by K. Z. Howell
“No. Not an awake brain. Not exactly. I want to know if a dream state brain can reach out and interact with the subconscious part of an awake brain. I’ve studied this for years, there is no known way to remotely access the conscious mind. But the subconscious still employs the same wavelengths, albeit at different frequencies, as the dreaming brain.” He answered.
“So, the plan is to have them locate a target while he or she is awake and try to influence them through their subconscious?” Well asked.
“Essentially, yes. But that’s down the line. We first need to prove the concept. I have devised several tests designed to verify and quantify the process, once we have the existence of the effect proven, then we can expand the parameters. We need to move quickly though. In two months our funding for the research is up for review and we have no conclusive proof of our original mandate. Cayce may well have been unique, or the ability may exist in so few people that finding one with it would prove impossible.” Professor Bench stated.
“Well, professor, tomorrow we will find out. You’re supposed to open the envelope. Jennifer say’s that it has all the details of their last attempt and that there will be no doubt. I just hope it lives up to the hype. I know that her and Benji and Kathryn believe it. But, I’ve seen coincidence do some weird things as well.” Will told the professor.
“Did she mention when I could open the letter?”
Will answered “She said by the time we had our Wednesday free period. That’s the 9:00 a.m. slot for all four of us. We plan to meet at the benches outside the administrative building if you want to join us.”
“I believe I will join you. That’s where I sit for lunch most days, I know right where you mean. Now, I’ve kept you from that pretty young woman long enough. We shall have answers in the morning so you and her have a good time.” Bench said.
Wednesday morning, 9:06 a.m., at the bench in front of the administrative building.
Will dropped his Styrofoam cup. He didn’t even feel the hot coffee splash his pant legs. Jennifer clasped her hand over her mouth, her eyes unblinking saucers. Benji and Kathryn were laughing so hard that tears were streaming down their faces. Professor Bench, the only one sitting on the bench beside the brick walkway showed no change other than a sudden flurry of puffs of smoke from his lips as he furiously pulled at his pipe.
Mr. Alder, the campus janitor that everyone suspected of being a peeping perv in the girls locker room, walked past the group. He had parked his car directly in front of the building and stepped out stark naked. His pasty, pale legs goose stepping to the administrative buildings steps to the tune of “My Fair Lady” as he sang as loudly as he could. Campus security rushed out from the buildings lobby and tackled him, bringing a sudden halt to his awkward dance, but not his shrill, off key rendition of the classic show tune. That only ended when one of the security officers got tired of wrestling a naked man and tasered him into silence.
When the officers had handcuffed the naked janitor and carried him away in a patrol car Professor Bench stood and tapped out the smoldering tobacco from his pipe and carefully placed it into its pouch. “It seems that I have a letter to read.” He stated calmly. “I will see all of you this evening, as scheduled.”
Will watched as the old scientist walked toward the science building as though nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. When he turned his gaze to his friends the look of shock on his face set Kathryn and Benji into a fresh fit of howling laughter. Jennifer tried to contain herself, but failed at the wide eyed look on Will’s face. She joined the others in riotous laughter as he stood in stunned silence.
Dream State
Chapter 3
Sleep my child, tomorrow wake.
For tonight a world of dreams awaits.
Professor August Bench
Will connected the last electrode to Jennifer and kissed her quickly before flipping the lights to low and activating the rooms recording equipment. As he slipped out and let the door close behind him, a wave of nostalgia washed over him. He had been involved in the dream state program since it began. He had enjoyed being Professor Bench’s assistant and had learned a great deal from the old researcher in his two years working for him. Will still did not understand why their funding had not been renewed, the professor had been unusually vague when he told him of the Department of Homeland Securities decision to scrap the Dream State program in favor of a computer based future modeling system. Will could understand the disappointment of the programs failure to emulate Edgar Cayce’s work, but what they could do, what they had shown repeatedly that they could do was no less astounding!
Professor Bench was in the monitoring room tonight, though Will still ran the equipment. As the wave sounds played and the three subjects relaxed and began to drift off, the old scientist began to speak softly.
“I’m sorry Will. I know what this program means to you and your young friends. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell the DHS research team what we had discovered. The potential for the knowledge to be horribly abused is just too great.”
Will, just as softly, asked “What do you mean, professor? You didn’t tell them what we have discovered?”
“No, I considered it. I wanted to. But today they would use it against terrorists. Tomorrow, who would they turn it against?” the professor said sadly.
“They have already begun to monitor our phone conversations. They have been reading our e-mails for years, there are camera’s everywhere now. All of that is to watch us. Not our enemies. They spy on us every hour of every day because they think that we are their enemy.” He added with dismay.
“Professor, all of that is to protect us from the terrorist threat. How else would they catch them before they can strike? If our discovery can stop an attack, why keep the information secret?” Will asked.
“They monitor every phone, internet and radio signal in the country, Will. You’re a smart man, you understand how much data that is and the impossibility of sifting through even a single days worth. Yet they gather the data, record the calls and intercept all of those signals. Why take everything and store it when it would be far simpler and far easier to just look for the bad guys themselves?” the professor asked. “It is a matter of scale, and the scale they have chosen is impossibly large. If you want to find a needle in a haystack, you don’t make a stack of needles to search through.”
“Maybe so, Professor Bench, but it has worked so far, hasn’t it?” Will asked, still not convinced of the wisdom of keeping the ability to influence people under the radar.
“Has it, Will? All I see that it has done is made the enemy change his tactics. Mounting a huge operation like 9-11 requires a great deal of coordination and communication, but they rarely ever tried those here. Our police and intelligence services are simply too good. But a hundred lone wolf attacks generates no trail to find. What defense would we be offering to people with our knowledge when there is no way to find the right person to influence?” The professor asked.
“Okay, I get that. But what danger could our method pose? If it was ever needed, it would be there.” Will posed.
“Next year is the Presidential election. What happens if we come forward and someone decides to train a few personal dreamers? What happens if they use the method to have a candidate grab a lady reporter and kiss her on national television two days before the election?” The professor asked “I know that is a comical scenario, but the applications are endless. Influencing the Chairman of the joint Chiefs, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, even just a plain old bank president. The temptation is real, we see the corruption on the news every night. What happens when they realize that money and power and vengeance are just a dream away?”
Will checked the monitors, thinking about what the professor was saying while he looked. Benji was a little behind Kathryn and Jennifer, that was normal. The two women almost always entered the dream state before the male and tonight was no exception. The women were in slow wave sleep already. The EEG patterns of both
so close to identical that Will couldn’t see a difference without checking the readout in a mathematical representation.
Professor Bench leaned in to peer more closely at the combination monitor. This one showed all three patterns as they overlap, each dreamer having a specific color band assigned to them for each tracked brainwave form. Tonights experiment was designed to find the link between the two womens ability to project outside their own body and why they could control it better and stay in dream mode longer while Benji was with them. His idea was that the wiring of a female brain was subtly different from the male. In his previous studies the female brain produced a more robust K-complex brain wave which is connected to information processing and brain regulation as well as a much stronger Alpha pattern during slow wave sleep.
The male brain produces a much stronger Theta wave pattern during both slow wave sleep and R.E.M. sleep. Theta waves are tied to navigation and memory. The male brain also produces a broader frequency Alpha wave that has been thought to be tied to sexual arousal during the dream phase of sleep. Professor Bench believes that the sheer power of the Alpha wave at this stage is not simply sexual arousal, but more likely a response to any high adventure sensation of the dreaming brain. His working theory is that Benji’s heightened Alpha pattern is used as a booster by the female K-complex to locate and process remote information far outside the physical bodies of the dreamer.
This experiment would identify at what point the male dreamers accentuated Alpha pattern was essentially hijacked by the females K-complex waves and used to send and receive information remotely. They had added a series of highly sensitive receivers to the complex array of instruments in the room. These additional receivers were not connected directly to the dreamers the way that the EEG was. They were specialized devices designed specifically to detect and measure the wavelengths of the human brain. Their design was similar to the incredibly sensitive detectors used by cosmologists to ‘listen’ to distant stars, only they were programmed to weed out any signal they caught that was not within the particular wavelengths that a human brain produced.
The data feed from these new instruments each fed a constant stream of information to its own monitor and recording equipment and then into the master computer that collated their data with that of the EEG monitors. Will and the professor hoped to get a clear and complete ‘picture’ of the entire process from start to finish.
The set up appeared to be working as expected, the new devices suddenly began to detect Alpha, Theta and k-complex waves just as the EEG monitors showed that all three dreamers brain wave patterns had moved into synchronicity. While Will studied each individual subjects patters in a 1-2-3 pattern over and over, the professor focused his attention on the combined EEG and remote wave detector monitor, watching in fascination as the combined patterns steadily increased in power now that the women had the added boost of energy from Benji’s brain. There was a rapid spike in the combined monitor that made the old researcher sit back in shock. He quickly looked at the individual monitors and saw that they showed no such spike in energy on any of the wave frequencies the EEG was set to detect. There was a slight elevation in the K-complex reading from both females, but nothing different from Benji and certainly nothing that accounted for the massive surge that the remote detectors were receiving.
The professor refocused his attention on the combination screen, the astonishingly high levels were still being recorded, whatever was causing it was ongoing. He flicked his eyes to the timer, 38 seconds at these levels. An incredibly long time for a steady state brainwave pattern under any circumstance, much less a steady synchronization of three brains at once.
Another glance, 51 seconds on the timer. Fifty one seconds was not a long time in the waking world, but in the dream state it could be hours, even days. The professor noticed Will, the young man was staring at the combo monitor, his mouth a gaping maw of shock as he stared unblinking at the screen. The old man realized that his own face displayed the same look of shock and even awe at what they were witnessing. At 67 seconds the remote detectors dropped back to zero as quickly as they had spiked upward off the known charts.
One minute and seven seconds, for the first time in human history three minds had worked together at a level so basic to the human genetic structure that the ability to see it happen could only occur with instrumentation designed to study energy waves that had occurred millions of years in the past and quadrillions of miles away.
Kathryn woke as Will was removing the EEG connections and smiled at him. Smiling back, he handed her her journal and pencil which she took and immediately began sketching her memories. Will moved on to Jennifer and Benji, removing their electrodes and leaving both to slowly begin to stir as the room lights brightened. Professor Bench began collating all of the data from the EEG array and the remote wave detector modules and organizing them into a single file for Will to add the digitized journals to after the dreamers were finished recording their own memories of the session. The gray haired scientist completed his file just as Will reentered the monitor room.
“I have the collated file ready for you, William. When your friends are done and you have scanned the journals over, just drop the completed files on my desk on your way out. I am going to visit Dr. Parkman in the physics lab and ask about his experience with Theta and K-complex waves of such magnitude. I must confess, in all my years of studying the human brain, I have never seen anything remotely like the readings we saw tonight.” He said.
“Okay, Professor. I will take care of it. Have a good night.” Will replied.
After professor Bench had left, Will checked in on the dreamers monitor. They were all awake and busily transcribing their experience. While he waited for them to finish he reviewed the combination monitors recording. As it replayed through the 67 second sequence that interested him, Will carefully noted the time stamp as each wave form peaked and reached its maximum strength. He did this for Theta, Alpha and the K- complex waves making a separate note for slow wave sleep and full on REM sleep. When he compared the peak time of each wave in slow wave mode to the peaks in full REM mode he noticed a subtle shift in the Theta waves from each woman. Alpha and K-complex waveforms remained completely in lockstep, but the Theta wave varied just the tiniest bit beginning at the half second mark and continuing until the pattern collapsed at the 67 second mark.
Theta waves are a major means of the brains ability to know where it is in relation to everything else. In the simplest of terms , theta waves were the human brains GPS system. They control how the brain interprets location, distance, direction and a host of other sensory inputs that form the navigation system of a human. Why the subtle difference? Like a compass pointing north, if it is off just a tiny amount you will be off target more and more as you move from your starting point out toward your destination.
Benji’s waveform remained rock steady throughout the 67 second timeframe but to Wills eye, it looked like Benji was the one whose pattern broke, collapsing the synchronized activity. After a moment to think, Will decided that it made sense, especially if Professor Bench were correct in thinking that it was his Theta and Alpha waves that Jennifer and Kathryn were using to boost their own waves enough to find and access other brains outside their own.
Looking again at the test rooms monitor, Will saw that Benji and Kathryn were done with their entries. Jennifer was still writing but finished and closed her note book after a couple more minutes. The three came out and Benji held the door as the women came into the monitor room with Will. He took their books and began scanning in the new pages as he they talked about the experiment together.
When Will reached the part where Benji’s sudden wave shift collapsed the synchronization, both women laughed and asked “So, Benji. What was the name of the shameless hussy that killed our fun?”
Will was about to say that it could have been anything that broke the wave pattern, not just a sex dream, when Benji’s face turned bright red and he said sheepishly “I don’t know h
er name, but she does the nightly news on channel 23.”
That got all of them laughing hysterically. Will was still chuckling when he dropped off the professors copy of the nights data, his own on a thumb drive in his pocket. As they exited the building, Kendra Mills entered, wordlessly glaring at Jennifer and Kathryn as she passed quickly down the hallway. Will started to tell the doctor that Professor Bench was out, but the womans attitude and his general dislike for the snooty cougar just sent him out the door behind his friends.
“She’s supposed to be some kind of genius, she’ll figure it out. Eventually.” He thought.
They again went to Mutt’s Diner to eat. They liked the place, it was comfortable, not too loud and the food was good. It also was close to Will and Jen’s apartment and the dorms so a beer or two wasn’t a big deal. As they ate, Will filled the others in on what had occurred in the monitor room. Having been involved in the program and close friends with Will for so long they all understood the unusual nature of what the machines had recorded, even if they weren’t as scientifically inclined as Will was.
“I have to ask, what happened while you were in the dream state this time? It lasted so much longer and was much more high energy that the other experiments.” Will inquired.
Benji said “Don’t look at me. I just supply the gas, the ladies do the driving. All I got was images of sand and water.” Then he added “That probably explains why I ended up on a beach with the news lady in a bikini.”
That cracked up the whole group, but when they finished laughing, Jen looked at Kathryn before telling the men what they had done.
“Since the professor just wanted to see how far we could push the dream state, Kat and I decided to try something different. Instead of looking for someone, we each went somewhere. We think that to do that means we need to find someone in the place and “see” it, maybe experience it is a better word, through their memory and anchor our dream selves to them. Then we can experience what they have seen and done. That was the idea any way.