so I guess my brain had the assets loaded. But he wasn't threatening. He was... explaining things? Like a tour guide for whatever my subconscious was trying to show me. Very patient. Very calm. Spoke directly to me about what I was seeing.
His subject was how belief systems work. He called them principalities of the mind — self-contained little kingdoms where every belief props up every other belief. Contradictions bounce off. The whole thing holds together through pure internal consistency, even when there's nothing underneath it. You can't see the foundation from inside. The child heir was his example — look, here's what a sealed principality looks like when you give it a body and a crown.
Movement never got easier. I kept pushing through the mud, the child kept showing up with that sealed scepter catching the light, and the mage just... kept talking. Honestly it was like being in the world's most surreal college lecture. I couldn't take notes. I was naked and covered in dream-molasses.
And then everything started dissolving. The mall went first, then the Old Navy fortress, then the chaos outside — all of it pulling apart. But the mage stayed.
He looked right at me. Not past me, not through me — at me. And he said: "Your scepter is unbound — do with this what you will."
I woke up and lay there for a long time.
The contrast hit me while I was staring at the hospital ceiling. The child's scepter was sealed — a closed system that couldn't take in anything new. Perfect, complete, and totally stuck. Mine was unbound. Whatever that meant.
I honestly don't know if this is my unconscious mind processing the surgery, the medication doing something weird to my REM cycles, or just the kind of thing that happens when you stare down your own mortality and then your brain has opinions about it. What I do know is that the symbolism was so on-the-nose it felt like getting a lecture from my own subconscious.
In chaos magick — which, yes, is a real thing I've read about, I'm not just making this up — there's this concept that beliefs are tools. You pick one up, use it, put it down when it stops being useful. It's not who you are. It's "a person's preferred structure of reality," emphasis on preferred. You can swap it out.
Principalities of the mind are what happens when you forget your beliefs are a tool and start treating them like physics. The triangle seals shut. The scepter becomes a prison you can't see from inside. And the part the black mage was so patient about — the really messed up part — is that from inside a sealed principality, everything seems fine. Your beliefs are consistent, reality makes sense, and you have no idea you're trapped because the cage is made of your own assumptions.
An unbound scepter is the opposite of comfortable. Your worldview has gaps in it, entry points where new information can come in and rearrange everything. That's scary. But it also means you can actually change, which is more than the heir could say.
Wait, so the good outcome here is having a belief system with holes in it?
I mean... kind of? A sealed scepter means you never have to doubt anything but you also never grow. An unbound one is overwhelming but at least you can move. The heir was frozen. Perfect and still and going absolutely nowhere forever.
Maybe that's why I couldn't move in the dream. Wading through mud, barely able to take a step — but I was taking steps. The heir just stood there. He didn't struggle because he had nowhere to go. His triangle was already complete.
"Do with this what you will." That's what the mage said. Not telling me what to do with it. Just... handing me the choice. An unbound scepter doesn't come with instructions.
I think the dream was telling me something I already knew. Or maybe reminding me that knowing it once isn't enough — you have to keep choosing to stay open. The triangle is always trying to close.
Your scepter is unbound. Do with this what you will.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a hospital discharge to survive and a husband to hug.