Dreamtime - Part 1 - Entanglement - Chapter 2 - Purpose

“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

Journal Entry, March 15, 2007

Few times in my life have I looked back and thought my gift a curse: as a child when I felt afraid for myself, as a young man that I might be the only one of my kind, and as a man when I lost Lisa Renner to despair and madness. I now believe with confidence that there are others like me and we will find each other. I believe in a purposeful existence, a meaning to our common struggles, even if we must forge it from the mettle of our own self-determination.

 Ethan James, Ph.D.

A woman sat in the inconspicuous middle of the audience during a late lecture at McGuinn Auditorium, Boston College in the fall of 2011. 

Ethan stood at the podium, debunking the myths of photographic memory and citing actual case studies of total recall. It was a cheap trick, lecturing on overdone topics like this, but it was a great way to lure in crowds and occasionally debate about related subject matter. Like sheep they flocked, but this time not all were sheep. 

She sat there, unmoving and faking a sheepish grin, no doubt trying to fit in. She could not. No matter how hard she tried, she would not. 

The woman practically glowed with self-assurance, the image of perfect dreamtime clarity, devoid of distortion. Ethan mused that, in a misty sea of grotesque figures, she appeared zoomed-in and everyone else out of focus. 

By the time the topic turned away from the freaks who could paint masterpieces from memory to the cognitive science of episodic memory encoding, the crowd had thinned. Yet there she sat, bolted to her seat. When the last attendees departed together to divulge their groundbreaking revelations over caramel macchiato, she stood and waited in the lobby.

"Do you speak?" he asked, as he approached. 

She turned, surprising him with the fluidity of her motion.

"Why yes, yes I do," she voiced, and it rang in his ears like birdsong. "I came to see if it was true."

"And?" he shrugged, surprised again.

"To see if Dr. Ethan James could see through me." Her words dripped like water filtered for a hundred years through volcanic rock from a moonstone stalactite into a deep pool of a vast cavern far beneath him. 

With mouth hung open for a long moment, he stood truly dazed and disarmed. He was used to being challenged like this, but not by someone who hid nothing. He scanned her dreamtime body for distortions. Nothing. Only the faintest white mist around her.

“What are you looking at, Dr. James?” She snapped with feigned alarm.

“You," he paused, “have me at a loss, Miss ---”

“Monet. How rude of me,” she blushed, as hues of red and violet flashed over her skin.

For the first time, Ethan had a chance to recover from his shock. “No. How rude of me, Miss Monet. It’s a pleasure to meet you." He drew a quick breath and almost blurted what he was thinking. Instead he reached out his hand to shake hers and she obliged. 

Just then he knew she was the one he was looking for, someone like himself. He had felt it when he first saw her in the lecture hall.

“Are you a student at the university?" he guessed, changing the subject.

“No.”

“So you came just for the lecture," he said disjointedly, more to himself, "to meet me." 

She gave two quick nods and that sheepish grin. And again she appeared to blush, but this time he saw the colors floating just above her skin. They shifted hypnotically and glowed brighter. 

“Do you drink?" he finally blurted.

“When I’m thirsty, Dr. James.”

“I mean, coffee. Do you drink coffee? And please, call me Ethan, Miss Monet.”

“Why yes. Yes I do, Professor. And please, call me Carol.”

On their way to get coffee, Carol did the talking. Carol Monet sold herself as a life coach and public relations consultant. He saw no distortions, so instantly Ethan felt he could trust her.

"Do you know who I am, Carol?" he prodded, trying to move things along.

"Why of course. You're Ethan James, Ph.D., adjunct professor of psychology at a prestigious university, doing your best to appear normal. Well, not normal, but you know what I mean."

"What do you mean?" He leaned back amused.

"Oh please, Professor," she pulled her bangs behind her left ear and crossed her arms. "You may have the others fooled, but I see it."

"What do you see?"

"Okay. Don't sit here and pretend you're like everyone else in this Starbucks," she said, unfolding her arms and flinging them out wide. "Look at me and tell me what you see."

Ethan was truly taken aback. He was not ready for this. After waiting his whole life, he still wasn't ready to voice his secret to another human being. 

"I see nothing."

"Nothing?" she gasped, honestly sounding hurt.

"No, no. Not nothing," he tried to recover. "I see you. Nothing more. Just you."

"Explain."

"The frat pledge flirting with the blonde behind the counter looks shriveled and he has no lips. The blonde is missing her right ear. The eavesdropping old guy, pretending to use his laptop in the corner, has a large, droopy chin. And the steamy couple against the wall look like they're melting. Then there's you. You're just you."

She smiled a huge, congratulatory smile.

Then more to himself. "And it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen before." 

She turned to the side and pretended to gag herself, but then quickly turned back with an apologetic look on her smooth face.

"I'm sorry. It's not you. A woman hears stuff like that all the time, but when I look at you, I ... can tell you mean it. And you're not even trying to get into my pants."

"I'm not?"

She laughed aloud, but tried to muffle it with her hand.

"Seriously, how can you tell?" Ethan scratched his nose.

"You're skin. It's glowing a faint purple and white."

"What?" He lifted his arms and looked them up and down.

"Your aura. Oh, don't look at me like that. I assure you, it's very scientific. I can see the fields of energy that surround you. They give you away. They have different colors and they mean something if you watch people carefully. And I do."

"So what does purple and white mean?"

"To me it means you are deeply impassioned and honestly seeking wisdom."

"How observant and accurate," Ethan smiled crookedly. "But your pants aren't safe yet."

She gave a goofy frown and continued, "The colors are your beliefs and, more importantly, what you believe about yourself. 

"When people are about to fail, they turn a darker shade. Just before they succeed or make a decision, they appear to glow brighter. I call it 'reading the rainbow' and it's just the beginning." 

"Are you saying you can tell what's going to happen?"

"Not exactly. Weak intentions cause people to fail because their beliefs limit them. But yes, you can pretty much tell if someone's intentions are strong and if they're getting close to making a decision. Couple that with the kind of energy they're putting off and it's not hard to tell what's going to happen next."

"What is going to happen next?" he wondered aloud.

She tilted her head slightly to the left. "Strange. You know, I really can't tell at this moment."

"Kind of a handy talent for a life coach ... when it works."

"Oh sure, but challenge someone to act against their limiting beliefs and stand back to watch the fireworks. Literally."

"I can imagine." 

"These self-defeating beliefs are almost impossible to change without a life-altering event, like death or horrible tragedy."

"What about this?" he gestured, holding his hands out to each side.

“Oh this?" she asked, pointing back and forth between herself and Ethan. "I saw this would happen, knew it when I first caught your eye in the lecture hall, Professor,” she said, sipping on her soy latte. “You had quickly turned a deep sea green color, solid too, which means your intentions were pure, not mixed with a hidden agenda or diluted with fantasy. That’s when I knew it was true and I could trust you," she paused, considering her words. "People would kill us to know what we know and for what we are.”

“What are we, Coach?”

She stopped and shook her head.

“I saw colors on you when you blushed earlier," he accused, pointing at her. "I’ve never seen that before.”

She shook her head again. “I don’t know what this is or how this works, but if you can see and experience my dreams, maybe that has somehow changed you. Or maybe when you touch...” 

Her voice trailed off, as she wondered if she would be struck with the same visions as Ethan. Almost as an immediate confirmation, Carol caught a quick rush of emotion and images that seemed to pour over her like a waterfall. Just as she began to swoon, he grabbed her by the arms and gently shook her.

“Carol," he yelled, sharply raising his voice and catching the quick glances of alarmed coffee shop patrons. “It’s too soon for you," he whispered. “Who knows? You might end up catatonic for a week." 

He steadied her and let her regain her bearings. 

"You have to learn how to control it first. Just breathe and focus on an object in front of you until the nausea fades.” 

After a minute, she straightened again, asking, "How do you do it, Professor?"

"I've done it all my life. At first, I couldn't tell the difference between my own dreams and others' nightmares, but you should already know the difference, so you will learn quickly." 

"I mean how do you remain so steady in all this chaos?" she wondered, looking down to his hands, and he realized he was still holding her arms. He withdrew them and her skin appeared to glow where he had touched her. 

"Do you see that?"

She did. "Something has happened, Professor," she stared up at him and he saw what resembled a butterfly tattoo covering her entire face slowly lift up and flap inches above her skin. By the look on his face, she knew he could see what she was feeling.

Carol and Ethan met several times over the next few months in hotel lobbies and airport terminals, piecing together the truth about the world around them. They compared notes from research and delved into their collective experiences for clues of why they could do what they could do. When the big answers simply would not come, they finally had to settle for mere agreement on the truths they had discovered.

They sat at a table in the middle of the food court in Laguardia airport overlooking a bank of flight information monitors. 

Carol cocked her head and crinkled her eyebrows with mock doe-eyed adoration. “So what you’re saying, Professor, is that what people call ‘reality’ is actually an altered dream state that they only believe to be real?”

Ethan ignored her pitiful imitation of his female students. “In a manner, yes. sleepers pass through the major conflicts of their lives - remember your stages of psychological development. They most often fail, for one reason or another, due to their weak intentions; you taught me that. I’ve watched them all my life, my friends slowly taking on subtle deformities as they grappled with life’s questions ... and failed.” 

He stared out over the railing at the sea of humanity lining up and shuffling on to their flights to get to anywhere but here.

“My best guess is that the conflicts remain as unresolved signals. What I can’t understand is why you and I were somehow spared.”

“Never mind that,” Carol slumped in her chair. “I’m still trying to get why we keep seeing them flare up. It’s like they're a lit fuse and someone keeps supplying explosives.” 

Again Ethan wagered a guess, “Maybe when a sleeper encounters just the right stressor or faces a similar conflict, the unresolved signal is getting triggered.” He sat back in his chair. “What if beliefs and emotions, negative and positive, are overwhelming the sleeper, inducing a kind of hypnotic state? The signal dominates from then on and the sleeper perceives the world through the colored lens of the signal.”

Carol sat straight up and snapped her fingers, “Imagine a lifetime of auto-feedback patterns, all to cover up a single failure. A self-sustaining signal that loops back on itself, reaffirming its limiting beliefs.”

“Exactly. A person’s whole personality can become a slave to mere coping mechanisms," Ethan bemoaned. “Doesn’t sound like much of a person, does it?”

“And then someone comes along challenging the beliefs you've held your whole life.” She bit her lip and screwed up her face, “Wouldn’t you react violently?” 

“Well, let me put it another way.” He squared his shoulders and thought his way through it. “It’s like a girl who wants her boyfriend to buy her every piece of jewelry she sees on the Home Shopping Network. 

"She doesn’t tell him she wants them because that would seem shallow and materialistic, but she still can’t stop wanting them. Unconsciously, she blames him for being poor and insensitive to her needs, and no matter how much she tries to ignore this need, it becomes the defining problem of their relationship." 

Carol leaned in, listening with a skeptical expression. 

"Every time she thinks he’s ignoring her or looking at another girl, this signal flares up and distorts her perception.  It drives her actions. Without understanding it, she becomes consumed with jealousy and sabotages the relationship.”

“Now, you can’t go attacking fine jewelry, Professor,” she shot back and pretended to swoon in her chair. “A girl has to have her beads and baubles.”

Dr. Ethan James shot up to his full height of six foot two and looked her straight in the eye, "Make no mistake, Carol Monet. These parasites are the plague of this age and they have been spreading for millennia since they first invaded the human psyche. This is our enemy. He has possession of everyone I've ever met, save you, and he has not yet shown his true face."

"Or her face, Mr. Big." She stood up in front of him, matching his intensity at an impressive five foot ten. "I've waited my whole life to know why I was given this freakish gift, and I've watched helplessly as the people I care about suffered endlessly. If you think I have no skin in the game, you're blind, Professor."

"Good," Ethan said, sitting back down satisfied. "I guess we can get started then."

"We're going to need an army," she quipped, springing off to the baggage claim area.

"We'll need more than that before we're done, I fear." He downed his bottled water and boarded his plane.

Schedules cleared after finals week, Carol and Ethan sequestered themselves at the Stillmeadow Bed and Breakfast in Hampstead, New Hampshire. They agreed that zero exposure to large populations connected to global systems would give them room to experiment without so much interference.

“My God, Professor, remind me again why I live in the city?” she practically squealed, when she saw the adorable nineteenth century cottage.

“Clients, Carol. I doubt many out here need a life coach,” he droned, always the deadpan delivery.

“Who needs clients when you have this?" she asked and dropped her bags to the gravel driveway, stretched out her arms to the forest all around her, and slowly spun around Julie Andrews-esque.

“Let’s not forget what we’re here for, Coach. This isn’t The Sound of Music and you’d make a horrible nun.”

“It was you who picked the place, Professor," she reminded him, putting heavy emphasis on the playful name she used to tease him for all his stuffiness. He acted way too stodgy for his age, she thought. “I think I’d make a pretty good nun, thank you very much. I haven’t had any since last Christmas.”

“Always the optimist, but you have a point. Few would argue we could have picked a more congenial spot for our work. A quaint, old house near a lake in a protected forest with weak cellular coverage.”

“You’re right, I haven’t had a signal since we left the interstate.” She checked her phone and, sure enough, it displayed a big X over the signal strength icon.

"God forbid you miss a text from a whiny client."

She shot him an incredulous stare.

"What? Can you honestly say anything we've done up to this point has been of any help to our clients and students?"

She slumped her shoulders, "Well, it helps them cope with modern life."

Ethan looked doubtful. "Coping. I think we can both agree it was never enough. Look at the state of things."

"Why are we here again?" she shrugged.

"It's spring break. The party's at the lake." He made the hang ten gesture with his right hand and the horns with his left, waving them in the air.

"I'm not with him," she announced to the empty driveway and covered her face. "Do me a favor, Professor."

"What's that, Coach?" he smiled a toothy grin.

"Leave the jokes to me." She scooped up her bags and swept herself inside. 

She was immediately greeted by a diminutive woman with worn hands, graying hair up in a bun, and a cheerful smile. The woman was seated at a desk in the corner of the receiving room decorated with wildflowers, crocheted slip covers on the furniture, and paintings of boats and birds on the walls. 

“You’re right on time, Miss Monet. I trust your trip was pleasant, my dear. Your room is ready with fresh flowers. Brought ‘em up just this morning.” She scratched under her bun with a pencil and asked, “Can I get George to help with your bags?”

“That won’t be necessary. I - I can manage.” Carol let out a nervous giggle.

“Well, I’m Sharon West, the owner, and you can call me any time using the phone in your room.” She flashed her smile again, handed Carol the keys, and said, “Dinner will be at 5:30. Enjoy your stay with us, Miss Monet.”

After enjoying the dinner and pleasant hospitality of their hosts, Carol and Ethan retired to the gazebo out back by the lake, enjoying the fleeting minutes of dusk on a cool New Hampshire early Summer evening, birdsong playing in the air. It all seemed so quaint and otherworldly to Carol, so that the enormity of the task ahead weighed heavily on her mind, poised to obliterate the fragility that floated on the breeze. Ethan made a motion with his hand, as if to break the silence, and Carol placed her hand over his, lowering it back to his knee. Nothing was going to ruin this peaceful moment. 

Carol was in a dream so intense the likes of which she had never known. She was on a cruise ship docked in a swampy inlet. The hundreds of passengers on the boat were intent on her and watching everywhere she went. One by one, they tried to subdue her with increasingly elaborate bindings and traps, culminating in an attempt to encase her in an enormous jungle gym structure on the forward bow. She climbed to its summit and dove off the top of it into the swampy water below, only to be rescued by Ethan and another man, who she did not recognize, in a small charter fishing boat.

She awoke to a knock at the door and almost peed herself. She got up to answer, hurriedly putting on her robe. The digital clock on the night stand read 2:31.

"Are you ready to begin now?" Ethan asked. His voice was deep, resonating in the hallway. She was glad they were the only visitors or there would have been complaints for sure.

"Don't you ever dream your own dreams, Professor?" Her scowl radiated heat across her face.

"If you'd prefer to be left to the vultures of dreamtime, I could let them pick your body clean," he said with a smirk.

"You arrogant prick. Who do you think you are?" Carol scoffed. She almost meant it, but she couldn't muster the scorn.

"But I'd never forgive myself for spoiling so perfect a thing," he practically crooned in that baritone voice that made tingles up her spine.

"Nice recovery, Professor." Colors flashed all over her face as she purred at the compliment. She stepped aside with a sideways grin and let him enter.

"You see what they can do. The fear is their greatest weapon; it drives all of us, corrals us. They reach out to you and now they know your name." He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and promised, "In a world of darkness, Carol, you're the only light I see, and I'm not leaving you to the shadows."

She squirmed a bit under her robe. "So what do I do? Show me," she sighed heavily and stared up at her teacher. "I can't very well take too many more nights like this."

"You're the dreamer, Carol. Only you can actuate the dream. Remember that. All that dream interpretation literature is horse s**t, and don't let them tell you that a cigar is just a cigar. If it feels locked, you have to actuate it."

“What do you mean, actuate it?” she asked, waiting patiently while he started brewing some Earl Grey green tea.

“I mean that anything and everything in the dream can lock up your energy and keep it. When you write down the dream - and you must keep a dream journal - you are forcing yourself to remain in dreamtime.” 

Carol sat down in one of the chairs angled toward the window. 

“In time you will recall your dreams with greater clarity," he said and he sat down in the chair next to her. 

“But how do you know something is locked?” 

“Oh, you’ll know. Tension. Pain. Anxiety. When you mentally walk through the dream, an item, a person, a situation, a place will feel locked, like you have no access to it.” Ethan leaned in. “You are literally feeding it your energy, whole super-complexes of neurons dedicated to maintaining the lock. The more you feed it, the quicker the pain and anxiety can grow from a tiny pin prick in your mind to a raging migraine.” 

“But why a lock?" Carol questioned. "Why not call it a book or a suitcase? Just open it.” 

“Good girl, but not so fast. A lock has a key for good reason.” He made the motion of turning a key with his hand. “You have to find the key, the password, the true name of the signal.” 

“I’m not following you, Professor.” 

“Try this on then. You’ve heard of cognitive dissonance.” 

“Sure,” she acknowledged. “Mental discomfort when faced with contradictions or competing truths.” 

“Well, think of the lock as a way of hiding an unwanted truth or a lie that you can’t ignore. It's a built in defense mechanism for your mind. The more distressing the contradiction, the more energy consumed by the lock.” 

“OK, Professor, I get that, but how am I supposed to know the password when my mind is hiding it from me?” 

Ethan jumped out of his chair and jabbed his finger high into the air. “That, my friend, is why we dream.” Just then the teapot began to whistle. “The universe agrees!" he declared with confidence and went to prepare the tea. 

Carol sat slumped with her hand covering her mouth, digesting what she had just absorbed. 

Ethan returned with two cups of tea. “Is there something you’re not saying, Coach?” He mirrored her body language and mouth-covering.

She sat up and asked, “So what’s in the dream? Clues?”

He sat up and sipped his tea. “It’s all there. Everything. You have the five external senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.”

“Well, there’s that," she mocked.

“But you also have others, like temperature, direction, pain, balance, and kinesthetic, which is body movement and position, as well as sensations from other internal organs, like the bladder, intestines, stomach, lungs, heart, esophagus. Time is a sense governed by the brain, your circadian daily rhythm, for instance.” 

She smiled and stared at him for a few seconds. “Thanks for the biology lesson, Professor, but what good are bodily senses in an imaginary world?” 

He grinned right back and nodded his head. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you mentioned that; you see, imagination is the vehicle for exploring internal reality. The closer you get to the lock, the more clues your ‘senses’ will pick up.” He made an exaggerated quotations gesture with both hands. “Your imagination will place those clues somewhere in your body. Your senses, all of them, will tell you the truth. The important thing is that you’ll identify it and you’ll name it. The identifier is the password.”

“And once I have the password, what then, genius?”

“You open the lock.” He made the turning motion again with his hand. “And then the fun starts.” He raised his eyebrows, formed his hand into a gun, clicked his tongue against his back teeth, and fired with his thumb.

She took a deep breath. “Oh boy. I think I need more tea for this or a drink, but first, I have to pee.” Ethan’s jaw hung open as she stood and shook the disbelief out of her left arm and shoulder. Dark brown flakes slipped off her skin in sheets. He felt the confirmation of his choice and the responsibility of his mission settle in his stomach.

He looked up as Carol returned and he marveled at how the evening glow surrounded her with a deep blue shimmer. “You’ve got to teach me that someday.”

“Someday.” She stuck her tongue out. “But tonight, you’re the teacher.”

He nodded. "You see, once you've blown the lock, you gain access to the conflict, the original conflict that your mind couldn't resolve. It's like finding a lost symphony of Mozart or Beethoven, but it's only half finished. You have to resolve it. No one else can." 

"Wait, how do you resolve the cognitive dissonance you failed to resolve the first time?" she challenged him and crossed her arms curtly.

Ethan gently tapped the rhythm to Shave and a Haircut on his tea cup with his spoon. Carol, already reaching for her spoon before he finished the rhythm, tapped the response. Two bits. 

"Just like that." He smiled smugly. 

She shook her head and grimaced. 

"Oh they won't always be that easy, but if you've done the work, the resolution will surely come from your imagination, just as your imagination presented them to you in your dreams in the first place.

"In our case the resolution is always a voiced command, the shorter, the better. If you seek validation, you'll know you have the command when the dreamtime object no longer feels locked. You'll feel the locked energy release back into your body, like your computer just got faster after closing a bunch of windows." 

"Why is that?" she wondered and scratched her forehead impulsively.

"I don’t know how the damned things work. Ask a computer expert.” Seeing her none too amused expression, he continued, “It’s something about the voice, the throat chakra. It brings the quickest and most permanent resolution to all things," he cleared his throat. "Once you've said it, it is done. A verbal contract is binding when spoken with full intention, even with just yourself.

“Let me put it another way. You've heard of karma, right?”

“Who hasn't?” Carol asked, pretending to sound annoyed.

“Well, when it comes to karma, every debt must be paid, every kindness must be credited,” Ethan stood, scratching his head with both hands and continued, “you see, whether you believe in past lives or not, there is a balance to the universe and upsetting that balance creates voids and accumulations. 

“Your karma demands that you fill the voids in your past failures to achieve what you were meant to do. You are here because of your unpaid karmic debt. Your dreams are the invoice in your mailbox. Actuating the dream opens the envelope. Voicing the verbal contract writes the check. Performing the action in dreamtime mails it and the universe cashes it. If you overpay, you take that credit with you on your next trip.”

Carol stared at Ethan with awe and genuine appreciation. "How long have you been doing this?"

"Since I was seven, but the formal discipline of dreamwork didn't happen for me until I was twelve. I had to do it, or the dreams would have driven me crazy. The whole thing is extremely habit forming and a bit addictive, but nothing like Candy Crush or Angry Birds. This discipline is where you start and without it you are defenseless against the signals of sleepers."

She continued staring at him a while longer until he interrupted, "Well, you've got some work to do, don't you, Coach?" 

Caught off guard, she wasn't sure if he was done. She could listen to him for hours, so well suited he was for his chosen profession. He left her to it and she opened her laptop to get started.

Author's Note

Please be brutal and blunt, but provide constructive criticism. I'm not one to care for niceness concerning my work. The world won't be nice, even if this is my first attempt at writing.