3. Research

MacIntyre reports intense, vivid dreams about a land of green hills, colorful brick roads, and flying monkey-creatures. He also states that these elements duplicate those in a book he was read as a child, and has urged me to look into that author as someone who might know some great truth. Assigning his dreams, which merely repeat childhood motifs, as having deep universal significance, may indicate the formation of delusional thinking, or may indicate only that the dreams themselves are extraordinarily potent to a point nearing the hallucinatory.

-Subject file, James MacIntyre, HYPNOS project files.

Practical knowledge is built on the accumulation of things that worked the right way. Which sounds great, right up until you realize how many things you have try. For every thing you get right, you generally get a whole lot of things wrong.

Gina and Ray bought all the South African poppies the greenhouse had, which was a couple dozen, and also bought a few pots, and some soil. Ray then sat down 'for a minute', and ended up crashing, snoring out a few hours on the couch. Meanwhile, Gina got the seeds off, pressed them, and walked through a few different steps of refinement. The result was a kind of grainy putty, the same milky-brown as the stuff we had. It was, she said, about four times as much as she'd burnt the night before. Meaning that six poppies made one dose, more or less, if her guess of "one dose" was anything like accurate. On waking, Ray took it to work, along with a bit more of the original, to compare them while he kept up his usual routine.

Watching Ray dive right in, without any friction, worried at me a little. I shrugged it off, though - I'd done the same, hadn't I? I'd gone a bit further, really; my normal routine was taking a pretty serious beating.

I was thinking about getting things right, and getting them wrong, though. And about how to determine which is which, so that your whole method doesn't have hidden flaws. We'd need blood tests, to watch for buildup toward nitrate poisoning. We'd need a overdose kit, though I hoped we'd never need it. We'd need more flowers - way more. We'd need a monitoring setup; self-reporting journals, at a minimum, but preferably actual sleeping couches. And we'd either need a long time, or a lot of subjects.

No matter how I sliced it up, money was going to be a thing. Right now, we were two students operating on scholarship money, and one globe-trotting... It occurred to me that I had no idea how Gina paid for her existence. So, best to just lay out the starter plan for "what we can do right now with a couple comfy chairs", and the various ways to expand on it, and if anyone could dream up some plan for cash, we'd be doing well.

My general idea was that we could just whip up a few small batches, and then try and get a pharmaceutical company interested. We get to be the discoverers of this thing, with Gina taking top billing, and we all get rich. Easy enough. When I started to lay out this line of thinking for Gina, though, she had other ideas.

"No way, coz. Any one of those companies would see a military sale as the best bid around. We might still get a payday, but the stuff would be prohibited - flowers and all - and vanish off the market so fast your head would spin right around."

"So... What's the goal, then?"

"Herbal medicine, coz. We will officially be engaging in the hippiest of hippie trades. Think about it; we can do tests, find volunteers, even do research on dreaming techniques, and nobody will care even a little bit. If we're just some incense-making dream gurus, nobody legal will ever believe that we're putting lightning in bottles."

"Or at least, they'll be looking for pot."

"Sure thing."

I mentally added a tie-dyed headband to my idea of becoming a labcoated "Q", and went back to explaining our upcoming needs for Gina. She nodded along, making a list as she went.

"I've got three thousand in the bank, and I could max out my credit at... another eight thousand past what it's at. That get us anywhere close?"

"It's more than we need for most of the first runs, to narrow down an okay dose of the stuff you're cooking up right now, get a rough picture of what it's doing. Not even close to enough for us to hunt side effects, try out a good course of variants, all that. To do that, we either need a program... Or, well, you want to be herbal hippies, right?"

"Right."

"After basic tests, when we've got one thing that works okay, and I'm pretty sure it's not gonna kill anyone, we could find you a shop with a big back room. Incense, meditation mats, and a little lab in the back; flowers everywhere, probably even growing lights inside. We could take months or years to test variations, while making sales, the whole thing. But, I mean... That'd be your whole life, you know?"

"It's already my life, coz. Sounds pretty sweet, really. You talking about turning into a lifer, here, too?"

"It wouldn't be that hard for you to stick to a set of best practices for tests, right? I'd just need to put those together for you, and I could walk anytime; it's not such a big commitment for me."

"Sure thing."

"Okay. So. That's a big hit. I dunno if you could cover setting it up on, what, about eleven thousand? But it seems like it's a do-able thing, and we've got a couple weeks of the fundamental tests before we should even be thinking about this. It really should be more; we're talking about a mostly-unknown drug here."

"You'll get your couple weeks. Gimme a bare-bones shopping list."

...

Gina reported lucid dreams that night, but couldn't get me 'on the line'. Or Ray, for that matter. The next night, she couldn't even recall her dreams. She had some, though; we had three not-quite-antique reclining chairs sitting in my living room by then, with most of the file boxes stacked out of the way, and all three of us were hooked up to little electrodes, through a cheap 'brainwave monitor' from a wellness store (which lasted all of a week before fritzing out, and gave terrible readings, but still). The agreement was that she'd get another go, then Ray the night following. I'd play control; there to be contacted, but no drugs for me.

Ray was as sure as one person could be without a hell of a forensic lab that we'd recreated the same drug - if we dried it hard, and shaved it to slivers, he believed, it'd be very nearly identical. Gina was leery of doing that, though; she wanted to stick with what she'd translated out of the older pages before playing around any further.

So, on the third night, having taken and passed a blood toxicity test, Gina took another hit. She put it a thumbnail-sized sliver on a little ceramic stand, put that in a big metal bowl, and burned it away with a gas lighter. All this with a damp towel draped over her, so she could "hotbox" the bowl. She sat and breathed in the fumes there for a few minutes, then sat back. Ray and I must have looked like we were expecting her head to spin around or something; she just looked at us and said "Boo!", and we all broke down giggling. She dropped off to sleep almost the moment she hit her chair, though she hadn't mentioned being tired. It took me a little longer.

In sleep, Gina found me first. I wasn't dreaming at all, at the time, as far as I can tell - I was just asleep, but she wandered into whatever it was that my sleeping mind was up to, found a copy of me in a "my apartment" scene, and said "Hey, Ben. Coz. Pull yourself together; it's dream-time". And then I arrived, or pulled all my various different 'selves' together, however you want to look at it. I became lucid, anyway.

"That is one weird feeling."

"Looks like it, yeah. Here I am, though! Your place, but no Ray. We'll have to go look for him."

"Think about places we've been together, and the ways to get there, that kind of thing?"

"I'm the one that's all hopped up, coz. I'll try first. I went for a drive with him, in my jeep, to the greenhouse. So, I'm gonna open the apartment door, and it'll be actual rest of the building outside; then, downstairs to my jeep. That's what's going to happen, if we concentrate, I think. Ready?"

"Ready."

She opened the door. There were stairs on the other side, and her jeep, but not my apartment building. Outside my apartment door was a kind of porch made of what looked like white marble, and then steps leading down a grassy slope. At the bottom of the slope, maybe forty or fifty feet away, Gina's jeep was waiting. Above this, a starry sky, heavy with strange constellations in a multitude of colors.

"It's the hills. Remember, the hills I told you about!" Gina shouted, as we both walked to the door, and craned around to look outside.

"Yeah. Do we go out?"

"Do we! I'll race you!" And she was off, down the hill and into her jeep.

From the jeep, we got our first good look at the hills - what we would, soon enough, come to call "the outlands". Behind us, on a wide hill, was what can best be described as a giant, jumbled tower that was made up of everywhere I could remember going in my life. Houses I'd lived in. Schools I'd attended. Places I'd hung out, streets I'd spent time on, all stacked and staggered up and up, with my current apartment building turned inside-out as the ground floor. Endless locked apartment doors facing outward in a ring, with the hallway carpet as a kind of sidewalk ring that encircled the tower. It would have been a building big enough to take up a full block, ten stories tall at least, on any street, if it were possible at all in reality.

And just behind it, maybe half a mile distant on another hill, another tower - some of it familiar, but more airports and hotel rooms, cliffs and ruins. Gina drove us over towards it, over the gently waving grass of the hills, and we saw the bridge she'd made - the hospital walkway, stretching from her tower to mine.

As we drove, I noticed that we'd left a sort of road - flat beige stones, broken and mostly overgrown in the grass, but still there. I pointed this out to Gina, and she paused in examining the tower of her stuff to look down at it, and follow it with her pointing finger into the distance. As that road went over the hills and out of sight, we could see the top of another something; a tower like ours, maybe, but what we could see of it seemed to be all brick. After a little time looking over her own tower, we turned that way and drove, windows down, along the broken road.

The gentle hills of the ouglands are very real in terms of detail. We rolled our windows down, and felt the cool night breeze. We could hear crickets, in the grass, and watch the stars glimmer - too many and too large, in all colors, but otherwise plain enough. So the drive was pleasant, however surreal it may have felt. The hills gave the impression of deep emptiness – not the natural quiet of the wild, but the hollow echoing feel of a room someone had walked out of. The ruined road we had taken was matched by a shattered and overgrown plaza that we could see in one of the valleys. One kind of short green grass transitioned into tall yellow stalks along a clean, straight boundary.

Moments later, we came upon was Ray's tower, but... it wasn't a jumble like ours. It was the front facing of Derleth elementary school, an old Victorian brick-and-limestone school about twenty blocks from where my apartment was. So, all brick, with the same windows, over and over about twelve floors up, with the same front entranceway repeated on the ground floor three times on the side facing us, and it looked like three more times on the next side, around the corner. As we drove up on the roadway, we could see copies Ray, sitting on the steps of all three entrances. Each copy was bouncing the same ball, over and over, in perfect harmony.

Gina leaned out of her window and shouted "Ray! We're here to pick you up!" as we pulled up.

"You're not my dad. I'm waiting for my dad." Mumbled the copy of Ray nearest us, audible despite the distance.

She wasn't having it, though "Wakey-wake-dream, Ray. It's Ben and Gina, here to drag you off on impossible adventures." she called as she puled to a stop, and opened up her door.

I got to see the multiple-selves-coming-together thing, then, with a blur of identical copies of Ray, and then other versions of him doing other things, all suddenly superimposing themselves half-transparently in space. And then, just the one version, standing in front of us with a little shudder.

"Whoa. Ouch."

"Yeah, we know. Welcome to dream club! My name is Gina, I'll be your driver, and we have no idea what the hell this place is."

"It's.. My school. I went here, as a kid. I'd sit on the steps, and wait for my dad to pick me up every day after school."

I broke in with "Well, maybe you figured we would be coming, so you were waiting for us.", which actually made more sense than I'd expected, and we all looked at each other for a moment.

"Anyway, you should see our towers; they're a little different."

"Your towers?"

So, of course, we showed him. And talked about the difference between his place and ours. And we tried to figure out the bridge Gina had made, and talked about how the road and jeep had appeared leading to him when we'd opened the door from my apartment looking for a connection to him. There was a sort of sense to it all, but we couldn't quite get through it.

As we talked, we drove up the highest hill we could see, wondering if we could find any other towers. We were starting to feel a bit stretched, as if staying lucid was taking something out of us; getting a better view seemed like a good capstone for the night. What we found instead was a black cat, with white-socked paws, sitting on a huge grey boulder at the top of that hill. It looked at us, cocked it's head, and jumped down and ran over to me, rubbing up against my legs. I picked it up, gave it some scritches, looked around.

Long, low ridges. Lost and splintered roads, plazas. A few rare boulders, stretching out, out as far as I could see in the clear air. In the great distance, here and there, lone trees, dim shimmers of light coming up from valleys. Here and there in the distance, we could see what might be shapes blocking out areas of stars, or might just be dark spaces near the horizon. We looked for a while, and then 'let go' of the effort of staying focused and lucid.