You are standing before a limitless stairway of foliage reaching up as far as the eye can see. Its leathery leaves are as big as dinner plates, pointed at the ends and heart-shaped where they meet the stalks, with a gently curving ribbed vein down the centre of each. You look down; you are standing in mid-air, in empty space, and the beanstalk-like thing stretches down below you too. Looking for where it meets the ground, if there is any ground, gives you nothing but dizzying vertigo.
You know somehow that climbing up would take you into the past, and climbing down would transport you into the future. Beneath the broad leaves you can see fruit - small and mulberry-red, like oversized raspberries. You know that if you eat them, they have the power to send you into other worlds.
This is the Vine. You know its name without knowing how, even though it bears little resemblance to any other type of vine you have ever seen. It is infinite and it has awesome beauty, but there is a sadness about it too, because it is dying.
"Are you real?" you ask it. You know it does not have human intelligence, and yet it can understand you, though perhaps it reads your thoughts instead of listening to your voice.
Its reply is soundless, but it reverberates in your head like the memory of speech. It says, I am.
This isn't exactly how it happened to me. Actually I can't remember the details of the dream that introduced me to the Vine back in January 1992. (Most things with this type of significance tend to happen to me in January.) But I came away with that sense of sadness, and beauty, and the indelible memory of the Vine's soundless words. Just a dream? I expect so. But who says dreams are never worth remembering?
I still have the picture I drew in multicoloured ballpoint in my spiral-bound notebook at school that day. It spans the page from top to bottom, and at each end there's a little infinity sign, which was supposed to show that the Vine goes on for ever and I could only fit part of it on the page. As I drew more of it, I became better at drawing the heart-shaped leaves. I'm no artist, and the picture doesn't capture the Vine I remember. It does well as a record, though.
Over the next few years I kept the Vine in mind, and gradually I seemed to know more about it. I was very fond of time travel stories then, and the idea of a living time machine intrigued me. But I became even more interested in the idea that the Vine embodied the links between everything. I started using it as my personal symbol. I drew it across the top of each page in my homework diary, and I used to give pictures of it to people who were special to me. In the spring of 1994 I drew an elaborate design on the plain blue cover of another spiral bound notebook (I preferred to draw in fountain pen by then, blue on blue) and covered it with sticky-backed plastic to stop it getting spoiled. Between the loops of Vine on the cover were seven or eight little pictures. One was a group of musical symbols centred around a large crescendo. Another was a map of Sri Lanka. Each symbolised something that was important to me at the time, but now, without the book in front of me, I can't remember them all. The idea was that the Vine somehow linked them all together.
Even then I was beginning to get the idea that the connections the Vine made were dangerous. I had a nightmare in which a person I loved got mixed up in a situation I feared, all because I'd linked the two together using the Vine. That scared me, although I thought of it more as my fault than as the Vine's - I was the one who'd manipulated it. (If you're wondering why I take these dreams seriously, the answer is that I follow them the way some people follow TV series they particularly like. The scariness is part of the fun and probably balances the happiness and stability in the rest of my life. Though I was scared, I felt fulfilled at the same time.)
When I started writing, I naturally wanted to put the Vine in my stories. Actually, I felt that since it was my personal symbol, no story I wrote would be complete without it. Since then I've found that I haven't got room for the Vine in everything I write, but it's often still there. I had an idea in 1993 for a novel involving a mysterious diary (the cover of which inspired the cover of my notebook a year later), time travel (done via the Vine, naturally) and a mirror-world where everything was backwards. This story never saw the light of day. I abandoned it when I realised it contained a time paradox that I couldn't solve. But a fragment of it, apart from the Vine, found its way into the novel I did finally write. At the beginning of each one, a character realises that there's something odd about a stranger they've just met when the notice that the stranger is dressed for summer weather on a cold winter day.
So I put the Vine in the newer book too, which has made me find out (okay, make up) even more about it. I now know exactly how real it is, and what it can do, and how knowing about it can be dangerous. I won't reveal the answers here except to say this: the characters in the book have the same relationship with the Vine as I have, at least to begin with. It introduces itself to them in the same way it did to me, and if later it becomes more "real" in their lives, it is because their own actions make it so. I like the way story fades into real life here, and it makes me think that if the Vine is really out there (and I don't expect it to be real in any sense you could touch) then the signs of its existence should be exactly the same as if it is only one dream and some imagination on my part. As with gods, it's impossible to tell.
When I made my first website in 1997 on the Oxford University server, I used my own name. But when I made a second one on GeoCities (back before Yahoo! ruined it) and wanted to go anonymously, I called the site Vine's Folly. (I still think folly is a good word for a personal website, but I don't know any others that use it.) The way the Vine is supposed to link things, it seemed a good name to use online. I stopped calling myself "Vine" after a while - I know more about it now than I did then - but when I came to get a domain name it naturally came to mind.
Unfortunately, with the way the domain name system works, vine.everything I liked had already been taken. I thought of some other possibilities and then came back to "vine" combined with another word. From the rest of this page you'll see that "dreamvine" was quite appropriate. (I liked "ghostvine", but that's a plant in a Lucius Shepard story.) I chose the .org.uk extension just because I'm nonprofitmaking and British. I registered the domain with Black Cat Networks on 21 June 2000.
The "dream" part of the name has absolutely nothing to do with The Sandman. I like the series very much, but I didn't discover it until April 2001, too late to name the site after it. However, I was still chuffed when the sysadmin of one of the servers where I hosted the site gave me "dream" as a user name.