Tetrahedron began with a notion I had been musing over, regarding why I would always wake up at exactly the wrong moment during sexually explicit dreams. Was it possible that there is some energetic dissonance between the dreaming state and the orgasmic state? Some incompatibility?
At that time my work took me all over New Jersey, where I spent most days driving down various highways, often for three or four hours at a stretch. So I had time to think about it.
On one trip, I expanded the hypothesis to include the possibility that if one were traveling in time and had an opportunity to make love with someone there, would a similar incompatibility exist, causing a disruption in the time-traveling event? Seemed reasonable, so I discussed it with my then-wife over dinner that night, but she needed clarification. She insisted I write it out, so it might be easier for her to comprehend.
A few days later I wrote a short depiction of what I was trying to explain. She read it, looked up and nodded. She understood. But she still seemed perplexed.
"What happened then?" she asked, challenging me, "and what brought them together in the first place?"
I told her there was no back story, no story at all, it was just a few hand-written pages to help illustrate what I was trying to convey before.
"Well, write it down!" She demanded. "I want to know more about these people!"
I thought about it the following day, staring out through the windshield, and by the time I got home I was ready to commit it to words. Within a week I had blocked out what became the last scene of the second chapter. Over the next several years, I developed the story, beginning to end.
Somewhere along the way I realized that I was not writing about time travel, but rather something more akin to the nature of our holistic experience of being, which, of course, includes our perception of time. It reminded me of what Carlos Castaneda had written about. I re-read his first eight works, and decided to appropriate his cosmology, whole cloth, and apply it as the foundational basis of the story I was telling, never mind his detractors. I always liked the feel of his narrative, true or not, and I had already been accessing it anyway, if unknowingly.
Several more years of re-writing and polishing and I believe the story is ready for readers. If you are familiar with the Don Juan saga, you will undoubtedly recognize some of Carlos Castaneda's conceptual artifacts woven throughout this book. If you are not familiar with his writings, that's all right as well. In either case, my hope is that you will delve in, pull back the layers and find something about yourself, perhaps something unexpected, that you didn't know was there before.
