He was back in the suit that fit him like a second skin, filled again with a sense of physical power and grace as he raised his arms and spun in a perfect pirouette. The ship hung above him. Nearby, Tim struck a pose and soared away. Josh couldn’t see Tim’s face, not that he needed to. Sheer joy, to be able move so beautifully! He let the feeling swell inside him for a long moment before focusing on his first question: Water or vacuum? The answer wouldn’t come clear. His ballet moves required resistance, and he felt resistance, but the medium he floated in didn’t seem to be water. Or not only water. Water and something else at the same time. The suit was both a wet suit and something else—yes, a pressure suit designed for space walks, as he had assumed. The situation, thus examined, revealed not an answer but an ambiguity.
He looked “up” at the ship—directions being relevant only in the presence of gravity, yet he felt he was looking up—and saw that it too was suspended in both water and space. How could that be? He was still puzzling about it when the black shuttle shot from beneath the ship’s hat brim, heading straight for himself and Tim. And this time the shuttle’s “headlights” were blazing like weapons, stabbing through the dark.
The old fear seized him, but this time he was ready, and soared purposefully to confront it. Close-to, he realized, the jack-o’-lantern face with its X-ray vision looked merely silly, and as he thought this thought the face disappeared. The black shape, no longer heading for Josh, swept past him, out of the sphere of foggy light and into the absolute blackness below.
Relieved, Josh swooped closer to the ship, wanting to see under that hat brim, maybe even go in. But the round underside was a detailed image of the full moon, not a photograph but a painting he himself had made in high school, hanging now in his room at home. The image of the moon exactly fit into the circle of the hat brim, like the base of a lamp or a candlestick. There was no sign of a hatch for the black object or objects to have emerged from, and no visible attachment points for the lines connecting the ship to himself and Tim. The vague structures below the hat were gone. Suddenly remembering Professor Christian’s question about the source of light in the painted dreamscape, he looked up to locate it—and saw the sun, a yellow brightness shining out of a black void. At that moment someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to see his brother in jeans and a sweatshirt, standing on the sidewalk in front of his dorm. “Call me,” Tim said, just as the drumming ended.
“The shuttle went dark and veered off,” Jen said. “Nice work.” They were sitting on Josh’s bed in a row, holding mugs of coffee from the wall vendor, which was out of creamer.
“Thanks.” Josh thought about how to put his question without leading the witnesses. “So which did you get? Outer space or deep-sea diving?”
“You know, I couldn’t tell.” This was Emily. “In my dream of your dream, it kind of felt like both. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. It wasn’t clear.”
“In my dream of your dream, that’s what I got too,” Jen said. “What about you, Josh?”
“Same here. I think it must be something happening in both places. I swam under the ship, and I saw this painting I did of the moon for an art class in high school, so that made me think space. But it seemed like the shuttle thing was plunging through the water.”
Jen said, “Do you realize you said you swam under the ship?”
Josh’s eyebrows shot up. “Hunh.” He shrugged. “It’s both, that’s all. It’s, like, something starting in space and ending up underwater.”
“Or maybe vice versa? Or simultaneously?” Jen suggested. They all knew how dream images could refer to several things at the same time, or be in several locations at once, but Josh and Emily both shook their heads. The direction was downward to the Earth. He was sure of that much, even though the dream hadn’t provided any sense of movement from one dimension into the other.
Jen said, “Well, okay, something starting out in space and up ending underwater. Such as what? What would do that?”
“I’m not saying this is it,” Josh said, “but like, say, a spacecraft doing a splashdown landing and breaking up on impact, and sinking. Just to take a hypothetical example. Or a supersonic plane crashing over the ocean.”
Emily said, “Or maybe—a missile launched from space at an underwater target?”
They looked at each other. All three had carefully avoided saying out loud that Josh’s dream might be precognitive with reference to something outside of, and greater than, his personal life, though all were beginning to wonder. To recognize such dreams was what they were being trained to do, but the danger of crying wolf, and calling the whole program into question, was so real that every other possibility had to be considered first, and the students were cautioned not to bandy the word about.
Over time a superstitious fear had arisen in the Center that even mentioning the world precognitive was bad luck. In the years since its founding, only a handful of precognitive dreams had been definitely identified and used to avert disaster (a shooter arrested at the New York Metropolitan Opera, a train derailment in Switzerland prevented, evacuation of towns in Arkansas and Oklahoma before a tornado outbreak). None of these had been dreamed or recognized by an undergraduate, however, and none was accepted as genuine by everybody; in fact, a whole small industry of skeptics worked busily to prove pure coincidence each time a disaster had been prevented—precognitive dreaming seeming to be activated all but entirely by impending disasters.
“Well, anyhow,” Josh said, backing away from the danger zone, “None of those is an ‘Aha.’ And the shuttle turned harmless when I confronted it, so that sounds like a personal childhood fear thing, like Professor Christian said. I still don’t get why I felt so afraid of it, but I wonder if that matters.”
“You mean, maybe it’s enough to face your fears, even if you don’t understand them? I don’t think I buy that, Josh,” Emily said. “I don’t think Christian’s going to either. I think you need to incubate another dream and take it further.” She paused. “It might be important.”
Jen stood up and set her mug on a chair. “Are we done? I’ve got to go, I’m meeting Sanjay in fifteen minutes.” Folding her baggy shawl into a triangle, she flipped it around her and tied the ends. “ I agree with Emily, for what it’s worth. Oh, wait—you haven’t stated your intention! Now that you’ve got the information. Such as it is.”
Josh stood up too. “Just before the drumming stopped, Tim asked me to call him. So I intend to do that first, and take it from there.”
Emily was wrapping herself in her cloak, holding it together with one hand while lifting her hair with the other and draping it down the back, a tricky but practiced maneuver. “Keep us posted,” she said.
Josh blinked; he’d been watching the cloak performance. “I will. In class, if not before. If I get any further with it before then I’ll let you know for sure. Thanks, guys, thanks a lot.”