'Please continue,' I urged. 'What you say somehow feels very right to me, though I'm not sure I really understand it all.'
'You're remembering,' C.I. replied. 'In time you will begin to remember fragments of other lives. You dream of them often. Ever since you were born, Lea has been visiting you on the astral plane, but you didn't remember, since you had not yet learned the importance of your dreams.'
'Is that why...' I hesitated. 'Is that why I woke up so many times feeling full of joy and hope for something that seemed to be there just beyond my reach?'
'Yes,' was C.I.'s reply. 'It was all you could remember of your contacts on the astral plane where Lea reminded you again of your oneness and that she was working to bring you to 2150.'
C.I.'s voice was fading, though I listened intently.
'Your time translation is our most advanced 'continuity of life' project. It has been achieved through the joint efforts of the most highly evolved minds in our galaxy, with your own budding belief in macrocosmic oneness playing a...'
CHAPTER 2: Was It a Dream?
I awoke fresh and alive, as though I had just come in from a brisk walk.
My big round alarm clock read 7:41.
Where had I been? What had I been hearing?
A female voice seemed to echo back into my dream. Some kind of a formula... or a process. A sentence, half finished.
Pulling my pillow over my head I tried to go back to sleep, mentally stretching back into my dream.
Then it hit me as though I was still dreaming.
But I wasn't!
I could hear the pleasant voice of C.I. presenting so many new ideas that my mind was reeling under their impact.
Then there was that girl, Lea. What clarity!
'Clarity'? Where did that word come from? 'Clarity.'
It had a nice feeling attached to it, yet it now meant something new-something it had not meant before last night's dream.
Lea was 'clear.' There was no game-playing, no being what she thought I wanted her to be, no pretense, no expectations, no defenses, just a very bright, capable, honest, straightforward woman joyously experiencing and respecting herself, others, and life itself.
Hers was not the shallow, brittle beauty of a Hollywood starlet, but a deep almost spiritual essence that seemed to radiate from her. While her physical beauty was obvious, it was the sparkling multifaceted depths of her mind which aroused and excited me with a completeness that I had never quite reached before.
Hugging my pillow, I felt Lea warm against me and, once again, argued with myself. Why cover my bare body? Just so I wouldn't be embarrassed? Why be embarrassed? If the body is just the outer garment of the essential self.
And there was another new term. 'Essential self.' It, too, meant something new; something more complex. This dream was a more interesting education than any class I'd ever attended!
Why?
The question brought my mind's focus from a fantasy world of the future back to the prosaic present. Mentally I moved into this new day. Physically, or was it spiritually?-some deep core of my essential self reached forward into 2150 and stayed there.
The feeling of loss was strong in me as I sat up in-bed and strapped on my artificial limb. Karl had already left to teach his 8 a.m. Introductory Psychology class. I was glad that I had given up my teaching assistantship this semester to work full-time on our dissertation. This left my time relatively free of demands, so I could let this incredible dream drift about the edges of my mind as I pursued my day's activities.
Was it just a dream? Just. Maybe that was the wrong word. That booklet I had scanned-a light brown booklet-said something about dreams being much more important, a reality of their own. What was it? Maybe I could find it again. Just a little booklet, 'Interpret Your Dreams from a... ' something or other.
Finishing my breakfast, I cleaned up our small kitchen absorbed in conflict. Never had I experienced a dream so clear and vivid and with such an incredibly detailed story.
Yet if I took it seriously, I might just as well forget about becoming a respected social psychologist. Anyone in my field who spoke of time travel, astral bodies, parapsychology, or other forms of intelligent life contacting us here on Earth, would be ostracized by his colleagues.
Still, I decided to write down what I could remember, and as I slowly recorded this strange experience, I began to live it again:
As I puzzled over that last statement of C.I.-something about my belief system-the door opened.
'Man, am I hungry!' Karl shook the snow off his fuzzy black hair as he pulled off his fake fur overcoat and boots.
Seemed like I had just begun, and here it was 1:30 already!
'You look like Big Foot with that coat on!' I said. Karl was not a small man. While I was the runner on the team, Karl cleared the way so I'd have an opening to run through. And he was built for the job!
'I could eat like Big Foot right now!' he answered. 'Let's have some lunch. What are you doing?' he added.
'Been writing down some ideas I got from a dream last night.'
'What?'
'I said I've been writing down some ideas I got from a dream last night.'
'That's what I thought you said. What the hell are you talking about?' Karl peered at me with that intense green eye of his.
Sometimes I think that Karl's eye was taken from him not to keep him out of pro football, as he sometimes postulates, but rather for the protection of the people he looks at. He has enough power in that one eye to make up for the one he lost and then some!
Feeling a shade intimidated by his look and the hint of sarcasm in his inquiry, I began, 'Last night I had the most 'real' dream.'
'A wet one, I trust.'
'Damn it, Karl! I'm serious!'
'And I'm dying of starvation. You'll have to wait a minute or deliver your oration to a dead audience!'
He disappeared into the kitchen, emerging a moment later with a pint bottle of carrot juice in his left hand; peanut butter, jelly, salami, brick cheese, and lettuce sandwiched precariously between two oversized slices of wheatberry bread in his right hand; and a paper towel with a freshly rinsed carrot inside it tucked between his forearm and his chest. He was big on carrots.
'Okay,' he said, 'lay it on me.' His beanbag chair cringed briefly before yielding to his 240-pound onslaught.
Pacing the floor, I told him of the fantastic freedom I had experienced a mere seven hours ago. His angular face remained impassive, but as I finished, it broke into a huge grin.
'Well, now,' he chuckled. 'I can understand why you were sorry to wake up. Leave it to you to produce the summa cum laude dream of all time!'
I shook my head slowly. 'But I don't think that I, Jon Lake, could produce a dream like that. Really, Karl. I mean, the new words, the detail... I can't even imagine that kind of stuff, much less dream it.'
'Okay, Jon. Maybe it was the Jon Lake of 2150 who produced the classical wish fulfillment dream for the crippled Jon Lake of 1976. After all, that's what your dream girl, Lea, said, wasn't it?
'And by the way, did you think of asking your dream computer how they were able to develop a utopia like
