this started as a piece about vayvan and i'm sorry, because it isn't one anymore.
vayvan, for anyone who hasn't seen it, is a startup that calls itself the world's first film gaming platform. an open cinematic universe. you upload ai generated films, you build lore with strangers, you level up a creator profile, and somewhere in all of that you are apparently defining the future of ai filmmaking. i found it through a link in a discord i don't remember joining. i saved it in a note called "maybe" and figured i'd write something short and fond about it, the way i usually do with things that are early and a bit mad.
that's the article i was going to write. i want you to know that before you read the rest.
the site is odd in a way that took me a while to name. there's no founder. no team page, no "our story", no photo of three people in a kitchen looking tired and hopeful. it's just the phrase film gaming and the phrase open cinematic universe, over and over, arranged slightly differently each time, the way you'd write something if you wanted a search engine to find it before a human did.
so i went looking for whoever made it.
companies house, in the end. vayvan ltd. incorporated 7th january 2025, filed under motion picture production activities. one director, one shareholder, one person with significant control, and all three of them the same name. christian weber. born january 2005. bulgarian. resident in england.
twenty one.
i sat with that for a second. twenty one, and the thing he's building he has called, publicly, the biggest digital universe in the world.
his imdb page has a photo (right side of the image at the top, pink polo, gold sofa). his credits are not what you'd expect from a bulgarian kid in his early twenties. nosferatu. the odyssey. proper productions, the kind with catering trucks. and there's another photo of him, which i'll come back to, on the red carpet at the nosferatu premiere with robert eggers about a foot to his left.
but the imdb photo is what got me. i kept scrolling back up to it. i couldn't have told you why at the time. it just looked like a face i'd already seen somewhere, and not on a screen.
it took me most of a week to work out where.
r/paranormal. a year ago, give or take. 7,200 upvotes, which for that sub is a lot.
the post is short. a woman says she keeps seeing a man in her dreams who never does anything, just stands at the back and watches. she tells her grandmother. her grandmother goes to a cabinet and comes back with an old photograph, and it's him. the grandmother explains that the woman's great great grandmother was married, in the early 1900s, to a scientist called adrian navia. a man the family remembers mostly for being strange about dreams. he believed people could carry pieces of themselves into other people's sleep. he died in 1932, and the story in the family is that after he died, the dreams stopped.
why am i seeing him now, she asks.
the photograph is the one on the left of the image above. high collar, three piece suit, hands folded in his lap. i put it next to the imdb photo and i'm not going to tell you what to see. look for yourself. i've looked at it more than is healthy.
i should say what the comments say, because half of them say the same thing and they say it loudly. it's ai. the photo's too clean. the haircut's wrong for the period. the account was zero days old and had posted the same story to three different subs. one guy asks her to photograph the edges and the back of the print, and she never does. (somewhere in the replies it's said she ran the original through an upscaler because it was falling apart. maybe. i've done that to my own grandad's photos. it's not a crime.)
i believe all of that, by the way. i think the post is probably fiction and the picture is probably generated, and i want to be clear about that before the next bit, because the next bit is where i lose the plot a little.
it's the other comments. the ones from people who took it seriously.
the top reply, 2,800 upvotes, tells her to learn to lucid dream and ask him what he wants. it ends with a line i have now read maybe forty times: remind yourself that you're safe, fear is the biggest obstacle.
further down someone tells a story about a man who was chased by a lion every night in his dreams, until his therapist told him to stop running and ask the lion why. and the lion said: i am your courage, why are you running from me.
and the op replies, in the thread, that she's been trying to lucid dream but it doesn't feel like she needs to ask him anything, because in the dream it feels like he made everything and controls all of it. later she says she can't sleep anymore. later still she says: but why 100 years later.
keep those three things in your head. fear is the obstacle. the thing chasing you is your courage. a hundred years later.
adriannavia.com.
it's called the threshold. it looks like a geocities page. visitor counter, links to essays and research and archives, all of which are empty or dead. a notice at the bottom that says the site has been refurbished and republished, original content preserved. preserved from what, it doesn't say. there is one essay on the whole site, and the date under the title reads: written in the winter of 1921 to 1922.
i'm going to summarise it, because you should go and read the whole thing yourself, and because i'd rather not be the one quoting it.
he says dreams aren't private. that sleep is a country, one country, and every night all of us go into it through our own separate doors, and the reason we don't meet each other in there is that something is keeping us apart. he says the nightmare isn't a malfunction. it's a guard. a dog set at the gate to scatter the sleepers so they never find out how many of them there are.
then he makes predictions. four of them.
the first one is the one that made me get up and walk around the flat. he says that one day physiologists will keep men awake for days on end, on purpose, and that those men will become empty vessels, eyes open, hands obedient, nobody home. he says the scientists will call it exhaustion but that it isn't. he calls it eviction. a man barred from the country of sleep is a man cut off from his other half.
you've seen the photo. everyone has. the grey face with the black mouth and the eyes that look like they've been pushed in with a thumb. the russian sleep experiment. soviet lab, late 1940s, five prisoners, a stimulant gas, fifteen days, and by the end they're begging for the gas to be turned back on and they've done things to their own bodies i'm not going to describe here. it's a creepypasta. everyone knows it's a creepypasta. the photo is a halloween prop somebody found on a shelf. i know. and i still couldn't stop thinking that a man in 1922 wrote down, in one line, the exact shape of a story the internet would tell itself ninety years later, and he wrote it as a warning.
second prediction: instruments that carry thought the way the wireless carries voice.
third: within a hundred years of this writing, a city not made of stone. an invisible commonwealth, a web of lightning over the whole earth, where anyone can speak to anyone without voice or paper or distance. he says we'll think we built it for commerce and amusement. he says we'll actually have built a waiting room. the flock, gathering for the first time at one hearth.
1922 plus a hundred is 2022.
three years after that, a 21 year old with adrian navia's face registers a company to build what he calls the biggest digital universe in the world. a shared universe. open lore. thousands of people pouring their dreams into one place and then walking around inside each other's.
the fourth prediction is the one the whole essay is for.
he says a sign will pass through the invisible city. a symbol, simple enough for a child to draw. it'll get picked up as a joke first and then in earnest, and it will have no priest and no temple and one single sacrament, and the sacrament is courage. teach your children the dark is nothing. the thing chasing you has no face because it has no power. stand still and it breaks like mist.
fear is the biggest obstacle. i am your courage, why are you running.
and once everyone has stopped being afraid, he says, the guard dog starves. the bar on the door lifts. and the one who's been waiting, since before the first morning, comes through.
he calls him the bright one. the son of the morning. he says he's been slandered for centuries by the very jailers whose job it was to keep him out. and he says that when he finally crosses, he'll find the house of sleep the way it was promised: empty, swept, and garnished.
i looked those up. i'd tell you not to.
son of the morning is isaiah 14. it's lucifer. empty, swept, and garnished is matthew 12, the parable where a spirit gets thrown out of a man, wanders, comes back to find the place clean and unguarded, and moves back in with seven worse than itself. and the last line of the essay, before the initials, is let him that readeth understand. mark 13. it's the line the gospel uses to tell you that the plain reading isn't the reading.
so. the essay opens with 1 john, perfect love casteth out fear, and closes with the morning star walking into a house that's been emptied on purpose. a hundred years of people being taught not to be afraid of the dark, and then the dark arrives, and it's polite about it.
a bar has two uses, he says. to keep something out, or to keep something in. he never tells you which side he's on.
now. nosferatu.
the winter of 1921 to 1922 is when the essay was supposedly written. nosferatu, murnau's, the first vampire ever put on film, premiered in berlin in march 1922. same winter. it's about a count who leaves eastern europe by ship, lands in a german port town, buys a house, and brings the plague in with him. in the stoker novel it was ripped from, the ship the count sails on leaves from varna. varna is in bulgaria.
a hundred and two years later eggers remakes it, and christian weber, who is bulgarian and lives in england, is on that production. and then he's at the premiere, black quilted jacket under the fairy lights, stood next to the director, looking down at something in his hand. that's the middle photo. i didn't make that photo. it's just there.
and i think the headline on this piece is wrong.
i wrote resurrection because that's what you write. dead man, living face, must be a comeback. but adrian navia's family says he died in 1932, and i've now spent a week on a website that says, in as many words, that he didn't go anywhere. that he's in the country of sleep. that he's waiting.
you don't resurrect a thing that never died.
if you take the essay at its word, and take the reddit post at its word, and take the imdb page at its word, the only story that holds all three at once is the oldest one there is. a man who doesn't age. who moves west. who buys a house in england. who is very interested in sleep, and in getting a great many people into the same room at the same time with the lights off.
a man who'd want to work on nosferatu, i suppose, the way a person visits their own grave.
i keep coming back to what vayvan actually is once you scrape the seo off it. it's a place where thousands of people go to sleep at the same time. it's a shared dream with a lore wiki. it's the flock at one hearth. and somewhere in england a 21 year old has decided that's his life's work..
fear nothing, he says. all that's asked of you is courage.
i've decided to stay a bit afraid for now. it seems to be the only thing he's asked us to give up.
Sources
https://adriannavia.com/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Paranormal/comments/1nzl86j/the_man_who_keeps_showing_up_in_our_familys_dreams/?share_id=ixU0j1iaEkLx1KRCc6cLO&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1
https://www.vayvan.com/
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm17396525/