Dangerous Dreams: A Novel (58 page)

Nancy went pensive, held her silence.

“Hot damn! Emily’s gonna make it . . . at least long enough to have a baby . . . and that baby has to make it, too, because we’re here.” Allie beamed with relief and satisfaction at her conclusion. “The history books are wrong, Mom. Emily’s gonna make it.”

“Allie, hang on a second. There’s more. I just remembered something . . . and you’re not going to like it . . . I remember Ian telling me her dreams weren’t always of
direct
ancestors . . . some were of siblings of the direct ancestors . . . and . . . and many of them died young.”

Allie’s smile vanished; she squinted tight lipped at her mother.

“And here’s the part I didn’t want to tell you on the phone.”

“Damn it, Mom. Spit it out, will you? I can handle it!”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Ian became just as addicted to her dreams and the people in them as you’ve become to yours . . . as if the dreams were drugs. And when some of the people died she . . . she basically went into withdrawal, deep depression, and . . . and . . .”

“Say it, Mom.”

“And she had several emotional meltdowns . . . and they say she tried to kill herself a couple times.”

“Damn! I knew it.” She shook her head repeatedly. “I can relate, Mom. I can really relate. You can’t imagine how attached I am to Emily . . . how I love her . . . how she’s part of me. I’ve been afraid
with
her, afraid
for
her,
sad
for her. I don’t know what’s gonna happen when she dies . . . or what I’ll do . . . or if I’ll be able to handle it. I’m scared, Mom.”

“Allie, you’re scaring the hell out of me, too.”

“I know.” She stared at the floor, saw Emily running from the Panther, whispered, “But all I know is I’ve got to get back to her . . . be there with her for whatever happens . . . before it’s too late.” She closed her eyes.
Emily, I’ll be there. Hang on. “It’s all falling apart, Mom . . . and me with it.” Tears filled her eyes as she lunged to her mother’s arms, held her tight. “Hold me, Mom. Hold me.”

Allie spoke in a flat tone. “So as always, it was like a TV serial and ended at a dramatic, scary moment and left me hanging. Why in the hell does it always do that? Pisses me off.”

Dressler stopped writing, looked up at Allie, smiled. “Well, that’s how it always seems to go with us cowardly humans. When stuff gets scary and we’re about to die, we instinctively wake up to preclude our demise.”

“Hmm. Well, Emily keeps managing to stay alive, but things are really turning to shit. So let me ask you this. I know I’m a lucid dreamer, but I haven’t tried to make anything happen in the dreams, which lucid dreamers are supposed to be able to do . . . and which I’ve actually done a few times with normal dreams. Do you think I could change anything . . . like maybe command her to escape from a situation where she’s about to die?”

“Won’t know until you try it; but don’t forget there’s an old time-travel adage: you can’t change history. And if you’re dreaming real history, the same may hold true for your dreams.”

Allie frowned, looked away. “Well, as I told you, my mom says my Great-Great-Grandma Ian knew for sure the dreams were true, and this morning she told me that Ian also knew for certain they were of our family’s ancestors. How about that?”

Dressler’s eyes squeezed into a tight, academic squint; he nodded slowly several times. “Does she know how Ian knew?”

“Nay . . . damn it.” She slapped herself mockingly on the cheek. “There I go again—second time today I’ve talked like them. Getting spooky. No, she doesn’t know, but she says Ian was
absolutely
certain.” She handed him a piece of paper. “Here. Take a look at this. Just found it on the net this morning.”

He scanned the sheet. “Very intriguing. I actually read this study, and it made great sense to me . . . even before I met you. But now it makes a
hell
of a lot of sense.”

“So if it really works that way, and we assume Emily’s my ancestor— possibly my Many-Great-Grandmother, as I call her—and I have her genes and DNA, and she’s my channel to the collective unconscious where all this history is stored, how can I see and feel things that
other
people besides Emily see and feel and say when Emily’s not there? And how can I understand the Indians? And why are there apparently just a few of us in the history of the world with this gift, and why are we women, and why does it skip generations?”

He smiled. “Don’t know yet. I haven’t considered it all together in context . . . but I
do
have some preliminary thoughts.”

Allie’s eyes widened, enlivened as she leaned toward him. God, let him figure it out. “Hit me, Doc.”

“Well, I’ve started working my way back through my library and— oh, by the way, you might want to read some of my books . . . could possibly stimulate a few thoughts that haven’t occurred to either of us . . . so I’ll give you the list. So, for starters, a guy named Waggoner suggests that lucid dreaming connects us with our unconscious at greater depth and breadth; and I think you’re seeing that, for sure . . . at least the immensity part. Then in the book
Healing Dreams
”—he glanced at the cover—“ Barasch suggested—and I’m paraphrasing—that maybe we should examine dreams less symbolically and more as an anthology of ‘stories’—stories that can exceed the limitations of ‘time & space’ . . .
time and space
. . .” He glanced at her. “That would be
your
dreams, Allie. He also talks about dreams being well-crafted, meaningful tales full of vivid realism and senses, emotion, movie-like scripting and characters, and the twists and turns of real life—all of which rise above the personal realm and tend to hover in our memories. He says lots of other stuff, too; but one you’ll appreciate is that the psychoanalytic idea that dreams have to do only with the
dreamer’s
life is a joke to native people . . . like the Indians, who’ve always had visions and vision quests as an integral part of their cultural and spiritual existence.”

He flipped to the next page. “Then, get this, even Jung wondered how the collecting house of experiences and memories passes from generation to generation. So whose experiences and memories—essentially their
pasts—was he talking about? Well, he was probably talking about their
personal
pasts; but I think, per your article, a person’s
personal
past might include their
ancestors
’ pasts, which means Emily’s experiences, feelings— everything in her memory and unconscious—are now part of
your
past, whether it’s accessed in the collective unconscious or carried in your genes and DNA, or some combination of both.” He paused for a breath. “You know, to avoid confusion in our future discussions let’s say that
memory
and
the unconscious
are functionally one and the same, regardless of where they reside. So from now on, we’ll just talk about
memory
, be it personal or collective. Okay?”

“Sounds good.”

He nodded. “So to conclude, Barasch talks about dreams sometimes inserting dreamers into other peoples’ existences, which, of course, can greatly broaden their perspectives on things.” He again looked at Allie with sad, sympathetic eyes and parted lips. “If that ain’t you, nothing is.”

Her face was a picture of gloomy surrender; her head nodded like a metronome. “That’s me.” She looked away as a single tear worked its way down each cheek. “I know it’s that way because everything about Emily is so real, so personal, so
me
.”

“Are you alright, Allie?”

“Yes . . . I’m just emotionally drained, sad, feeling helpless and utterly consumed by Emily and the dreams.” She took a deep breath. “What else?”

“Have you ever heard of atavism?”

“Yeah, I think so. Doesn’t it have to do with traits being carried from generation to generation?”

“It does. It’s the inclination to go back to an earlier ancestral type . . . like a backward leap in evolution . . . where long-gone traits suddenly reemerge. And one way atavisms can occur is when genes for an earlier trait are carried forward in DNA and eventually show up again due to some aberration— perhaps a mutation—that allows the
old
traits to dominate the
new
ones. So if we assume that atavisms can be selective about when and where they occur, this might explain why only you and Ian, two women, generations apart, have had this dreaming gift. Now understand, I’m extrapolating from a theory that applies to
non-dreaming
entities, like organisms, and applying it
to
dreaming
entities, like people; and I’m doing that because
we’re
organisms, the theory fits, and there’s, as yet, no reason
not
to apply it. By the way, the word
atavism
comes from the Latin word
atavus
, which is a multiple-great-grandfather—a distant ancestor. So in the spirit of modern thinking, where we’ve started down the pathway of psycho-physiological dream theory—as opposed to Freud’s purely psychoanalytic approach—we have a melding of things of the mind, genetics, and physiology, and I understate when I say we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s there. But, Allie, my dear research assistant, that’s where we’re going.”

Allie curved her lips into a modest smile. “Let’s go!”

He held his own warm smile as he fixed his inquisitive eyes on hers for a moment, repressed a sudden urge to hold her. “Okay. So to summarize, I believe the answers to your questions are in some combination of the collective memory, genetics, the stuff I just read to you, and several other theories, such as morphic resonance, formative causation, activation synthesis, Lamarckian inheritance, and a few more; and we’re going to analyze all of them, along with the results of your sleep studies, with respect to each of your dream characteristics.” He paused, waited for her to process what he’d said. “But for now, if Emily’s your—how did you say it?—”

“Many-great-grandmother.”

“your many-great-grandmother, you have her genes and DNA, and I think, somehow—TBD—they direct your
personal
memory to the right spot in the
collective
memory to access all her experiences, feelings, thoughts, and memories; and that’s why you feel the thoughts and emotions of those who were associated with her, even though she might not have always been present; they’re in
her
temporal and personal section of the collective memory. Or, another possibility is that she acquired knowledge of those things, and it was stored in her
personal
memory, and you received it directly via her genes and DNA with the same result: the ability to access exactly the right place in the
collective
memory to find the
personal
memories of all the people who interacted with Emily.” He smiled. “And as I inferred a moment ago, it’s like all these fragments of causality are floating around out there somewhere in space, and we have to pluck out the right ones and meld them together into the best possible theory that explains human
dreaming . . . and most especially, Allie O’Shay’s dreaming. Allie, are you sure you’re alright?”

With a docile look that morphed into a hopeless one, she said, “Not really. I guess it’s what I said before . . . the whole thing’s getting me down. I mean, I was really excited that Emily’s my direct ancestor, ’cuz that meant she had to live . . . at least until she had a kid, but then Mom told me that Ian said some of her dreams were about
siblings
of the direct ancestor; so now I really don’t know, and it’s pissing me off. Then there’s the last thing Mom told me . . . about Ian having emotional crashes over her dreams . . . trying to kill herself a couple times. So maybe I’m just depressed about having nothing but suicide to look forward to in my life.”

She’s slipping into depression real fast. Got to handle this now. “Allie O’Shay, don’t even think that way for a second. You have a remarkable, one-of-a-kind power—an incredibly unique gift—that lets you see things perhaps no one else on the planet can see.”

“It’s getting to be more like a curse.”

“But you know what? There’s a damn good chance you’re seeing real history through the eyes and feelings of a person who lived it, and that’s . . . that’s absolutely extraordinary. And, Allie”—he stood, walked to her, took her hands in his, stared into her eyes—“ we
will
figure it out, and we
will
do whatever it takes to get you safely through. I promise. Do you understand?” What a sad little girl she is. Got to help her before it’s too late.

She smiled, nodded. “Yes . . . and thanks. You know, Doc . . . Steve . . . I really trust you . . . and believe in you . . . and I know you’ll do everything you can to help me, and that alone makes me feel better.”

“Good.” He looked at his watch. “So I think it’s about time to get you wired up and do a test run on the instrumentation. Are you ready?”

She fidgeted, exhibited the nervous apprehension of someone on their way into the operating room. “I think so.”

“Good. Excuse me a minute while I see if they’re ready for you.”

When he had left the room, Allie walked to his desk, peeled three pre-stamped prescription sheets from his pad, stuffed them into her cutoff jeans pocket, then returned to her seat. Well, Allie, you just stepped over
the line, started down the pathway of crime, and you’re now a genuine criminal. Dumbshit!