Green Eyed Dragons

I was realizing this morning after a dream that may have had some important details to it, it is hard to say as I do not remember them, that a particular riddle may be more like a hint at something. The riddle was considered to be the hardest in the world at the time of its creation.

I will simplify it for brevity: There are 100 green eyes dragons on an island, if they ever find out their eye color they turn into a butterfly that night at midnight and fly away, unable to return, so there are no reflective surfaces and they never talk about eye color. One day a green eyed traveler arrives and is treated well. Unaware of the rules, and wanting to say something nice, he says "I'm glad to see at least someone here has green eyes like me."  Now assuming truth and logic are both perfect on this island, what, if anything, happens?

After grasping the logic of it once (hint, the answer isn't nothing, build up from 1 dragon, to 2, to 3), I started considering permutations (unaware of being R/G color blind was one, but that just seems confounding). This morning I considered another. What if one dragon's eyes shined differently (golden, for example)? What if you knew the rules, and wanted to share the island with that dragon alone? Is there something you could say to make this happen?

What if there were not a hundred, but billions? Now what if dreams set up scenarios where the pool is much smaller, and isolated in each case, but the soul's eye color remains consistent and always recognizable on a fundamental level? Each member of the group then returns to the whole in the morning, not able to identify each other consciously, but now subconsciously linked. Not wanting to ever give her eye color away, I imagine the clever traveler would simply keep repeating the same line "I'm glad to see at least someone else here has green eyes." during each dream. There would be only one scenario where he would not be able to honestly say this (well, two technically).

I like to think the traveler is not being cruel. The dragons are all shapeshifters and don't realize it. Their journey as butterflies may not be the most pleasant, but they will awake on a distant shore as travelers themselves, and at that moment will know something very important about unfamiliar lands and kaleidescopic color schemes. Meanwhile the golden eyed dragon will have witnessed the butterfly migration and realize she's a shapeshifter too, and that this island is hers to do with as she pleases.

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