Falling Awake(6)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“I hope so.”

She turned the corner and walked swiftly toward her destination. Visions of her future flashed before her eyes. The promotion to department head would not only elevate her status at the center, it would mean a hefty increase in salary. She did the calculations and concluded that if she was careful, the raise would enable her to pay off her credit card debt ahead of schedule. In a few months, she might even be able to start looking for the Dream House. She was tired of living in apartments. She longed for a home of her own.

She stopped thinking about her potentially rosy future when she drew closer to the door of the office. A wistful sensation went through her, a mixture of sadness and regret. She was going to miss Martin Belvedere. The old man had been irascible, short-tempered, self-absorbed and secretive. But he had recognized her unusual abilities and gave her the first serious, professional post she’d ever held in the field of dream research. She would be forever grateful to him for rescuing her from the Psychic Dreamer Hotline.

Belvedere had possessed a number of unsociable traits but there was no doubt about his commitment to dream research.

In recent years Martin Belvedere had developed an obsession with a phenomenon he claimed to have discovered in a small number of dreamers. He had created the term “Level Five lucid dreaming” to describe it. In his opinion it was a highly developed form of what was commonly referred to as lucid dreaming, the experience of knowing that you are dreaming while you are actually in a dream and the ability to exert some control over the dreamscape.

Lucid dreaming had been written about and discussed for centuries from the time of Aristotle on down to the present. The phenomenon had been studied off and on in modern laboratory settings but little progress had been made toward understanding the lucid dreaming state. Many scientific researchers had abandoned the effort altogether in favor of conducting research on sleep phenomena that could be recorded and analyzed by their instruments. They preferred to examine changes in brain waves, blood pressure and heartbeat. They talked of REM and NREM sleep and published papers that were heavily weighted with statistics, charts and graphs.

But Martin Belvedere had gone much further than other researchers. He had taken a bold leap into the unknown and theorized that some people could achieve a very advanced state of the lucid dream experience. He claimed that in what he called a Level Five state, certain individuals could access their powers of intuition, insight, creativity and unconscious observations in ways that enabled them to see what they could not in the waking state. Belvedere was 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 had gone 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 up the 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 that artists 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.