So now, before opening the circle, he asked Josh to describe his brother’s dream for his professors and classmates. While Josh was speaking, a stir went round the table as the students reconsidered their incubated dreams in light of the new information. And when he’d finished, and as each student rose and read out his or her log entry, the other students and the attending faculty worked their notebooks busily, looking things up, making notes, texting each other, connecting the dots and building a composite picture out of what they were hearing:
Yancey: “I’m at a big Olympic-size outdoor swimming pool. It’s very sunny and hot. There are a lot of people sunbathing around the sides of the pool. An enormous fat man does a cannonball off the high dive. He hits so hard that he splashes all the water out of the pool. The people around the sides are swamped in several feet of water. They run around screaming. Title: ‘Cannonball.’ Affect: I was terrified of the fat man even before he jumped. I was still terrified when I woke up.”
Emily: “In this dream I’m three years old. I’m all alone and scared. I’m on top of a mountain that’s sticking up out of the ocean. There’s deep water all around. I’m wandering around trying to find my mother, but I can’t find her. Then I see something big out in the water. It’s swimming toward me. I can’t tell what it is but it’s huge and hairy, and I’m afraid of it and start to cry. Just as it starts to climb out of the water I hear somebody say, ‘That’s a rare rat, Barbara.’ Title: ‘Rare Rat.’ Affect: Fear of the rat, before and after waking; also annoyance at being called Barbara. I’ve always hated that name.”
Jen: “I’ve gone to the doctor to be treated for a terrible case of hemorrhoids. I’m carrying the hemorrhoids, which look like gallstones, in a small glass bowl. I’m in the center of a group of doctors who’ve been called in to work on my case. One of them hands me a big bottle of medicine, and tells me that if I take this medicine for three years I’ll be cured. I look at the bottle thinking I would see a skull and crossbones, but there’s just a big black letter B on a white label. Title: ‘Hemorrhoids.’ Affect: Anxiety in the dream. On waking: confusion, then disappointment. I don’t see how this could possibly have anything to do with Josh’s dream.”
David: “I’m in Little League and we’re in the middle of a game. I’m playing outfield. My team is winning 3.21-0; it says that on the scoreboard. The other team’s best batter steps up to the plate and clobbers the ball straight up in the air. It looks like a home run. I run like crazy to get under it, and jump as high as I can and stick my glove way up in the air to catch it, but it flies over the fence. Then I hear a huge splash. I can’t see what happened but I know it landed in the duck pond on the other side. Title: ‘Home Run.’ Affect: I was devastated in the dream. But I felt better when I woke up. The score was still 3.21-1, our favor. We could still win the game.”
Rick: “I’m inside Josh’s picture, only in my dream of his dream the ship is a flying saucer in orbit around earth. In this dream I’m Josh’s brother. We are prisoners of the saucer aliens, who have put us into space suits and tied us to the saucer with cables. While we’re twisting and turning helplessly in space, the aliens launch that thing we’ve been calling the Lego shuttle. What it is in my dream, is a robotic lander armed with some hugely powerful weapon. There may be more landers too, its hard to tell. The aliens’ aim is to destroy the Earth. I can’t do anything to stop them or warn people. I can see Earth; it looks like a big blue marble with white swirls against the black of space, incredibly beautiful. The lander is heading right for it. Josh looks at me and shakes his head. There’s nothing we can do. Title: ‘Saucer Prisoners.’ Affect: Distress and helplessness inside the dream. On waking, total determination not to accept the role of helpless prisoner. Decision to reenter the dream.”
Claudia: “I’m weeding my grandmother’s flower garden. It’s hot and I want to get cleaned up and go meet my friends, but I know I have to finish this first. I feel huge resistance, I don’t want to be out here working. I’m so angry I yank up a bunch of flowers and throw them in the fishpond. Grandma comes out and says, ‘Just finish those asters, then you can quit.’ Title: ‘Weeding.’ Affect: In the dream, furious resentment. On waking, surprise. I actually like gardening. And this didn’t seem to have any bearing at all on Josh’s dream.”
“It does, though,” Josh said a little shakily as he stood up, and Claudia nodded; she understood that now, they all did. At this point there was not a person in the room who hadn’t understood, along with a great deal else, that Claudia’s asters and Jen’s hemorrhoids—individually, but especially together—said asteroids in the wacko punning language of dreams.
Josh pulled a cardboard square and a roll of tape out of his portfolio. “This is just a brush-pen sketch, all I had time for, but it shows how the elements in my first dream get incorporated into this one, but switched around.” He tore tape off the roll and stuck the new picture up next to the old one. Then he picked up his notepad, caught the eye of the Center’s director, Marcus Manning, whose gaze was trained on him, and read his log entry:
“I’m back in my dream, and I’m in space. The ship has turned into a hot air balloon. The hole at the top of the ship”—he pointed to his finished painting, then to the sketch—“is now the hole at the bottom of the balloon, and the light streaming out through the top of the ship… is the propane flame that goes through the hole in the balloon and heats the air inside. The black of space surrounds the balloon, but the flame creates a sphere of light around it, and the basket underneath that I’m riding in, as if the balloon were in the atmosphere. I look down and see the whole Earth, with the continents and the blue water, way down below. Suddenly Mr. Hopewell appears in the basket with me. He says, ‘A sandbag is dropped from a hot air balloon that is a million miles above the earth. How long does it take for the sandbag to reach the surface?’ I say, ‘Three years, two months, and nineteen days.’ Title: ‘Hot Air Balloon.’ Affect: In the dream, a sense of foreboding but I’m pleased that I know the answer. On waking, excitement and certainty!” Looking up, he added, “Mr. Hopewell was my algebra teacher in high school.”
“He has an optimistic name,” Bob Christian said. “I call that a good sign.”
The class had moved beyond the need for if-this-were-my-dream courtesies; their collaborative effort had brought them into sync. Their professors held back and let them pull it all together. They bent over their notepads and proceeded to do that.
Unless it could somehow be prevented, an asteroid would fall into the Pacific near Santa Barbara in a little more than three years’ time; Josh’s answer to the sandbag question chimed with David’s scoreboard display and (less precisely) with Jen’s treatment lasting three years and Emily’s being three when she saw the rare rat. (“What’s “a rare rat” about, anybody know?” Yancey asked, and Professor Manning said, “Emily must have learned about Noah’s ark in Sunday School. When the flood waters started to recede, the ark came down on top of Mount A-rar-at.” Emily emitted a startled “Oh!” “At least they were receding,” Yancey said.)