ONE

As I lay bleeding, listening to Laurent's tribe combing the house so that they could cave in my skull, I hurried to empty my pockets.  Toys, photographs, a funeral announcement, and other oddments all sent flying.  Never mind trying to find good spots for them, at this point; I just didn't want them on me when I died.

You see, when you die in a dream, you generally just wake up - even when the dream is lucid and telepathic.  You tend to have psychosomatic injuries, sure; I was going to have a hell of a limp after getting my leg mangled, but some good meditation would clear that up.  And, yeah, you can even get wicked real-life bruises where you had dream injuries, if you don't train for it like I do.  The thing to really worry about is what you're carrying when you get your return ticket punched, and I was carrying a crapload of memories of worst-childhoods-ever, which I didn't want turning into memories of having my very own worst-childhood-ever.

See, we wanted Laurent to end up committed to the psych wing, and...

Let me go back a bit.

...................

Ambrose Laurent, drug dealer extraordinaire, was trying to blackmail several members of my little circle of dreamers.  Not for the dreaming itself - he didn't really know what we were up to - just, for misusing University property, breaking into areas, stealing drugs, and so on.  We had needed money at one point, so we'd taken some supplies his way, and he'd wanted us to make a regular thing of it.  We'd refused.  One big yellow envelope of photographs later, we either had to pass over the drugs, or get him off us some other way.

So, we'd gone dream-diving into the coma ward, hunted down the very worst childhoods....

Okay, I'm going to have to go back further.

.....................


My cousin, Gina, is basically a hippie that digs on the occult.  Where most of the dropouts I know went backpacking in Europe, she spent a year in Egypt researching Niarla-Thotep instead.  I think she spells it with a "Y", though.  Anyway, she kept telling me about how she'd gotten all these copies of different spells, in translation, and how some of them still did things, but most had been corrupted.  That kind of thing; it was her whole deal.  She bombs around in a rusted-out jeep, playing mystery maven.

Our family resemblance does show - We're both inside an inch of six feet tall, curly black hair, narrow jaw.  It looks better on her.  She used to call me "Bang", just as a way of saying "Ben".  These days, though, it's "Coz"".

One fine September morning, she dropped by the hospital, found me having a coffee, and unloaded a file box on the table in front of me.  It looked exactly like what you'd expect a crappy overflow filing box from a bureaucratic warehouse to look like; cheap cardboard, bashed-in corners, the works.  Just, stamped with DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE across the eagle seal.


So, I stared at that bird, with this terrible feeling in my gut, as she pulled out files and plunked them down.  I maintained my cool.  I continued to maintain my cool right up until she pulled out a sheaf of papers, obviously old, obviously torn out of some book, covered over in hieroglyphs, in a plastic government baggie that someone had labelled, in sharpie, as ORIGINAL PROJECT HYPNOS DOCUMENTS.

At that point, I entirely failed to maintain my cool.

We shouted back and forth across the table, with my end revolving around the general theme of "What the fuck is this?" and her end around "Chill, coz!".

The HYPNOS project had, apparently, been both declassified and sent to the landfill on the same day, which Gina referred to as the Nobody-Cares cover-up option.  Like, this had been a big secret for a while, but nobody had been looking into it, or looking for it, so they made it go away the simplest possible way.  And Gina, who was the only one paying attention, had caught them at it to the extent that the trunk and the backseat of her crappy jeep were both filled with the leftovers of the project.

"Okay, so?"

She pointed to the tabs on the files she'd pulled out, which were names, and then pulled another page out of her pocket.

"So.  This one is James Virgil MacIntyre; now a therapist in Maryland.  Charges about a thousand an hour, does dream therapy.   This is Michael Lewis Bowley; got an honorary PhD in psychology from MIT, and consults in their sleep lab.  These next three are dead, various causes.  This one is FBI now, and this one is wanted by INTERPOL for undisclosed reasons.  All the rest are residents in various mental hospitals, nuthouses, and booby hatches.  Some comatose, the rest with huge complexes of obsessions, delusions, and manias, almost all with weird fixations of sleep and dreaming."

"And nobody else cared?"

"Nobody else noticed.  This HYPNOS thing was twenty years back, and got filed by pretty much all the papers in as a silly-season story.  You know, men who stare at goats kind of stuff, maybe with a little sleep deprivation thrown in, but not a funny one."

"But conspiracy buffs, those kinds of people?  Weren't they watching?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?  But I drove all night out here, picked 'em up right off the top of the landfill, and that was it."

Apparently so.  She just leaned up against the counter, crossed her arms, and...

"Fuck.  Okay, look, here's my apartment keys; address is on the little brass tag.  I'm off at nine.  You can shower, crash, and we can solve the mystery of the freaky sleepy when I get home."

"Sweet deal, coz."

And I was in.