The Dreamers

10.

The eyelids flutter. The breathing is irregular. The muscle tone is visibly slack. With each new patient, Catherine notes it again—these signs that the sleepers might be dreaming.

What weird cases. Curiosity is part of what keeps her coming back all this way.

By her third visit to Santa Lora, a sleep specialist has confirmed it: the mapping of brain activity shows that these sleepers are, indeed, dreaming.

Dreams have never much interested Catherine. The field of psychiatry has moved on to different territory. Most of her colleagues would argue that dreams are entirely meaningless, a kind of mental junk, randomly generated by the electrical impulses of the brain. Or at best, some might say, dreams are like religion—a force that exists outside the realm of science.

But on her long drive home that night, it is hard not to wonder what it is those kids are dreaming of.

Maybe they dream of the lost and the departed, the once known and the dead. They dream of lovers, certainly, the real and the imagined, that girl at the bar, that boy they used to know. Or else they dream, as Catherine sometimes does, the mundane dreams of cluttered desks and computer screens, the loading of laundry, the clatter of dishes, the mowing of overgrown lawns. They dream they can fly. Or they dream they can kill. Maybe they dream they are pregnant and feel elated. Or they dream they are pregnant and are devastated. Or maybe, one or two of them, dream the answers to the problems they’ve been struggling with for years—like the nineteenth-century German chemist who insisted that the undiscovered structure of the chemical compound benzene came to him in the form of a dream.

If any of those kids dream of falling from great heights, they do not—for the first time in their lives—wake up before their bodies hit the ground. Instead, they dream right through these impacts and then go on dreaming after that.

The true contents of these dreams go unrecorded, of course, but in some patients, the accompanying brain waves are captured with electrodes and projected on screens, like silhouettes of the hereafter. Catherine is as shocked as the sleep specialists are by what she sees on those screens. These are not the brains of ordinary sleepers. These are not the brains of the comatose. These brains are extraordinarily busy.

By the time Catherine is pulling into her driveway back home, the news has leaked to the media and is streaming through the speakers of her car radio: there is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain—awake or asleep.