Falling Awake

mind went blank. He watched the faint, sexy movement of her throat as she swallowed the mussel and frantically tried to remember what they had been talking about.
    “When did you first start experiencing the really intense stuff?” he managed.
    “I’ve always done some lucid dreaming but things really picked up during my last two years in high school.”
    “Same with me. I can remember having lucid dreams when I was a kid but they got stronger and clearer in high school.”
    She nodded. “It makes sense it would happen that way if you subscribe to the new theory that dreaming is a function of cognitive development.”
    “Meaning the brain gets better at dreaming as it develops?”

    “Sure. Just as it gets better at logic and reasoning. In fact, a lot of the experts who buy into the cognitive development theory believe that dreaming is really just another form of thinking, but a rather passive version of it. The reason that we don’t recall most of our dreams is because we don’t usually pay much attention to them due to the fact that, duh, we’re asleep.”
    “I’ve heard Lawson talk about that theory.”
    “Dreaming might be very similar to the kind of zoning out you do when you get into a car and drive a familiar route that you’ve driven a hundred times before.” She smiled. “You know how it feels when you get out of the car at the other end with no sharp, clear memory of the drive itself?”
    He looked at her. “No.”
    She frowned. “You’ve never had that experience?”
    “I like to drive,” he said simply. “I pay attention.”
    She made a face. “Exceptions to every rule, I guess. As I was saying, it’s a reasonable theory.”
    He smiled a little. “But it comes from the same experts who don’t believe there’s any such thing as a Level Five lucid dream, right?”
    She laughed. “Right. But I give them credit for trying to conduct a scientific study of dreams. For years a lot of good researchers wouldn’t even touch the field because it was seen as very soft science at best.”
    “They feared that any investigation would prove to be a slippery slope that started with fuzzy psychology and went straight downhill into the pits of psychic phenomena and mysticism.”

    She shrugged. “You can understand the problem. How do you objectively study something that can’t be seen or measured? Furthermore, you’re completely at the mercy of your research subjects. They can tell you anything they want about their dreams and you can’t prove it or disprove it.”
    “True.” He ate the last oyster. “Did you ever talk to anyone about your extreme dreams?”
    She was amused. “Well, let’s see, I believe I mentioned them to a guidance counselor in high school. I was wondering if there were any special career opportunities for people like me. She concluded that I was on drugs and called my parents. A couple of years later I talked to a doctor. He suggested that my intense dreaming was a side effect of medication. When I told him I wasn’t taking any meds, he decided that I probably needed some.”
    “I know the feeling. I talked to a couple of doctors my first year in college. Got the same diagnosis. They advised me to lay off the drugs. After that, I stopped mentioning the dreams to people. But a year later, I met up with Lawson.”
    She gave him a sympathetic look. “And you were so grateful to discover that someone actually understood your dream experience that you would have worked for him for free, if necessary, right?”
    “I was grateful,” he said dryly. “But not that grateful. Let’s just say that we negotiated a deal.”
    “Is Lawson a Five?”
    “No, but he’s probably a solid Four on Belvedere’s scale. High enough to sense the possibilities and certainly curious enough to try to figure out how to make a Five useful.”

    The waiter returned to remove the empty appetizer dish. When he was gone, Isabel sat forward and lowered her voice.
    “Lawson ran some experiments with drugs to see if he could enhance dreaming, didn’t he?”
    “How did you know that?”
    “I got some really bizarre Level Five dreams from him several months ago. I could tell there was something off. I asked Dr. B. if the subjects were on drugs. He said he wouldn’t be surprised.”
    “It was a short-lived experiment,” he admitted. “Lawson didn’t pursue it because the results were unpredictable. The stuff was something called CZ-149. It was originally developed as a drug designed