And Not Make Dreams Your Master

Chapter 1-2

To the great surprise of many, this turned out to be remarkably simple to chart. Except for those people with physical disorders—which were now easily identifiable—everyone stored the same kinds of images in the same places within their brains. By stimulating the same spot in two different people, it was possible to conjure identical images within their minds. At first, these experiments could only be done by the old-fashioned method of surgically implanting electrodes within the brain itself—but shortly thereafter, a method was found to stimulate these areas using electromagnetic waves instead of electrodes. The new method had obvious advantages: it could be applied externally, so there was no need of surgery, and it could be guided by computer with pinpoint accuracy to the desired location within the brain, leaving all the areas around that site unaffected. A helmet—the direct forebear of the Dreamcap—was designed for the subject to wear. By stimulating the correct sites within the subject’s brain, it was possible to produce an exact series of images in his mind, controlled by an outside influence.

At first, knowledge of the new techniques was limited to neurological specialists, and the applications were primarily in the field of psychotherapy. By scanning the output of a brain, analysts could visualize what their patients were actually seeing. For those patients suffering from delusions and physical misperceptions, the therapist could then substitute more correct images for the false ones. It was literally possible to change the way a person thought by altering the way he perceived reality.

But the implications of this discovery were too broad to be left in the laboratory. In totalitarian countries around the world, the Dreamcap quickly became the primary instrument of brainwashing and thought-control. If a dissident wouldn’t cooperate with his government, the ruling powers could imprison him in a mental institution—a cover the old Soviet Union and other dictatorships had used for many years—and impress their own thoughts into his mind. If the dissident’s mind accepted the new perceptions as its own, the person was pronounced “cured” and released into society. If the dissident’s mind refused to accept the new perceptions, his tormentors would keep at him, continually bombarding his brain with new images until his mind could no longer determine what was an outside influence and what was its own thought. The prisoner was then quite certifiably crazy, which justified his continued imprisonment. In either case, his ability to stand against the government’s power was effectively crushed.

Such uses of the technique were banned as utterly abhorrent throughout the free world, although there were persistent rumors that the CIA and other intelligence organizations did maintain their own brainwashing “clinics.” But free enterprise was not about to let such a powerful tool go undeveloped—not when there were potentially billions of dollars to be made.

It was frequently pointed out that the average person spent roughly a third of his life asleep. Aside from the fact that sleep allowed the body to rid itself of the day’s accumulation of poisons, and that the normal mind had a definite need to dream, sleep had little to recommend it. It was a colossal time-waster. People’s sleeping hours were a vast, untapped resource waiting to be developed and exploited. The Dreamcap offered an ideal way to do this.

One way was through education. Although nothing could supplant the traditional teacher-student learning experience in school, the Dreamcaps were a godsend to the field of adult education. People who worked hard at a job all day could still find time, while they slept, to learn a second language or catch up on the latest theories of organic gardening. “News magazines” of sleep could keep the citizenry informed through articles dealing with world conditions. The most popular use by far, though, was in the entertainment industry. After dealing with mundane problems during the day, most people were happy to put such cares behind them and lose themselves in a world of fantasy. The Dream broadcast industry provided the ultimate in escapist entertainment.

In all previous entertainment media, the medium itself came between the storyteller and the audience—the printed page in the case of books, or a screen in the case of movies and TV. The audience had to rely on the artificial images the storyteller provided and translate those images into personal symbols within the mind. In Dreams, all that had radically changed. The images were supplied directly into the viewer’s brain, and the viewer felt as though he were actually undergoing the experiences. He could spend his night actually being a spy, or a detective, or the greatest swordsman in seventeenth century France, then wake up in the morning with full memory of what had happened. He could go out and face the new day with a feeling of having been greater than he was, of having lived through an adventure without any personal risk.

Wayne Corrigan was an important part of the new entertainment industry, one of the select few people with imaginations vivid enough to be Dreamers. He and Janet Meyers and the other Dreamers projected the images that sleepers at home picked up on their own Dreamcaps. He created a role and broadcast it through his headset. His images were amplified and transmitted across wires to homes throughout Los Angeles, where they were impressed by Dreamcaps into the minds of his audience, allowing them to live the adventure along with him. In turn, each home Dreamcap sent a signal back to the studio when it was tuned in, allowing the studio to monitor its precise ratings and bill its customers accordingly.

One of the earliest problems discovered was one of s*x role identification. Most men wanted to identify with male roles in Dreams, and most women wanted female roles. (There was an aberrant minority that seemed to prefer “cross-gender identification,” but the major broadcasters ignored them.) In some cases, it was possible for a given adventure to star a genderless protagonist who appealed to both sexes, but those stories were more limited in scope, and not nearly as popular as the ones with full identification.

One solution to the problem was the “Masterdream.” In this sort, the Dreamer created not one, but a number of different roles for various members of the audience to identify with, as they chose. The Masterdreamer would then move these characters through his Dream world to fit the story he was telling. Since he could create both male and female roles simultaneously, anyone could tune in to such a Dream without upset.

The Masterdreamers were a rare breed, though. They had to be able to visualize an entire world all at once, and to keep individual characters moving through it simultaneously without confusion. The Masterdreamer ran his entire stage, and moved people through it like puppets. It was a difficult art to master, and the staff here at Dramatic Dreams had only one Masterdreamer—a genius named Vince Rondel.

The more common solution was to have separate Dreams for men and women. Usually such Dreams would be totally separated from one another, although in an emergency—such as frequently happened at a small company like Dramatic Dreams with a tiny staff of writers and performers—the two roles could work together within the same Dream world. That was what was happening tonight: Wayne and Janet were portraying a team of government agents working together on the same case. The men in the audience received Wayne’s impressions, identified with him, and thought of Janet merely as another important character; for the women in the audience, it was the other way around.

For most Dreamers, this kind of Dream was easier to maintain than a Masterdream, because there was a straight one-to-one relationship between Dreamer and viewer. The viewer saw only what the Dreamer saw, and the Dreamer needn’t worry about maintaining portions of the world that were not in the present scene.

The disadvantage was that when two Dreamers were operating in the same Dream, accidents could occur—such as the guard in the corridor. Wayne and Janet had each been visualizing him differently, and as a result the image became fuzzy and jumped around until Janet relinquished control of him to Wayne. Since both Dreamers had an equal ability to affect the action within the Dream, coordination between them was essential.

Wayne was very grateful that Dreams did not run straight through. Research had shown that Dreams were most effective when broken into fourteen-minute acts, with fourteen-minute breaks between them. Dreaming was such an intense experience that the body needed time to relax from one session before entering another. The scenario writers had learned to gauge the length of their scenes accordingly, and Dreamers universally considered the intermissions a blessing. It gave them time to recover from the previous scene, stretch their muscles, remind themselves what they were doing, discuss technical problems with the engineer on duty, and—in the case of two or more auxiliary Dreamers working in tandem—it gave them the chance to go over their mistakes and improve their coordination.

Wayne took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he settled the Dreamcap on his head. Twenty-two thousand people were tuned in to this Dream, from what Ernie White had said. That wasn’t very many, not in a city the size of Los Angeles. Granted he was a new talent on a small local station, and it took time to build up a decent following. But Janet was a better Dreamer than he was, he knew that; she was one of the established artists at Dramatic Dreams, with a following of her own. Her presence in this one should have brought in a lot of women to bolster his ratings, maybe introduce a few new people to his style. Instead, he seemed to be dragging her down to his level.

Damn it, I know I’m good! he thought resentfully. I may not be another Vince Rondel, but I know I can do better than this. How in hell can I break out of this slump?

A blue light flashed in the ceiling, his thirty second cue. Wayne lay back on his couch, wriggled himself into a comfortable position, and began the self-hypnosis routine all Dreamers learned to get them into a trance state for better projection. He forced his mind to shed all extraneous thoughts. Above all else, he was a professional. He had a story to tell. He did not take his own problems and prejudices into the Dream with him; that was the surest way to get himself fired. As long as he was Dreaming, it didn’t matter to him whether there was one person or a million on the other end of the line. Ratings were only a problem in real life; to any dedicated Dreamer, the Dreams themselves were all that mattered.