DREAMS

Please respect the rights of the author.

It is not the dreams of the night I fear. It is the dreams that come in the day. The dreams of the night are merely illusions, small wispy fragments of the imagination that are real for but a brief moment before twinkling out again. They can be in all shades from the quiet to the passionate to the ominous. But all share the same thing. They are ephemeral. Existing one moment and vanishing the next, they hold the conscience for only moments in eternity, then slip away again beyond the reach of mortals. They are safe. Or they were. That was before the Sandman Project started.

The project seemed safe enough at first. Of course, any project designed to earn lots of money seems safe. Or can be made to look that way. Neither the people in white lab coats nor the suited businessmen sitting beside them in the approval hearings had any sense to look beyond the dollar sign. The businessmen in particular. To them everything stopped at the dollar. And they had the figures to show them how much the Sandman Project would make. There on the ledger sheets and analysis printouts were column after column of text and related numbers, each one a rung in a ladder to the bottom line proclaiming a big fat profit for the Corporation.

The people in white lab coats looked only a little further. They saw lecture tours, book sales, and all the other nonsense associated with that elusive and fickle commodity known as fame. If it worked the Sandman Project would be the most spectacular research enterprise of the century. Short sightedness was the order of the day.

I remember sitting in on the approval hearings - I was one of the men in the white lab coats. We talked in glowing terms to the members of the Allocations Committee of how the basic research involved in the Sandman Project would benefit mankind. And the committee went for it. They approved the Sandman Project and we were on our way to fame and glory.

It was fascinating work. Volunteers from all classes of society came to spend the night in our research department. Sleeping in a room with enough electronic equipment to sink a space shuttle, they were wired into computers, analyzers, digitizers, holographers, and recorders. They would awake in the morning none the worse for the experience and a few dollars richer. We would go to work energetically pouring over printouts, graphs, video displays, 3D imagers, and disc recorders.

And every day brought failure. The graphs indicated REM patterns and the volumes computer printouts showed definite signs of image transmittal, but try as we might the CDs and 3D image banks were blank.

It was one of those dead end, frustrating days when my colleague came up with the idea. I won't name him. He has his own conscience to live with, and publishing his name would only bring down upon his shoulders the unrestrained wrath of a fearful and vengeful public. Of course, the idea sounded like genius at the time. All he suggested was we connect all the equipment through a biological interface unit.

It was a bolt from the blue. A biological interface unit would handle all the trivial details that were encumbering our master computer. Assembling it would be no problem. We had a couple of excellent bio-technicians on staff.

Procuring the required biological unit was simple: we left saucer of cream overnight in a trap at someone's home. Next morning we had an empty saucer and an annoyed black cat in the trap. The feline was pregnant but we killed it anyway. After liberating its brain we installed it in a biocomputer shell that a technician moved in from her lab. Two days of hard work later we managed to interface the other equipment with it.

It worked, to use a phrase, like a dream. In a trial run that night we recorded on compact disc the first crude images of a person's dream. The audio was muffled and indistinct, the picture dark and fogged, but it was there on the CD! Our video technician went to work and in two hours came up with a coherent series of scenes that could form the basis of a successful soap opera.

Well I remember the elation the project team felt that day. No longer would dreams have to banished at the first wink of consciousness. Now they could be preserved for viewing at a later date. The CDs could trigger the inspiration of the dreamer or writers or film directors. They could be analyzed by psychologists and therapists for the benefit of their patients. They could edited, collated, and even put on sale for viewing by the general public. We had succeeded in a few short months what our critics had scoffed at as being impossible. We could see the start of a new era in sleep research, psychology, and entertainment.

That era lasted exactly 9 days.

Our volunteer on that devastating night was Jason Erickson. We had no reason in particular for selecting him; he was simply the next on the list. When we called him up and asked if he could come down to the research centre, he did. He went through the same procedures hundreds of volunteers had done before him. He was wired into the biological interface unit and left in our very comfortable bed to go to sleep.

At 3:00 that morning I was alone in the laboratory, monitoring Jason's dreams. The recorders were whirring quietly in the background. I was reading a book. It was actually boring, watching other people's dreams and waiting for something interesting to come along. I think I had it down to an art. I would read my book, and whenever I heard a strange sound from the audio monitors I would glance at the screen. Often I noted the time before returning to my book.

And at 3:00 that morning there came a sound from the speakers that I'll never forget. A chilling wail, quavering and awesome in its turbulence, seized my attention by the throat and shackled it. I let go my book and snapped my eyes to the video screen. I beheld it, transfixed by what I saw. Jason Erickson was having a night terror.

Worse than nightmares, night terrors consume the unconscious mind for a frenzied moment before wrenching the dreamer awake.

Worse than nightmares, night terrors consume the unconscious mind for a frenzied moment before wrenching the dreamer awake. They leave the heart pounding and the body cloaked in a cold sweat. I have heard stories since about people killing the ones sleeping beside them during a terror episode. And this night, watching the video monitor, I saw the helpless dreamer being pursued through endless shadowed hallways and up precarious stairs, hunted by the most hideous creatures that ever the eye had seen.

ring my eyes from the monitor I beheld Jason in the next room, writhing on the bed, his face mirroring the horror of the dream. Another spine chilling cry ripped from the speakers.

And then a power surge came through the city. Twenty thousand volts crashed through our electrical mains, bypassed our filters and safeties, and slammed into the biocomputer. There was a tremendous roar of dream energy and electric potential. The computer and the cat brain inside crackled for a moment. Then all was quiet, very quiet.

Next morning we surveyed the damage. Jason had survived but we could not awaken him. His body was still twitching and his face forming the most hideous contortions. Now and then he let loose a scream that twisted the hearts of all who heard it. And, tragically, he is no better now than then. The poor man is a permanent patient at a mental health centre, the solitary resident of an isolated room, forever re-living the terror that he experienced that night.

Our equipment seemed to have fared better. For the most part it was undamaged, with the exception of the biological interface unit. It was first in line to receive the power hit. After several minutes trying to coax it into operation, we decided that the power spike had killed the cat brain inside.

We asked one of our bio-technicians to extract the brain while we called around for a replacement. She worked at the job for a few minutes by herself, then, perplexed, called us over to look at the unit. Where she had expected to find a brain there was nothing - just a vacant space in the centre of the biocomputer.

Suddenly there howled forth from the cavity of the computer that same awful wail I had heard those few terrible hours before. For several dreadful moments it floated in the air, assaulting our ears with its hateful tones, before departing though a vent in ceiling. We tracked its progress through the building, probing here and there, searching for an exit. And it found one and escaped into the world.

We watched helplessly from the window as it attacked pedestrians on the sidewalk. One after another we saw them stop in their tracks, momentarily paralyzed with fear, then wandering disoriented for a time. And somehow we knew that we had unbound a monster.

We had cut short the cat's life before she had a chance to bear her kittens, and now the night terror exacted a horrible vengeance. It bore the children that we had denied the cat, but instead of kittens it bore new terrors.

Wherever we go now we meet the dayterrors. In a thousand inbred variations of fear, horror, panic, and anguish they are lurking. We never feel safe from them.

Always there is the uneasiness inside that we will suddenly be assaulted by a dayterror. They appear from nowhere to ambush our conscious minds, feeding greedily on our fear before releasing us to await its next victim. Currently, if we sharp enough, we can avoid them. We can feel them in our mind just before we encounter them, and, if we are alert enough, retreat before they strike.

But the dayterrors appear to be learning how to hide where we do not suspect them. The world has become a place where we cannot go anywhere without having a nightmare during the day. Children with their active imaginations are popular victims. Among our older population, heart attacks brought on by dayterrors are now the leading cause of death. Lately I have been receiving reports about dayterror colonies that can launch entire crowds into a mass panic with appalling consequences.

I am at a loss how to fight this menace. Eventually there will be technology and techniques developed to help people, but that may not be for years. A whole generation will grow up never knowing peace of mind or a restful day. Stress related diseases will overwhelm our medical and insurance systems.

The world has become a haunted, fearful place with little happiness and laughter. The dayterrors have all but eradicated the joy of living from an entire generation of people.

To die, to sleep no more; perchance to dream." O, Hamlet, you were wrong. Now it's, "To die, to wake no more, free from dreams."

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Last updated on September 14, 1996. Accesses since September 30, 1998: