Dream/Story

There are these guys, this is a college-type environment. These people are all involved in a Skull and Bones type society, a mystical society within the infrastructure of the school.

There is some kind of pretraining, they are very disciplined. There is a certain measure of a paramilitary type of discipline to it. They can be counted on to follow instructions to the letter.

At a certain point, they are given a magic word. The discipline is important here because they can't abuse this word. But, they are given circumstances under which it is OK to use it, and they are able to get definite substantial results with it. (Really, I am not sure what form this would take, I only vaguely remember how exactly that happened in the dream. It was something dramatic though.) But it is fairly controlled.

Working with this secret magic word is an ongoing part of their life for two years, their advancement within this order. At the end of that time, one of their initiations is they learn that these magic words are simply made up ... and their job is to make up one for somebody in the next generation.

This seemed like such a cool idea when I was just waking up ... but it doesn't make for all that interesting a story, does it? As a didactic thing it's very good, it would have to be like that, fundamentally didactic. Trying to work a plot beyond that into it would be a bad idea. Leave it.

I guess it could be a kind of cool story, given that. I have sort of gone from loving it to hating it back to liking it.

Anyway,the didactic point of the story (it seems overly obvious now kind of) is that the power they think is in this word is really in them, there is no power, they are doing these things that happen, their will and beliefs.

That sounds kind of tiresomely new agey. I don't know, maybe it won't so much seem like that if it isn't expressed in so many words.