Dreams

by Richard A. Lupoff

  Walter and Milton helped her to sit up. She blinked, a puzzled expression on her face, then smiled and greeted her boyfriend and her brother.

  Leaning on their arms to steady herself, she stood up. She looked at her desk and said, "What's this?"

  By this she referred to a sketch pad and Ticonderoga Number One pencil that lay near the Primal Atom snow globe. On the top sheet of the pad there was a drawing of a jagged landscape. Tall rocks rose into a black sky studded with uncounted stars. In the distance, so small as to be almost indiscernible, stood what seemed to be a city. If city was the right term. The image was tiny. Either the city was very far from the viewpoint of the artist or it was a very, very, very small city. There was no way of telling.

  Olga held the sketch pad and gazed at the picture. "I was there," she said.

  "Did you draw that?" her boyfriend, Walter, asked.

  Olga shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. I don't remember drawing it."

  "But you said you were there," her brother Milton put in.

  "I was."

  Walter said, "You must have fallen asleep. You were sleeping a minute ago. Do you think you could have made the drawing from a dream?"

  Olga shook her head. "I wasn't dreaming."

  Walter and Milton waited for her to continue.

  "At least, I don't think I was dreaming. I mean—it was so real. I was there. The heavens, the sky, it was beautiful. I've never seen so many stars at once. It was as if—as if I was standing in a cluster of stars close to the center of the galaxy."

  "If you were there you would have been gobbled up by a black hole," Milton said.

  "Well—" Olga shrugged—"well, whatever happened. It was fun. Even if it was just a dream. Even if I drew that picture in my sleep."

  She dropped the sketch pad on her desk. She turned to her boyfriend and smiled. "Did you say a picnic? Sandwiches and brew? Sounds great to me."

  And that would have been the end of the matter if Olga hadn't made another drawing a few days later. Again, the scene was an alien world. Again, the rocks rose jaggedly to tower overhead. Again, there was a city. This time the city was closer and you could make out the buildings a little bit. They were strange. If you'd studied non-Euclidean geometry you might be able to make heads or tails of them. And there appeared to be figures moving among the buildings.

  A few days later, wearing her plain Olga Smith outfit of blue jeans and Humboldt State Lumberjacks sweatshirt, Olga dropped in at the café where she had once waited tables. She ordered a latté and a Danish pastry and she was quietly enjoying her snack when Robyn Marten appeared and asked if she felt like company.

  Olga said, "Sure, take a load off."

  They exchanged small talk for a while and Olga mentioned her odd dream drawings. Robyn asked if Olga ever participated in the scenes she drew. Did she walk around? Did she pick things up and examine them? Did she ever visit the distant city or talk with its inhabitants?

  No to everything. She just saw what she drew. Drew what she saw. Whichever.

  But that set Olga to thinking. She had a class on her schedule that night, and when her students arrived she set out a bowl of fresh fruit and served clear herb tea and talked about automatic writing. Everybody from William Shakespeare to Helena Blavatsky to Margaret Mitchell to Mickey Spillane, it seemed, had dictated important works from the Other Side of the Great Divide. Alas, none of these had stood up to the scrutiny of scholars and critics, but maybe there was something to it. Who knew?

  Madame Olga—turbaned and be-robed now—gave some hints about placing oneself in a receptive state, opening one's mind to the departed author, and attempting to achieve a creative trance. Oh, and keep a supply or pencils and paper handy.

  One student asked if anybody had ever achieved automatic writing on a typewriter or computer keyboard or dictating machine. Madame Olga intoned that all things were possible. Why not give it a try?

  After the students had finished their tea and fruit and departed for the evening, Olga decided to give it a try herself. She laid out not merely a pad and pencils but a set of pastels on her desk, drew the curtains of her trance room (even though it was night) and sat staring into the Primal Atom.

  When she awakened she tried to sort out the dreams she had had during the night. She drew back the curtains. It was broad daylight. Her mind was filled with a jumble of images. Strange scenes, not merely of the dream world she had previously drawn but of one world after another. Worlds of water. Worlds of swirling gases. Worlds of endlessly cascading rocks. Worlds of glaciers and worlds of endless storms.

  Every world she had dreamed of was inhabited.

  She dreamed of creatures living on asteroids, tumbling endlessly in their progression around single suns and double stars and complex groups of stars that danced endlessly around one another. She dreamed of creatures of immeasurably fine gas, swirling endlessly and consciously, definitely consciously, in the incredibly thin and cold vacuum between the galaxies. Some of them were suggestive of sea creatures. Some might have been intelligent plants that communicated with complex sequences and blends of pheromones. Or maybe not.

  She knew their thoughts, and their thoughts were beautiful. And ineffable.

  Did she believe that all this was real? Well, it's about time to reveal the fact that the neatly dressed teen-aged girl who took the negative side in the high school debate in Wheaton, Illinois, was none other than Olga Smith.

  Sometimes skeptics snap and become fanatical believers. Or vice versa. That didn't happen with Olga. She just went from total disbelief to a kind of mild agnosticism to—well, how could she deny her own experience?

  And she had used the pastels. In a single night she had covered page after page of her sketch pad with colorful drawings of alien scenes and alien cities and, most notably of all, alien beings. They weren't little green men or hairless humanoids with shiny oblong eyes or any of the familiar images of aliens.

  They were totally unlike one another and they were totally unlike human beings.

  Olga phoned her friend Robyn Marten. Robyn came over to Olga's house and looked at the pictures. They were remarkable, Robyn announced. She was something of a science fiction buff, had a shelf of paperbacks in her apartment, followed several TV series and tried to catch every science fiction film that reached either the big or small screen, no matter how bad it might be. She called it her guilty pleasure.

  Robyn looked over Olga's drawings. By now there were enough of them to fill a portfolio. The black-and-white images were the earliest ones, and were mostly landscapes. The more recent ones placed greater emphasis on alien life forms. Robyn was fascinated. She asked Olga if she might make copies of them with her digital camera, some with the artist in the picture as well, wearing her full Madame Olga regalia.

  With the images she'd snapped, Robyn wrote up a feature and got in touch with a friend of hers, a CNN stringer, who came out to Olga's house and shot a feature story for the World's Most Trusted News Source. The Arcata Argus ran Robyn's story on page one, complete with a particularly intriguing pastel of a creature that seemed to be made of varicolored ice cubes.

  The day after the story ran on CNN (and in the Arcata Argus) Olga had a phone call from a NASA scientist at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He invited Olga to pack up her drawings and come to visit the NASA installation in Mountain View, a community just south of San Francisco, all expenses paid, of course.

  Olga declined the invitation, but told the scientist he was welcome to visit her in Arcata if he wished. He accepted the invitation.

  His name was Jaskaran Singh, D.Sc., Ph.D. He drove an all-electric modified Toyota Prius and wore a turban quite different from Olga's and a miniature sword attached to his belt. His English was flawless.

  At Dr. Singh's request Olga brought out her portfolio of drawings and permitted her visitor to examine them. He then asked her to describe the experience in which she made the drawings. He nodded understandingly as Olga answered his question
s.

  Finally, though, Olga had a question for Dr. Singh. She worded it diplomatically but in effect it was, Why are you interested in my drawings?

  Dr. Singh sorted through the drawings until he found the one he was looking for and laid it on the table. They were sitting in the dining room of Olga's house. Her trance room would have been too cramped for their meeting.

  "You see this odd rock configuration?" Dr. Singh asked. He was pointing to a very peculiar formation, something like the intriguing plateaus found in northern Arizona.

  Olga said, "I was there."

  "You mean, in your dream?"

  "Perhaps."

  "I don't understand. I thought these were dream images."

  Olga said, "I thought so, too, at first. But the experiences are so realistic, I think they may be something more than dreams."

  Dr. Singh smiled. "I'm not qualified in psychology, Miss Smith, but I know that dreams can be extremely convincing. Most remarkably so. People sometimes awaken and find themselves confused as to where they are, because they have been elsewhere, as it were, in a very realistic dream."

  Olga said, "That might be. But what's so special about this drawing?"

  "What you have drawn is an actual rock formation on Mars. We have images from our ground rovers. And I don't think you could have imagined that formation."

  "Well, maybe I saw it on TV or in a magazine."

  "No. We have millions of images of Mars now, and we try to release only those of the greatest scientific value or general interest to the public. I know this image. I have a printout of it in my car, if you'd like to see it."

  "But why is it so important?" Olga asked.

  Dr. Singh exhaled and nodded. "For two reasons, Miss Smith. First, that is such an odd formation, I don't understand how you could have made your drawing without seeing it, and yet I don't have any idea how you could have seen it. And second, you have put water in your drawing, clouds in the sky, plant life along the shoreline, and a boat on the water with—with—I'm afraid I'll have call him—if it is a him—a Martian in the boat."

  Olga managed a nervous laugh. "Then I guess it was a dream. Even I know there are no lakes on Mars, and certainly no plants or—or—Martians."

  Dr. Singh rubbed his jaw. "We're learning a lot about Mars, Miss Smith. We have strong evidence that there was once plenty of water on Mars. Rivers and seas, yes. Percival Lowell and Giovanni Schiaparelli may have been right, and all the skeptics of the past century, wrong. And if you saw what you drew—"

  He stopped.

  After a while, Olga Smith said, "If I saw what I drew—what, Dr. Singh?"

  "I don't know. Astral projection? Second sight? Remote viewing? Conscious time-travel? Each explanation is more far-fetched than the last." After a pause he said, "I wish I could convince you to come back to Mountain View with me. We can assemble a team to try and figure this out. If you are able to travel—or, at any rate, to 'see'—across vast distances of time and space, this could be one of the most amazing tools for research ever discovered."

  Long story short, Olga closed up shop in Arcata. Strictly temporarily. She liked that town, she had friends there. She had found a home in Arcata, which she had never done in Wheaton or Chicago or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle or either Vancouver. Walter Macintosh agreed to accompany her to Mountain View. He drove his own car, a lovingly restored 1966 Volvo 544. Olga's brother Milton agreed to stay in the Arcata house until Olga returned.

  And in Mountain View, nothing happened. The astronomers were fascinated by Olga's drawings, the psychologists interviewed her endlessly. But nothing happened.

  She did meet some interesting and very nice people. The chief headshrinker was the blackest woman she'd ever encountered. Her name was Pamela Snowden. The top mathematician and computer genius looked like a down-on-his-luck professional wrestler badly in need of a shave and a shower. He introduced himself as Biff McGurk. There just happened to be a book lying on a nearby table. Olga read the stamping on the spine. Inverse Multidimensional Matrix Inversion and Analysis Techniques for Universal Platform Transforms, by Eldon M. J. McGurk, Ph.D., D.Sc.

  Who said that NASA scientists were a humorless bunch?

  Olga had brought her Primal Atom snow globe with her, and all of her Dietrich Buxtehude CDs. The NASA people did their best to re-create Olga's trance room, and truth be told they did a remarkably good job of it. They even rounded up some packages of the kind of incense that Olga had used in Arcata.

  Nothing happened.

  So it was Thanks very much, Miss Smith, and Please stay in touch, Miss Smith, and Of course we'll pay all expenses and even give you a consulting fee out of our discretionary budget, Miss Smith, and Walter Macintosh and Olga Smith rode back from Mountain View to Arcata, California, a picturesque but demanding drive, and Madame Olga was back in business.

  But that isn't the end of the story.

  Olga and Walter resumed their pleasant lives in Arcata. Milton decided that he wanted to be a software designer and enrolled at Humboldt State. Two more of Olga's siblings, the twins Anna and Hannah, made their way to the West Coast and took up residence in the growing community of Madame Olga's family. They were only kids, eleven years of age, in fact, but the elder Smiths had by now reconciled themselves to Olga's having become the de facto mater familias of the Smith demesne.

  And Olga continued to play Buxtehude recordings and gaze into her Primal Atom snow globe and produce amazing drawings of exotic scenes and alien beings. She bought a digital camera and took photos of her drawings and sent them to Jaskaran Singh by email.

  Things went along tranquilly until the morning Olga's phone rang and an excited Jaskaran Singh told her that she had produced another drawing of a real place. It was Enceladus. Olga said she'd never heard of Enceladus. Dr. Singh said it was one of the moons of Saturn. It was believed to be warmed by tidal forces and to be geologically active.

  Olga wasn't sure why Dr. Singh was telling her this.

  He said, "You have drawn a picture of a village—I suppose we should call it a village—on Enceladus, and of the inhabitants of that village, who apparently resemble upright bipeds covered with a leafy exoskeleton. And they are looking upward. And in the sky above them you have placed a crewless scientific probe with NASA insignia."

  Olga smiled. "That one, I will confess, has to be a dream. Don't you think so?"

  "Miss Smith, the probe that you drew has yet to be activated. It's here in Mountain View right now. There's plenty of work still to be done on it. It should be completed and tested within the next year. It's scheduled to be shipped by rail to Florida and launched from Cape Canaveral. And the trip to Saturn—to Enceladus—will take another six years."

  Olga held her breath, waiting for Jaskaran Singh to continue.

  "It appears, Miss Smith, that you have not only drawn a scene on a world several hundred million miles from Earth. But the event you have drawn will not take place for seven years. It appears that you can see the future."

  Dr. Singh definitely sounded breathless.

  "Your Martian image was almost certainly of a moment from the remote past. That's remarkable enough. But your image of Enceladus is a vision of the future. That's more than remarkable. It's astonishing. It is going to shake the scientific world to its very foundations."

  Olga said, "I hope you're not going to ask me to leave Arcata again."

  Dr. Singh said, "No. That was a hard lesson. Your power—I suppose we have to call it that—your power operates in Arcata but not in Mountain View. But what I would like to do—several of my colleagues and I, members of the team you met when you were here—what we'd like to do is see if anyone else can do the same things you do. And also see which variables have an effect on your performance."

  "Variables? What variables?"

  "Well, for instance, is the music vital to your visions? Would you have the same experiences in a silent room?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Nor I. But suppose the choice o
f music, the selection, had an effect on your power? Would Haydn do as well as Buxtehude? What about, oh, Scarlatti? Or Ralph Vaughan Williams? Do you see what I mean?"

  She did.

  A week later a van pulled up to Madame Olga's House of Mystery in Arcata, California. Out poured the scientists and technicians and their support crew. Equipment you wouldn't believe, ranging from electroencephalographs to two- and three-dimensional imaging systems, to an array of computers that would set Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to playing rock-paper-scissors for who gets to tinker with them first.

  Olga wasn't exactly happy about all this. She'd fled the world of Wheaton, Illinois, because she felt out of place in those surroundings. She'd sampled half a dozen cities from Chicago to Los Angeles to Vancouver (both Vancouvers, right) and not wanted to live in any of them. But if Olga wouldn't come to the big city, it looked as if the big city was coming to Olga, and she didn't care much for it.

  She kept her friends in Arcata and she kept her classes going, more because they relaxed her than because she needed her students' fees. Maybe she should move out of Arcata, find a place in a smaller town nearby. Her friend Robyn Marten actually lived in Fickle Hill, and Walter Macintosh had a place in The Bottoms.

  But if Olga moved, she knew that Jaskaran Singh and his NASA colleagues would only follow. So she laid down the law about ground rules in Madame Olga's House of Mystery and vowed to make the best of it. She was in favor of science, after all, and if she truly had an unusual, even unique power, she felt that she ought to cooperate with the researchers from Mountain View.

  The first experiment involved setting up conditions identical to the ones that had produced her drawings, but without music.

  Nothing.

  Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti, Hildegard von Bingen. She loved the music. She even had some pleasant dreams. But no drawings.

  Okay, bring back Buxtehude.

  First try, a beautiful vision of a triple star. Red, white, and blue, no less. Dozens of planets, weaving in an intricate cosmic dance. And objects moving among them that looked more like living beings than artifacts.