EIGHT

Gina reported lucid dreams that night, but couldn't get me 'on the line'.  Or Ray, for that matter.  The next night, she couldn't even recall her dreams.  She had some, though; we had three not-quite-antique reclining chairs sitting in my living room by then, with most of the file boxes stacked out of the way, and all three of us were hooked up to little electrodes, through a cheap 'brainwave monitor' from a wellness store (which lasted all of a week before fritzing out, and gave terrible readings, but still).  The agreement was that she'd get another go, then Ray the night following.  I'd play control; there to be contacted, but no drugs for me.

Ray was as sure as one person could be without a hell of a forensic lab that we'd recreated the same drug - if we dried it hard, and shaved it to slivers, he believed, it'd be effectively identical.  Gina was leery of doing that, though; she wanted to stick with what she'd translated out of the older pages before playing around any further.

So, on the third night, having taken an passed a blood toxicity test, Gina took another hit.  She put it a thumbnail-sized sliver on a little ceramic stand, put that in a big metal bowl, and burned it away with a gas lighter.  All this with a damp towel draped over her, so she could "hotbox" the bowl.  She sat and breathed in the fumes there for a few minutes, then sat back.  Ray and I must have looked like we were expecting her head to spin around or something; she just looked at us and said "Boo!", and we all broke down giggling.

Gina found me first, as we slept.  I wasn't dreaming at all, at the time, as far as I can tell - I was just asleep, but she wandered into whatever it was that my sleeping mind was up to, found a copy of me in a "my apartment" scene, and said "Hey, Ben. Coz. Pull yourself together; it's dream-time". And then I arrived, or pulled all my various different 'selves' together, however you want to look at it.  I became lucid, anyway.

"That is one weird feeling."

"Looks like it, yeah.  Here I am, though! Your place, but no Ray.  We'll have to go look for him."

"Think about places we've been together, and the ways to get there, that kind of thing?"

"I'm the one that's all hopped up, coz.  I'll try first.  I went for a drive with him, in my jeep, to the greenhouse.  So, I'm gonna open the apartement door, and it'll be actual rest of the building outside; then, downstairs to my jeep.  That's what's going to happen, if we concentrate, I think.  Ready?"

"Ready."

She opened the door.  There were stairs on the other side, and her jeep, but not my apartment building.  Outside my apartment door was a kind of porch made of what looked like white marble, and then steps leading down a grassy slope.  At the bottom of the slope, maybe forty or fifty feet away, Gina's jeep was waiting.  Above this, a starry sky, heavy with strange constellations in a multitude of colors.

"It's the hills.  Remember, the hills I told you about!"   Gina shouted, as we both walked to the door, and craned around to look outside.

"Yeah.  Do we go out?"

"Do we!  I'll race you!" And she was off, down the hill and into her jeep.