Falling Awake

convinced that extreme dreaming was essentially a form of self-hypnosis that had the potential to allow the dreamer to tap into the deep rivers of human intuition and awareness.
    He had even ventured to say that extreme lucid dreaming was as close to a truly psychic experience as human beings could achieve.
    From the day two decades earlier when he had first used the word “psychic” in front of an audience of professional sleep and dream researchers, Martin Belvedere had instantly become a pariah among his colleagues.
    A few weeks ago, in a rare moment of personal revelation over a cup of tea, Belvedere had confided to Isabel how hurt and angry he had been when he realized that his friends and colleagues hadgone to great lengths to distance themselves from him after the ill-fated conference. Rivals and competitors, of which there was no lack, pounced upon his allusion to a possible paranormal aspect of dreaming as proof that Belvedere had wandered across the border that separated scientific study from New Age mysticism.
    In the last twenty years of his life, Belvedere had been considered eccentric at best and completely bonkers at worst by those in the field. But the remnants of the outstanding reputation he had established decades earlier had, nevertheless, clung to him like a worn and badly stained lab coat. His early, groundbreaking investigations into the biological and physiological changes that occur during sleep and in the dream state had assured him a place in the textbooks. It had also enabled him to establish the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research.
    The center was located near Los Angeles in one of the untold number of industrial parks that littered the landscape of Southern California. There were two small colleges nearby, both of which provided a steady source of paid research subjects for the various sleep studies conducted in the center’s labs. Students responded well to the idea of earning money while they slept.
    Most of the professional staff at the center was engaged in conducting research into a variety of serious sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnea and narcolepsy. The projects were commissioned and funded by various pharmaceutical companies and sleep disorder foundations.
    But in the year she had been working alongside Dr. Martin Belvedere, Isabel had discovered his great secret: He had set upthe center as an elaborate, respectable cover that enabled him to pursue his own, private research into extreme dreaming.
    Extreme lucid dreaming was a valuable talent, Belvedere had maintained, and one that could be cultivated in certain adept individuals and used in a variety of fields, but only if the talent could be properly understood and controlled.
    Everyone knew that the human brain was very good at tuning out most of the sensory stimulation that impacted it twenty-four hours a day, year in and year out. In fact, the ability to exert a high degree of selectivity over what sensory input would be utilized and what would be ignored was the only way the brain could make sense of the dazzling, overwhelming chaos that was reality, the only way it could stay sane. Total awareness would drive the mind mad.
    Belvedere had believed that extreme lucid dreamers were held to the same limitations of sensory selectivity and focus that governed everyone else but that they had an additional gift: They could shift or alter that focus while in the extreme lucid dream state. Furthermore, extreme lucid dreamers—those he labeled Level Fives—could not only perform that feat to a very high degree, they could do it at will.
    The possibilities were intriguing, Belvedere claimed. After all, a person who could selectively alter the way he or she looked at the world while in a dream trance would be able to discern things that would go unnoticed or unheeded while in the waking state.
    He had believed that those born with the talent no doubt used it, either consciously or unconsciously. He suspected thatartists who were extreme dreamers envisioned alternate views of reality and preserved them in paint and stone and other media for those who would not otherwise experience them. Mystics and philosophers used their extreme dreams for metaphysical exploration. Scientists endowed with the talent utilized it to find new ways to tackle research problems. Investigators who could drop into an extreme dream at will made use of the skill to pick up clues at crime scenes that others missed.
    It had been Belvedere’s goal