FIVE

Gina stuck her head into the bedroom, early, and called out.

"So, remember the dream?"

"Urh.  Ya."

I woke up pretty rapidly, trying to remember.

"Wait.  Those hills you were talking about.  Did we...?"

"No, we didn't find them.  I don't think so, anyway.  It all kind of trails off there, though."

"Right, same.  Wait.  The drug."

"Yep.  Sure did!"

"It's dangerous!  It's a twenty-year old sample of a badly-tested drug; we don't even know if it's the right one, or one that sent people into comas!"

"But we do.  He scratched it on the bottom; B3."

"Still you could have taken too much, not enough.  Oh, for....   You shouldn't be taking it at all."

"How about: Fuck that.  I've spent years looking for a way in on this thing that wasn't bullshit.  I've got one, I'm taking it."

"A way in on what?  Is there something you know here that you're not telling me?"

"Lots. Are you ready to stop rolling your eyes when I tell you about it?"

Turned out, I was.  Not before I sat and fumed for a few minutes, of course.  But ready.

What Gina had collected - stories around Ianathos, the temple incense turned drug that we now had on our hands - was kind of a filing cabinet of weird, but it all boiled down to a core explanation.  I've written out the core of what Gina had to say here, as well as I could remember it:

...

All around the world, we have these old mystical traditions playing with altered states, talking about the boundary between conscious and not, between having visions and being in reality.  Which is all groovy, but if you accept the idea of shared dreaming as a reality, and come at it all again, it starts to look like a lot of these stories are actually about that, and they just didn't know what they were playing with.  Vision quests where people communicate over distances.  Weird stories about twins.  Astral travel, out-of-body-experiences, a lot of stuff drops right into the picture as things that could easily be about it.

The really big motherlodes are the Tibetan traditions relating to Tulkas and Tulpas, and the few surviving bits of the books of Sarnath.  That second one is what the HYPNOS project was about, of course; they got the recipe, and some ideas, but weren't quite right about what it did.   The first one, well, the idea with Tulkas and Tulpas is more or less that you can make things out of thought, and that people can project thought-bodies out into the world.  There's more to it, but that's the idea; you meditate, and get into a state where you can do these things.  I've got books.

MacIntyre the therapist, Bowley the sleep guy, and Ward, they all figured out some of it.  MacIntyre wrote his lucid-dream-book, and I think he's learned to do what we just did without the drugs.  I've got a couple copies of his book around here, too...   Somewhere.  Bowley has published a lot of papers on on Neurochemistry and such - I think he's looking for Ianathos, but didn't want to dig up the stuff we have - maybe afraid of the Department of Defense, or whatever.  Not sure about Ward.

HYPNOS wasn't the first shot at this thing, though.  There have been little groups all over the place, scattered over history, that got going, figured out some parts of thing, and then went weird.  People getting rich, people vanishing, people going crazy.  There was a monastery in China where people in comas got taken, and their relatives could spend some time in these incense-heavy rituals, and then go and visit them spiritually, you know?  The Hashishin, the proto-assassins, they suposedly had this paradise garden that they got promised, but some of the things people wrote talk about how the garden was really a place that wasn't just owned by their boss - the old man of the mountain - but was actually a paradisaical dream-space that the old man maintained, and the Hashishin could visit while they slept.  Maybe they weren't just smoking hash, you know?

...

There was more like that, all these little examples of strange stuff on the same theme.  On an ordinary morning, one before I'd been visited in a dream, I would have thought it was a fun twist to put on a bunch of old stories at best, a strangely obsessive conspiracy-style hidden history at worst.  But since that had just happened, I was willing to believe that at least some of these stories were probably about this same kind of thing.

Gina had spotted the thread running through all this, and worked at it until she had it in her hands.  I wasn't her rational protector; I was her newly-acquired sidekick, proficient in medical matters and able, with a little help from a chemical wizard, to help her drag a whole lost branch of technology back into existence.  All I'd have to do was make her obsession into mine, too...   And I'd just spent a week throwing myself into it for no obvious reason beyond the fact that it was fun at first, and had then seemed totally natural to keep on.

I was hooked, plain and simple.