She looked startled when everyone laughed. Josh grabbed two handfuls of his lime-green hair and said, “Omigod, and all my analytical brilliance is leaking out through the hole in my head!”
Jen was a humorless girl, easy to tease, but Bob said sharply, “You might not be too wrong about that, Josh. Jen is the first person to address the thing that strikes me most forcibly about this dream, and that’s your terror. And didn’t you just say you woke up ‘scared out of my mind’?”
The kids knew better than to dismiss his spontaneous choice of that expression as just a handy cliché. They sobered up at once, and Josh had the grace to look abashed. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry, Jen. I said I wanted to know why they scared me, but probably I’d really rather not.”
“It’s okay, I don’t blame you. Actually, I was going to say that the light might symbolize intelligence. I can’t tell if it’s just visible through the top or streaming out the top, but I guess you’re saying it’s streaming?” He nodded, somewhat uncertainly. Jen said, “I don’t really have anything helpful on that, I guess. I don’t get why it’s streaming out.”
“Trepanning?” somebody suggested, and everyone laughed again. “I’ll try to keep an open mind about it,” Josh said, deadpan, and even Jen grinned. They were getting tired, and running out of time.
But the comments weren’t coalescing, and the next few didn’t change that. The menacing figures reminded Rick Kao of a set of Star Wars Legos his dad had passed down to him; they came with instructions for building a small spacecraft that had just the sort of blocky angularity as the one in Josh’s painting—the only craft, if that’s what it was, that hadn’t simply been suggested by a few brushstrokes and dots of light. But Josh said no, he had never played with Legos. “Too right-brain for me, I reckon. Tim,” tapping the other figure, “always had a bunch of them all over the floor, my mom was always yelling at him to pick them up, but, you know, all bright cheerful colors, red and yellow and blue and like that. No black.”
“Where’s Tim now?” Yancey asked.
“Engineering school.” This evoked more laughter. Emily said, “You guys should switch places in the picture, if the one on the left is supposed to be you.”
Claudia saw the tethers or tentacles as umbilical cords—Bob was surprised nobody had brought up that possibility right at the beginning—and wondered if an underwater setting, combined with Josh’s blissful feelings and reference to ‘the mother ship,’ suggested a memory in utero. “If it were my dream, those black things would be forceps,” she said. Bob watched the class struggle not to crack up again and earn another reprimand, then look nonplussed when Josh informed them that he and his brother were in fact fraternal twins.
That was everybody. “Does anyone want to add anything?” Nobody did; they were all ready for the class to be over. Bob said, “Okay, Josh, did any of this resonate for you? Any ‘Aha!’ moments?”
“Mainly the underwater thing. I was so sure we were in space. I can start there.”
Bob pushed back his chair. “We’re out of time, but stay put for another minute.” The people sliding notebooks into backpacks and satchels and pulling on outerwear reluctantly stopped doing those things and gave him their attention. “Couple of points. You did a good job with this in terms of receptiveness to the images and feelings; I’ll just add a few thoughts that didn’t come out in the discussion. One: the source of light in the painting is from above the ship. That’s why the top and brim, and the two figures, are lit the way they are.” Josh was nodding vigorously and looking as if this thought had only just dawned on him, despite having lighted the painting that way himself. “And David mentioned the foggy sphere of light around the scene, the way it doesn’t fill out the whole frame. I’m curious about how light is working here in general. And two: that little Lego shuttle seems like a child’s idea of frightening. Didn’t somebody mention a jack-o’-lantern? It strikes me that way too—for one thing, those yellow spots that look like eyes or headlights aren’t projecting any beams. If this were my nightmare, and I woke up terrified, I’d wonder if the terror didn’t hark back to my childhood. And I would certainly revisit the dream with a couple of trackers and demand that the shuttle tell me why it was coming for me.”
Josh’s shoulders sagged. He looked around the table at six classmates champing at the bit, and made an apologetic face. “I’ll have to go back in before I try to write this up, that’s obvious, so—I hate to ask, I know everybody’s got papers and finals, so do I!—but can anybody help me out with this in the next day or two?”
The students were all sophomores or juniors and were skilled at dream reentry, but nobody wanted extra work so close to the end of the semester, even knowing they would get credit for it and that soon enough they might have to call on Josh to help them in the same way. There was an awkward pause. Then Jen said, “I guess I could do it. But ideally shouldn’t you also have somebody who picked up on the water idea?”
“I can squeeze it in,” Emily said. “Not tonight though, I’ve got a precog paper due tomorrow. I’m free after that class though.”
“Meet up and make arrangements,” Bob said. “The rest of you can go.”
The Center for Dream Research, affiliated with the Psychology Department of the University of Pennsylvania, had been established eleven years earlier, in 2033, during the furor following the assassination of President Finley. Dreams and dreaming had been studied scientifically for many years before that, but science grapples confidently only with what it can quantify. Sleep labs were comfortable defining the various sleep states, logging what people said they were dreaming if you woke them up during REM sleep, even recording whether the reported dreams were said to be cheerful or disturbing, despite having no way to confirm the subjects’ reports independently. But whether or not dreams meant anything was beyond the ability of statistical studies to determine; and the work of scientists willing to think outside the statistical box was not widely respected.
In the meantime, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists went right on treating patients’ dreams as though they could be interpreted meaningfully; and since the patients went right on getting better as a result, being unable to prove scientifically that dreams had meaningful content was not felt by therapists to be a problem. How to interpret the content of dreams was an argument that went back to Freud and Jung—and before them at least as far as Joseph and Pharaoh, the sheaves of wheat and the seven fat and lean cows—but that there was something to interpret they took to be a given.
The wilder claims for what happened to people in the dreaming state—out-of-body travel, precognition, communication with the dead, and so on—occupied a twilight zone that neither the hard nor the soft sciences had cared to engage with. Such paranormal phenomena belonged to a shamanic tradition stretching back many thousands of years, and both groups generally viewed that in the light of primitive superstition. This despite a wealth of anecdotal evidence that many intelligent modern people found intriguing enough to be worth looking into. Books were written, websites constructed, lectures given, documentary films made, workshops and conferences convened, all more or less beneath the notice of institutions like the Stanford Center for Sleep Medicine and the Psych Department at Penn.
The Finley assassination changed all that. In the weeks before Geoffrey Gentry pulled the trigger and killed the American president, the various dream sites were flooded with reports that the assassination was about to take place. Many gave such details as place and circumstance, description of the shooter, where the bullet would strike, the motive behind the act—everything but the actual date. The various gurus behind the sites tried without success to bring this unprecedented flood of dream reports to the attention of government authorities, with no success whatever. Time went by. And then one day Gentry fired his gun. Many details from the dream sites were shown to match those of the event, and finally the authorities had to pay attention.