REM Shots

Speculative fiction: Part II of IV of the Detem Cycle: Dream a little dream of somebody’s dream

“Why do they call it the Crazy Horse project?”

“Because it’s been going on so long.”

Caity looked at the graffiti every time she came into the lab. She knew it had become a tradition, but it was also history, context, and background. Half a decade of grad students, plucked from a variety of fields, each knowing a part of the project, each seeing it differently. They weren’t all into word games, but it seemed that way when someone looked at the graffiti board. She hoped to add her own, but she hadn’t found the one she liked yet.

“We weren’t plucked; we were skinned.” That was one candidate. They weren’t picked individually so much as ripped, painfully, from their specialties, used for a couple of years before moving on to psychology, linguistics, large language modeling, or whatever they’d honed in the Dream Lab.

Not for the first time, she reminded herself that graffiti was “they” and not “it.” Each bon mot on the wall was a graffito.

“It’s asurreal,” one side of her brain said, and the other answered, “A surreal what?” Maybe that would be her contribution to the wall. She’d coined the word to explain the real side of the project. The dream side was surreal. That’s what it meant. The real side was not surreal, surrealist, surrealistic, or even surrealistical. Nothing wrong with any of those, so it wasn’t anti-surreal. But it was a-surreal. One side came up with the dream, surreal by definition, and the other made it asurreal, which wasn’t the same thing as real. At least not in the dream lab.

The graffiti were real. They were all the things people had said to try making sense out of the lab. The plaster logo was surreal. A closed eye with a few stylized zip ribbons. She’d learned to call them that, those lines that indicated motion in a cartoon or comic. They were all that remained around the closed eye in the logo. Nothing remained to say or show what had moved. Five of them were evenly spaced around the logo. In four of them the lines showed the motion bouncing off a rough curve, not drawn but suggested by the bounces. The fifth, one of the two on the right, came toward the eye. It had made it through the curve, but there was nothing to tell why, or to show what it was that had made it.

She dropped her backpack at her station. It was a small table, a little bigger than a coffee table, but high enough to use for a desk. A half-empty two-drawer file cabinet gave her more surface area if she needed it. Mostly it gave her an empty drawer for her backpack when she got tired of seeing it cluttering her table. The makeshift furnishings were another tradition of the lab. The public facing reception area was decorated like a high-end law firm’s office, but the lab’s money all went into processing power and electricity.

Caity booted her computer and looked at her to-do list. There was a series of small procedures to debug and a list of equations to double-check before they were coded. The longest task might take 15 minutes. Enough of them would get her into her groove, into a flow state that would let her dive into a swamp of code with her brain racing, swimming through the muck and the weeds until she came up beside a lily pad with a codified dream in her teeth. Metaphorically.

Unless something unusual happened like Madison and Larry coming straight to her station when they showed up a few minutes after she did. She found herself analyzing them. They weren’t subjects, and they hadn’t been dreaming, but the habit died hard. They hadn’t slept. She didn’t know if they were a couple, but she still knew the lack of sleep wasn’t from romance or sex. It was from work. Their eyes were red, not from drink but from eyestrain.

“What kept you up?” she asked. They glanced at each other, not sure which once should tell the story. Not necessarily a bad thing, for them. It gave them another second of having the secret just between the two of them.

“We’re ready to pro-act,” Larry finally said.

They waited two beats for her reaction. It took her that long to catch that they were waiting for one.

“Tell me more,” Caity said. She’d heard them, but she’d heard it before.

“OK, we’ve measured the physiological responses our subjects have when they’re dreaming,” Larry said. “And we’d matched that to their descriptions of the dreams when they wake up.”

Madison continued the description, too excited to wait. “And we’ve tried to incite particular dreams or topics by manipulating external stimuli to create the same responses.”

“I do know all that,” Caity said as gently as she could. “But what takes us from react to pro-act?”

They looked at each other for a second. Last chance to back out? Fear they’d sound silly? Or just enjoying the suspense?

“We want to try dreaming together,” Madison said.

She hadn’t heard that before.

“How would that work?” Caity asked.

“We’d reverse the Coll-Sen data,” Madison said.

It took Caity a moment to adjust.

“Is that what you called collection sensors at your old job?” she asked. Madison drew in a sharp breath and looked at Larry for help, but he didn’t seem to know what she needed help with.

“Never mind,” Caity said, sorry she’d asked. She thought it was a casual question, but she knew it might breach the NDA Madison had to sign on the other project. “How would we reverse it?”

Madison rushed on, looking relieved that her old job was no longer part of the discussion. “They’re also sold as Detems, detector-emitters. They can be arrayed so that one set gives off whatever the other one picks up.”

Caity held up a finger to tell them to wait.

“Ok, going from memory,” she said. “They’re considered safe as Coll-Sens because we’re not 100 percent sure what they sense and collect. The emitter function, if I recall, is mostly used in security applications. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Madison said. “It’s pretty simple programming. Once one sensor detects something, it can ask another if it’s seen the same thing or even tell the other sensor it’s seen it.”

“You make them sound like they’re alive,” Caity said.

Madison looked to Larry for help.

“They idea is to make them think they are,” he said.

—

“It doesn’t matter if you can make the machine think,” the lawyer, McCann, was saying. “The responsibility will still rest with the person who tells it what to do.”

“The machines don’t really think,” Caity said. “It’s just an expression. The idea is to give the machine enough background information and make it perform fast enough that it appears to think. What I was more wondering about was the person you refer to. Who exactly is it?”

“Who would you say it is? I’ll tell you what I think, but, worst-case, what would I be defending if something went wrong and this wound up in litigation?”

Caity felt herself counting the seconds of silence, and the counting itself took attention away from being able to answer. If something went wrong? What was the something? They were closer than they’d been, and Madison and Larry’s idea was the step that brought them there. But that didn’t answer the question of what the something was and how to defend it?

“I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s an honest answer,” he said, but Caity had already given herself credit for that. “The devices will be attached to a computer running a program. Somebody will have to put the devices on their heads, and somebody will have to tell the program to run. Is that it in a nutshell?”

“Yes, sort of . It’s not that simple, but . . .”

She paused long enough for him to finish the sentence.

“But it can be for legal purposes.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.

“That’s what I can defend,” McCann said. “But what is the worst case? What can go wrong?”

“That’s part of the problem. I mean, really, what can go right is only theoretical. We want to be able to cause a certain type of dream in a particular person to the extent that it can be used for therapeutic purposes. Remove nightmares, lessen anxiety, if possible. Create refreshing dreams, particularly in insomniacs.” Caity realized she was speaking rapidly, as if she were giving an elevator pitch. She took a breath and reminded herself she didn’t have to sell the attorney. He already worked for the lab.

“The worst case is if we don’t affect the subject’s dreams at all,” she said. “But that’s not what you’re asking, I don’t think. Truly worst case is some sort of mental injury to the subject.”

“Can the Detems do that?”

“We don’t know.”

“But you’re going to put them on somebody’s head?”

“No. They’re going to put the devices on their own heads.”

—

“So we’re just going to slap a Delmet on somebody, reverse the . . . the polarity on it, and see what happens?” Dr. Whitehill was asking, with his tone letting everyone around the table know how good an idea he thought that was.

Caity wondered where to start. First, she hated the name Delmet, for Detem Helmet. Second, going from detect to emit had nothing to do with poles or polarity. Third, the time to attach all the sensors, including the helmet, did not involve any slapping.

“That’s essentially it, in concept,” she said, adding to herself that they might or might not see, much less know, what happened. “We have two volunteers willing to test the process, and we have the protocols in place from the other tests we’ve run. We know what danger signals to watch for, and when to shut off the test if need be.”

“You haven’t convinced me,” Whitehill said. Caity had already done a nose count of committee members, and knew they’d go ahead without his vote. So the goal was to wear him out, not convince him. She nodded to Vinson, the math professor across the table from her.

“The Detems, as I understand it, detect unspecified and unclassified energy emission and can be programmed to duplicate and emit the same energy. Have those emissions been pointed at a human before?”

Caity glanced at Madison, who gave a movement of her shoulders that could have been a shrug or a spasm.

“Not that we know of. But we do know there’s no recorded instance of their emitting anything other than what they collected. So nothing will be directed back at a subject that hasn’t come directly from another subject.”

Vinson nodded, but Whitehill didn’t.

“So you think you could put . . . sweat from one person into another? What does that argument mean?”

“The comparison isn’t quite accurate,” Vinson said, because he was too polite to go further. “The devices don’t relay anything physical between the subjects, who are strictly volunteers.”

There was a pause. Whitehill, fortunately, didn’t discuss, but spoke in pronouncements, seething between them because the last one hadn’t been accepted. Someone, perhaps Vinson, had told her Whitehill was on the university’s original technology committee because he was the only one with an email address then that wasn’t AOL. Tech decisions were made now by network engineers, but the committee remained, with Whitehill representing the English department on the redundant tech committee, and representing that committee on the Dream Lab oversight panel.

Vinson had concluded his history by saying, “One of many examples of the difference between what we’d do if we started from scratch and what has happened ‘organically.’” He bracketed the final word with air quotes.

The formal part of the discussion had paused while the people around the table chatted with one another, quietly enough that there was only a murmur. Caity noticed those beside Whitehill each spoke with the person on the other side of them. Vinson brought them back.

“I feel like we have enough of a consensus that we don’t really need a vote,” he said. “Despite some mild reservations, I think we all trust Caity and her team to make a safe decision, especially if this moves the project forward as much as we have reason to hope.”

Whitehill may have said something, perhaps “All right,” as he stood up and left the room. The others took that as a signal. They gathered their things and left less abruptly. Vinson hung back to chat.

“How sure are you about this latest attempt?” he asked Caity.

“I think it’s safe,” she said. “But as far as whether it will work, my optimism may come from how long since we’ve had a breakthrough. We’ve learned a lot about dreaming and sleep, but not what causes particular dreams. And I guess I’m starting to worry about the asurreal side, mostly the funding.”

“That’s not a concern until the next cycle. The state still uses two-year budgets and you have some strong champions in the capitol building. So you’re safe for the next academic year, giving you eighteen months at least to produce a result or a publication.”

Caity tried not to visibly sigh. It was too close to a surrender. Still, she had to take this chance to express her concerns. A casual discussion after a meeting kept it casual. Meeting in one of their offices or for coffee would make it too formal.

“Last year’s paper, the one about whether dreams made depression better or worse, is the last real progress we’ve made. And that one mostly focused on the uncertainty of either. Could we classify dreams and choose one type as a therapy? We couldn’t even answer that. Are we stuck, Vin?”

“Not necessarily. One interpretation of Kingsley is that he was looking at the next step after dreaming, that dreaming was the only path to that level. You’ve probably gone further down that path than anyone has done in a non-mystical way. I won’t say there’s no mystical component to it, but it’s the most mathematical approach to dreaming that we know of.”

Caity hoped she wasn’t getting too much encouragement from Vinson’s pep talk.

“Can you use that to convince Whitehill?” she asked.

They shared a laugh. “I doubt it,” he said. “He thinks of math as a finite resource for counting prepositions in Shakespeare’s later tragedies. Any other application he’s afraid will use it up.”

“Wish me luck on this next test,” she said. “And promise me a good job reference if we kill off one of the subjects.”

—

Caity remembered the conversation as they prepared the Delmets for Madison and Larry. At least if the worst happened, the Dream Lab would save their salaries, she thought. Not that she expected that result. If something negative happened, nobody had ever gone to it more willingly. Their eagerness extended to signing the extra releases the attorney suggested. They read over-written sections to one another and giggled as if what they were reading didn’t apply to them.

Caity knew better than to wonder if they were a couple outside the lab. Wondering implied an uncertainty that should be saved for the work. She tried instead to think of it as their having a social connection that enhanced their work. It kept her from having to write a memo for the file about it.

She wondered about the placement of the sensors on the heads of the two subjects. Three dozen 1-inch sensors, looking like nine dollars worth of quarters wired together, but did the detector on one match its corresponding emitter on the other? In the five years of the Dream Lab’s existence, it seemed every step forward had required adding a new specialty. Would they have to find a grad student studying phrenology?

Caity wasn’t optimistic about the night’s experiment. She knew it might lead somewhere, but it was too new to provide immediate results. The numbers seemed almost random. Most people forgot half of a dream after about ten minutes, the literature said. So the dream transfer - Larry was calling it the flip-flop - would begin when the Delmet said REM began. What it detected from Larry would be emitted to Madison, and after five minutes that would switch. After both five-minute transfers, the computer would shut off the program and the attendant would wake the subjects, unless she had dozed off. A mild anti-psychotic with a short half-life would help them doze, but would delay REM. An hour of watching the monitors show nothing interesting, then an alert that said dreaming had commenced, then a ten-minute countdown. Caity would watch them on a pair of large screens, looking for any sign of distress. The grad student, for privacy reasons, was only allowed to watch the numbers and charts.

The same numbers the attendant saw showed in a small box at the bottom of Caity’s screen, but she only watched Madison and Larry. She’d wake them at any sign of distress. At least that’s what the guidance said. As they gradually found that some of the strongest, most memorable dreams caused distress, the term was tightened to include only physical distress. Thrashing was not enough; the heart rate had to go up as well.

“Subject A REM sleep beginning,” intoned the attendant through Caity’s headphones. That was Larry. He stirred on the screen, but that was all. “Subject B REM sleep beginning,” the attendant said half a minute later. Caity scratched a note on her pad. One of the big questions going in was whether they’d both begin dreaming at one time, and whether REM sleep in one would spark it in the other. Had they gotten lucky, or was one dream guiding the other? They’d know in the wake-up interview. Madison was stirring now, sparking the next question? Would the contact with Larry’s Delmet be enough to wake her up?

Six of the Detems had been left on detector mode for each subject. The graphs from each one roughly matched the other, with Madison’s showing weaker, perhaps half of Larry’s. What happened next didn’t match. Larry rolled onto his right side, just as Madison rolled onto her left. Larry’s respiration and heart rate rose first, and Madison let out a low moan.

“Oh, crap,” Caity heard herself saying.

“What’s wrong?” the attendant’s voice came back. The attendant had only numbers, and couldn’t see or hear the subjects.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Caity said. “I thought I’d forgotten to write something down.”

It was a weak lie, but all the attendant needed to know was that nothing was wrong. Caity hoped she believed it. Caity thought about turning off the monitor. But it was for science, she thought. She closed her hand around her mic while she suppressed a giggle.

She watched the timer on the top corner of the screen. Both heartbeats accelerated for a couple of minutes, and then the rhythm of their breathing steadied and synchronized. If she were in the other room, at the other console, Caity thought, she could stop the flip-flop at five minutes and let them finishe what they’d clearly started. But from here she could only monitor and, if necessary, hit a virtual kill switch. The countdown to the flip-flop ended with a subtle shift. The active Subject B had brighter type on her screen while the other dulled. Madison shifted in her sleep and gave an audible grunt. Their breathing intensified, then synced again. Caity knew what they were dreaming about, but didn’t know whether she should do anything about it. Leave the program running and let them finish? Let it end and blame any resulting frustration on science? The problem was solved for her when their breathing and heart rates peaked together. With thirty seconds to go, they were both beginning to even out.

“Should I wake them?” the attendant asked. It took Caity a moment to realize she was asking whether she or Caity should do it. At first, she thought the question was whether to let them sleep.

“Wake Larry,” she said. “I’ll get Madison.”

Another thing they’d forgotten to add to the protocol: Who’d wake whom? With only one subject in past tests, it had never been an issue. They might have to add an attendant for two-subject tests.

Caity started the wake-up call, a soft bell sound, every second and a half, designed to wake the subject without the unwelcome surprise of a traditional alarm. She waited for Madison to sit up before coming into the cubicle where the bed was. The lights came up slowly. Everything was designed to wake the subject, but not too much. Caity put the laptop on the bedside table. It was already booted, the text file already open.

“You know the drill,” she said quietly.

Madison nodded. She looked around the room, then reached for the laptop.

Caity left as quietly as she’d come in. Madison’s job now was to record as much of the dream as she could. The laptop was like the notepads some people kept beside their beds to remember the inspirations that came to them in the night. The laptop worked better with some subjects, and direct interviews worked better with others. Caity knew this would be one for the laptop, assuming the network’s NSFW filters didn’t catch it. She wasn’t completely sure of the details of the dream, but she was certain she didn’t want to discuss it with two people she had to work with every day. She didn’t really want to read it, but she could try to imagine SubjectB1011 as some stranger they’d tested on Oct. 11 and not as anyone she knew.

——

“Don’t sweat it, unless you’re told to.” That was one of the graffiti, a reference to the sweats subjects were issued for sleepwear. The sweats could almost pass for street clothes among the age cohort of most of the volunteers. It was easier to wake up a stranger in sweats than one in pajamas.

Madison and Larry were still wearing their sweats when they met with Caity in the late morning. Maybe it was a show of solidarity over what they’d shared. Or maybe they hadn’t taken time to sleep, shower, and eat breakfast. Caity was glad she had. She didn’t worry about the two being late. It gave her time to review all of the notes and data from the test. She was glad she’d done that too, and that she’d taken the time to decide how to frame discussion of the test. She knew she had to start strong, to overcome what would otherwise be an awkward and possibly mealy-mouthed discussion.

“Madison, you have the best grasp of how the Detems work, so I want you to take the data analysis. That would include power fluctuations in both detector and emitter, when they match and don’t match, and at what parts of the recorded dreams the two are most in sync. Larry, you wrote the literature search on whether animals dream, as well as the one on lucid dreaming. Build a scale between those two things, maybe one for animal dreams, five for completely lucid dreams. Then try to map that to Madison’s data. Where was the dream controlled, and where was it stream of consciousness? Questions so far?”

“If I use up 500 sheets of paper on my part,” Larry said. “Can I call it a lucid ream?”

“Make sure that goes on the graffiti board,” Caity said. “For the record, do I have permission from both of you to let the other one see your dream narrative?”

Madison started to speak, then paused, then began again. “We can both see all the dream narratives anyway, can’t we?”

“Yes, but only with designators on them,” Caity said. “This time you’ll know specifically who the subject is. It’s a privacy issue.”

“Do we need to sign something?” Larry asked, suppressing what might be a smile. Caity suppressed what might be a sigh.

“Verbal should be enough,” she said.

“Okay,” Larry said.

“Yeah,” Madison said.

“All right. Do both of you understand what the goal is?”

They glanced at each other, then back at Caity. They knew what their goal had been, but not what hers was. She thought maybe they’d lost track of the big picture.

“The goal is to establish how much of each person’s dream was influenced by the other’s.” She watched the mixture of surprise and relief on their faces, and suppressed the urge to ask them what they thought the goal was.

—

Caity supposed it was sexist, or something, to call Madison in separately but not Larry to ask about the narratives. But she didn’t think anybody would complain.

“I feel funny about this because I know who the subjects are,” Caity said. “And I work with them every day. Nobody else looking at the narratives will know who the subjects are, but because I know you, I’ll give you the opportunity to pull yours out of the study if you’re uncomfortable with anything about it.”

Madison gave a slight shrug. Caity guessed she was reluctant to go either way. Pulling the narrative might take something away from the project, but leaving it could create some awkwardness, at the very least.

“It’s for science,” Madison finally said. “It’s the first test of the flip-flop so it seems like it would set a bad precedent to bowdlerize it.”

“There’s another precedent,” Caity said. “The subjects had a prior relationship and this will give us an idea of how much that enhances dual dreaming. Intuitively, we won’t get the same strong results and we can’t expect them to hold together at the flip-flop.”

“You mean when I got on top?” Madison said. She appeared to realize just as she said it that Caity hadn’t meant anything that specific.

“Throughout the narrative,” Caity said quickly. “But I think we won’t suppress the narrative. We’ll hold it until we have several dual dreaming experiences so that it doesn’t predominate any papers that come out of it.”

“Ok, good,” Madison said, apparently glad to be talking about just the science. “We did that with what we called the period pieces too, but I think we have enough narratives to correlate some data and publish.”

“I’m reluctant,” Caity said. “How periods impact dreaming will be one of the major mental health outcomes, but that paper could get us pigeon-holed as a women’s studies project. We should wait until we have more topics out there. Unless we can think of an equivalent male topic.”

Madison chuckled.

“I can’t think of one,” she said. “Unless it’s a swift kick in the crotch.”

“Only a man would think it’s worse,” Caity said. “But it doesn’t happen once a month or last a few days.”

“I can see the notice on the job board,” Madison said. “Need male subjects willing to be kicked in the balls until they puke. Buckets provided.”

“I’d read that paper,” Caity said. “Thanks for the OK on the narrative. Just so I’ll know, the dual dreaming was your idea, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But please don’t tell Larry.”

—

The science must be taking over, Caity thought as she looked at the documents she’d stacked on her desk. She’d gone through everything about the IFF, the initial flip-flop, feeling as if she were peering in someone’s bedroom window, but a second read and some note-taking gave her a more clinical look at it. She needed that for interpretation as much as for analysis. It helped her understand that “anticipation of reaction based on prior contact with the subject” meant they knew what they liked. Other language, not quite double-speak, made clear they more than halfway expected to dream what they did. Between the lines, between multiple lines, Caity saw that Larry and Madison were in the early stages of a relationship when a couple thought about each other constantly. Strengthened by their working together every day, those thoughts, that preoccupation, could be expected to bleed over into their dreams. Not that she could complain. It had led them to the breakthrough the Dream Lab had been after for six years. They had finally caused a particular dream to happen.

Caity was glad Madison OK’d the narrative. The first test of dual dreaming would probably be the most productive, at least until they had more samples.

Her third read of the materials included all the subsequent tests. They were a vague mirror of the original success. Of four tests, three had corresponding graphs of reactions and the presumed emotions that went with them. But none had matching dream narratives in the subjects’ logs.

“How long since you put the Delmet on yourself?” Vinson asked her over coffee in an off-campus shop.

“Two, maybe three years,” she said. “I could look it up. Why do you ask?”

“You’ve established that one subject can impact the dreams of another, correct?” She nodded. “But that only the first pair of subjects had the same dream.”

Another nod. Caity waited while he gazed through the faint steam rising from his coffee cup. He always ordered the venti, and asked for two inches room for cream. Baristas who weren’t used to him would look at him with surprise or ask for clarification. One had even tried to argue with him. He had explained to Caity that the coffee steamed longer when served that way, and had explained the physics of it. She took his word on it.

“Have you established if the two original subjects were both lucid dreaming at the time?” He asked.

“Yes,” she said. “We know that Subject A knew he was dreaming from about a minute or two into his half of the flip-flop. We think he was choosing his actions in the dream in the last minute or so. So it fit both the loose and the tight definitions of lucid dreaming.”

As he watched his steam, Caity thought about the contrast between Vinson and Whitehill. Vinson was grounded in rules of math established over centuries, but was always open to the next idea. He didn’t use a smartphone very much himself, but had an in-depth understanding of how his students used them. He walked to campus every day, but had studied the city’s traffic patterns. He barely touched his coffee, but paid extra to study the steam. Whitehill hated students’ smartphones and possibly the students themselves. He raged against modern literature, meaning anything after Dickens except Hemingway. He and Vinson were the anchors and tentpoles of the Dream Lab committee. One sniffed for possible objections like a cat seeking mouse holes. One looked for the possibilities in understanding dreaming.

“Did you lucid dream?” Vinson asked.

“Only once during the tests,” Caity said.

“Do you see where I’m going?” he said.

“I’m beginning to,” Caity said. “I should go under again with a goal of lucid dreaming. But I’m not sure who I’d want to be the other subject. Except for Madison and Larry, they’ve been blind tests. Nobody knows who they’re dreaming with.” Caity was thinking about the rabbit dream that sometimes came back to her. Until she figured it out, she didn’t want to take the chance of letting someone else into it.

“You could dream with yourself,” Vinson said.

—

They called them samples, but it seemed like they needed a different word. Samples made her picture a rack of test tubes, or microscope slides. But that wasn’t the case with dream samples. There was just the list of files on her screen. There was no lock on the lab door, no key for a cabinet. Just a password she had to change every two months. The files could be accessed by only a few people. In the lab. And a few in the IT department. And a talented hacker. If he could get to the server. Or the backup. Or the offsite data center.

Just a file, but it had the rabbit dream in it. Worthless gibberish unless someone had the narrative to go with it. Of course if they had the narrative, they wouldn’t need the dream file. One told what she’d dreamt. The other told what her blood pressure, respiration, brain waves, and sweat had done while she was dreaming it. Plus whatever it was that the Detems picked up.

Playing it back was simple. Set the trigger to start emitting to the Delmet a couple of minutes after REM sleep began. Then see what happened.

She was never sure who the rabbit was. She had her list of suspects. The first teacher who ever looked at her the wrong way. The preacher scolding them in Sunday school. The boy on the date who made her call a cab. She knew it was somebody who turned out to be somebody she didn’t know they were. She didn’t know why they showed up as a rabbit. That’s what made it a dream. That’s what made it surreal. She could almost recognize the voice when it looked up and said, “You again.”

She’d have to remember to write that in the narrative. That meant she was lucid. Not only that, but she knew she was lucid.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The rabbit looked up from the table. It was dealing cards. It held one, ready to hand it to a player shielded from her view by the rabbit’s green eyeshade. The eyeshade should keep the rabbit from seeing the player, not keep her from seeing them. The rabbit looked surprised.

“I’m not anybody,” it said.

“Yes, you are,” Caity said, or heard herself saying. “I can recognize your voice.”

“Then whose is it?” the rabbit asked.

“It’s yours,” she said. “Don’t you know who you are?”

“It’s your dream,” the rabbit said. “Not mine.”

Caity woke with a jerk. She sat up in bed, watched the blanket fall away, and wondered why it was still twisted around her arm. She looked and it took her a second to realize it was her sweats. She raised her arm above her head to straighten out the sleeve. She grabbed the laptop from the bedside table and began to type.

“The rabbit is just people I’ve had a bad experience, guys I’ve had a bad experience with, esp if they made me feel I’d done something wrong if I was sure I hadn’t. He’s nobody in particular; I wonder if he’ll still come back.”

She started typing the narrative next, before it faded. She’d replayed the Delmet files from a rabbit dream years before when she’d been a subject. She couldn’t remember how closely the new dream matched the old one, and she wondered what it would be the next time. Would the rabbit still show up now that she knew what it was?

—-

Vin’s coffee had quit steaming by the time Caity finished describing her dream and her history with the rabbit. But she knew he’d been paying attention.

“Do you feel relieved to know what it was about?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said. “Just a thing that’s over now. I need to talk to somebody in Psych to see if it’s worth a paper on its own. We’re not ready to go public yet with reversing the Detems.”

“So what’s the next step?” he asked.

“I thought you’d tell me,” she said, smiling. “It was your idea to play my own dream back to me.”

Vin stared at the front window of the shop. His eyes didn’t move when a person or car went by. Apparently it was a substitute for steam. This late in the semester, this early in the morning, there was a light frost along the edges of the windows.

“One of the members of the committee has been hearing stories about the latest progress,” he said.

“You mean beyond what’s in the monthly reports?”

“Somewhat,” Vin said. “A rumor is going round about a sexual nature to the Dream Lab.”

“Not surprising, I guess,” she said. “Non-disclosure and privacy aren’t always absolutes.” She hoped her voice didn’t give away her annoyance with Larry and/or Madison.

“The rumor is two-edged, obviously,” he said. “More attention, more curiosity could mean more interest in funding.”

“Enough that I could do it full time and not teach two classes?”

“Maybe. But you know what the other edge of the sword is. A single drop of sex could sully the entire project in the eyes of opportunist legislators.”

What a delicate way of putting it, Caity was thinking. Opportunists. Neither of them believed for a second that the people in question would believe what they were saying.

“You have a suggestion then? We were talking about the next step.”

“You might reach out to Whitehill,” he said.

“Whitehill?”

“He’s on a committee looking into saving traditional disciplines. They’ve been in touch with legislators about what the liberal arts can do to satisfy concerns about job creation. Too many in the statehouse think the purpose of college is to get a job, not to learn to think.”

“Do they know these are the liberal arts?”

“That’s why they’re calling them the traditional disciplines. Those people like traditions.”

“So, Whitehill?”

“He’s asked me how you choose subjects. I think he wants to go under.”

Caity took a deep breath. Whitehill’s objections at committee meetings bordered on disruption. Getting him inside the tent, so to speak, had its attractions. But his disruption wasn’t the only negative.

“I can imagine why, based on the reputation he has among women on campus,” she said. “He knows that dreaming in pairs is the only thing we’re doing right now.”

It was Vinson’s turn to sigh. “I can’t speak to his motivations. But other than the stories women tell, is there a solid ethical objection to letting him be a subject.”

The stories women tell. Another delicate way of putting things.

“He can be a subject,” Caity said. “Everything - timing, disclaimers, releases - will have to be the same as for everyone. And he can’t choose and won’t know who he’s paired with.”

“I think it’s worth it,” Vin said. “Are there any advantages in the project itself?”

“The older someone is, the more likely lucid dreaming is. He’s twenty years past the oldest subject we’ve had so far, so we’ll have a chance to test that.”

“I know you’re not fond of the politics,” Vinson said. “But to the people who think it matters, sometimes it’s the only thing.”

“Understood,” Caity said. “I feel that way about research.”

—

“Do you oversee all the tests?” Whitehill asked. “It must be exhausting being up this late all the time.”

“I’m not always here,” Caity said. “Maybe once or twice a month. But they told me you were having trouble falling asleep.” She didn’t see any need to tell him she’d been there every time, in the other subject room. She still had the ethical objections, based on the stories women told, but had no ethical issues with being paired with him or with not telling him who the other subject was.

“Yes, your medications have failed me,” he said. It wasn’t agreement, Caity noted. It was shifting the onus from him falling asleep to the lab’s pharmaceutical protocol.

“We’ve had that with other subjects,” Caity said. “But many of the usual sleep aids interfere with REM sleep. One of our projects if we increase funding enough is to study assisted sleep, but for now it’s too far outside our protocols. I wanted to suggest doubling the dosage of the sleep aid we use. There’s no danger in it. We’re using a tiny dose to begin with compared to some of the psychiatric uses.”

“Could the problem be with the subject I’m paired with?” he asked.

“Not a factor,” she said, trying to ignore the blame shifting. “You’re not actually paired until a few minutes after strong REM sleep begins. But for purposes of consistency, we’d double the dose for the other subject as well.” She saw no need to mention that she had to double it anyway to get past the reluctance to dream paired with him.

She took his nod as agreement, and left the room as the attendants got his sensors set up. She put on her own without help. Sleep came easily. She got up earlier and made a point of working out on days she planned to be a subject. Anything that enhanced natural sleep was a plus.

Later she’d wonder about, and consider how to judge, whether the memory of a dream owed more to its intensity or to its recorded narrative. She’d remember later how she reacted to the rabbit. When she first saw it, it was more as guide than as menace. There had been something about its stare that made it seem dangerous. Its eyes seemed softer now. It was sitting at a table, as it often was, dealing cards, solitaire this time.

“I want you to know that I appreciate you more now that I understand you,” she said. The rabbit blinked, and laid a queen on a king. She wondered if there were anyone else in the dream to hear what she was saying, and the thought let her know that she was lucid dreaming. She might be in charge of the dream, but didn’t know how far into it she was. There was a flip-flop coming, but there was no clock. The rabbit walked toward her, the same look on its face, the eyes unchanged, but somehow she knew it was smiling how. She smiled back, but felt the expression fade when the rabbit reached for her sweats.

She backed up a step, but the rabbit was just as close. He didn’t move, but he didn’t get any further away. He tugged on the sweats. They weren’t sweats. She was wearing a blouse. The buttons popped loose as the rabbit tugged. They flew past his head as he kept tugging. She noticed again the way one ear drooped. Again? Had it always been that way, or did she remember if from seconds before in the same dream. The buttons were still flying, like hail flying sideways instead of down. There were hundreds of them. He was still tugging. She backed up over his chair and the pieces of it crunched like straw under her feet. She hit the rabbit’s table and it splashed into the water it was floating on. The cards didn’t fall with the table, but followed the buttons flowing toward the rabbit. He was still tugging with one of something, a hand or a paw or or a fist, while the other one tried to swat the cards out of the way.

Caity looked back at her narrative days later. She remembered the attendant waking her up. She remembered typing. But she wasn’t sure if she remembered the dream or remembered what she had written.

Whitehill had refused to write the narrative. They had awakened him after ten minutes of REM, just as the protocol required. He had yelled at the attendant, complaining that he hadn’t finished the dream. When she read the attendant’s notes, she wondered if Whitehill had the same dream she did. She didn’t worry about him tearing her blouse. She had cards on under it. Clubs and hearts, she was pretty sure. But she wondered if Whitehill knew about the rabbit.

—

Vinson and Caity had let themselves into McCann’s office while he finished a phone call. There was no apparent problem with privacy, since he was answering whoever he was talking to with grunts and uh-huhs. Not that privacy meant as much in a lab where Whitehill had entered her dreams.

Vinson was looking at the painting on the wall as McCann hung up.

“Do you know what that is?” McCann asked. “It was already hanging there when I moved into this office.”

“It’s the painting the Dream Lab logo is based on,” Vinson explained. “The eye represents what the person dreaming can see, sort of. The things bouncing back are the things dreams protect us against, and the one getting through is the dream the lab puts into the subject’s mind.”

“Who painted it?” McCann asked.

“It would have been the second year of the project,” Caity said. “We had some of the subjects giving their dream narratives to art students who’d try to represent them. We were thinking of the possibility of somehow pushing images to the subjects. It wasn’t productive, but we did get this painting.”

“As for now,” McCann said. “It is productive, but you’re getting complications. Am I right?”

“Complications is one way of looking at it,” Vinson said.

“And there’s something you didn’t want to put in writing, I take it?”

“I just need to clarify what we think liabilities might be,” Caity said. “You read the reports on the Flip-Flop dream?”

“I did,” McCann said. “Essentially one subject imposing a dream on another. And tell me one more time what lucid dreaming is.”

“Basically when you know you’re dreaming while it’s going on,” Caity said. “Or even more so, when you begin to take intentional actions in the dream. That intent is what I’m wondering about. When we first talked about it, we didn’t know what the worst case might be. We might have an idea now. Specifically, we think one subject dreamt of sexually assaulting another, and the dream did transfer during the Flip-Flop.”

“So that’s why Whitehill wanted to be a subject,” McCann said.

“We’re not using any names,” Vinson said. “They’re just subjects with numbers and letters.”

“Just using it for perspective,” McCann said. “Lust in your heart breaks the Ten Commandments, but not any state statute. And a dream may be a wish your heart makes, but unless a fairy godmother is on the jury, it’s not a crime. If I were defending the subject, I’d say he only thought about it. He didn’t do anything.”

“That’s what I thought I’d hear,” Caity said.

“Defending he project means defending the attacker. I hope it wasn’t too disappointing,” McCann said.

“Au contraire,” Caity said. “It’s what I wanted to hear.”

She didn’t look at Vinson for his reaction, but she felt him looking at her oddly.

—-

Caity looked at the stack of paper in front of her and wondered if it was real. The paper was ready for submission, but academic gossip already had it ready for acceptance in at least two journals. Funding had been continued out of educational funds instead of grants. Her release time had been increased by four hours a term.

“This almost guarantees tenure,” she said to Madison. “It’s almost like we built the lab waiting for you to show up.”

“I wasn’t sure if it would work,” Madison said, although it sounded more like she still couldn’t believe it.

“I haven’t been able to follow the project as closely this past semester,” Vinson said. “Was it really just a case of letting them watch the same movies?”

Caity was expecting an angry or exasperated reply from Madison, but they’d both noticed Vinson’s puckish amusement as he said it.

“They watched wearing Delmets, and we matched the responses. We paired people with similar responses and were able to induce similar dreams in 65 percent of the pairs. We called back some of those pairs and used movies keyed to produce certain emotions. More lucid dreaming, more paired dreaming.”

“You can’t tell what they’re dreaming,” Vinson summarized. “But within limits, you can tell them to dream the same thing.”

“That’s a good way to phrase it,” Caity said. “And the closer to the same thing, the more likely lucid dreaming is. We don’t quite know why yet, but we have time to find out with the new funding and the new oversight board.”

“You won’t miss Dr. Whitehill, will you?” Vinson asked.

“I wish him a happy retirement,” Caity said. “But we are giving him a going away present.”

“That’s generous,” Vinson said. “A necktie? A watch?”

“We’re going to let him go under again,” Caity said. “I’ll be wearing the other Delmet, but as usual, he won’t know that. We think some of the pre-dream stimuli - the movies and some other - will make lucid dreaming happen.”

“Is there a specific goal in mind?” Vinson said.

“It’s a vague one, but we want to repeat some of the early tests with what we’ve learned since,” Caity said. “This will be one of them. Madison and Larry will be one of the others. Theirs will be the first repeat with known dual dreamers. We’ve had some pairs repeat, but the identities were still blind to each other.”

“I almost feel like congratulations are in order for you and Larry,” Vinson said.

“Don’t get ahead of us,” Madison said. “We’re exchanging Delmets, not rings.”

“What about you, Caity?” he asked. “What are you exchanging with Whitehill. I know you feel your earlier experience with him was just a shadow of his history with students. Is that a factor in repeating the experience?”

“I’ll admit I’m wondering what will happen. But whatever it is, I won’t be surprised this time.”

—

Caity felt the sleep meds kicking in and wriggled her toes against the blankets. She had every reason to believe she’d be the lucid dreamer, the leading partner in the dream dance. There was just one thought she wanted to hold on to as she dozed, and she didn’t really need shoes for that. She didn’t need a hat either, but the rabbit had one. Maybe it was to hide his ears, but they still stuck out to either side. He didn’t look up from the table, but there were no cards this time. There was a Monopoly board, with a dozen game tokens on it. The rabbit would throw the dice, sometimes two, sometimes three or four, and move a token. First the wheelbarrow, then the cannon, then the tiny terrier. Then he laid a handful of dice on her side of the table. The boot was the only token left to move. When Caity saw it, she knew she was dreaming. She picked up the dice, felt the corners dig into her palms as she rolled them between her hands. She stood up as she threw them, wondering if she could make them come up with particular numbers. She’d just have to wonder, because the rabbit was standing up now. He looked confused, for a rabbit, and then he reached for her. As Caity kicked toward him, she saw that the boot she was wearing matched the game token. The rabbit doubled over, and leaned sideways against the table. A deck of cards on the table began falling, catching the air and spinning like maple seeds. Caity knew she wouldn’t do something like this if she were awake. But she knew she was dreaming, so she aimed a second kick. Running shoes this time, and she connected dead center again. The rabbit stumbled toward her, trying to avoid the falling cards. She kicked him a third time, just for good measure.

As Caity blinked her eyes and came out of the dream, she knew it wasn’t the ripped blouse from the original dream that she wanted payback for. It was the corruption of the process. She opened the laptop, then closed it. They might treat depression through dreams, or examine hidden traumas, or find out how creativity worked. But somebody would find a way to exploit their findings, sooner rather than later, for love or money or power. She wouldn’t be able to stop them, but she could have this one small moment of satisfaction.

She’d later wonder how long it was before she realized something was wrong. Nobody had come in to wake her. And she heard a lot of movement in the lab. She moved out of her sleep cubicle and the noises grew louder. She heard the controlled intensity of someone dealing with an emergency of some sort, suggestions that came out as orders, the snapping of equipment of some sort. She came into the main lab to see a gurney rolling toward the entrance. One of the attendants saw her and rushed over.

“Doctor, are you OK? Did anything happen?”

“I’m fine. What’s going on out here?”

“It’s Dr. Whitehill. He started throwing up in his sleep. We had to call the rescue squad. They think he must have choked on it. They got him breathing again, but they’re not sure he’s going to make it. They think he might have had a heart attack or something while he was choking.”

Caity stared at the attendant for a moment, then took a deep breath. She looked down at her feet and was surprised to see she was barefoot.