The Dream Machine

Janet had just taken a freshman course in basic psychology in which one of the things she learned about was the phenomenon known as the conditioned response. Two stimuli, one of which produces a certain response of its own accord, are presented as a pair to an experimental subject. Very quickly, the subject learns to respond similarly to either stimulus, even when the one producing the natural response is not given. The concept was, and is, one of the foundational roots of psychology as a science. It is certainly not a new idea.

Just a week later, however, Janet was watching a television science-fiction program in which the main character had a signaling device implanted in his head that enabled him to be aware of when her wa dreaming, and, then, to modify his dream through conscious effort. Something clicked in Janet’s mind at that moment. She had experienced dreams in which she was aware she was dreaming and she had (at least she believed she had) partially controlled the progress of her dreams once she was aware she was dreaming. Would it be possible to build a machine to let you know when you were dreaming? She reasoned that if a message such as, "I am dreaming" could be associated with a signal that could be sensed while asleep and without awakening, then all that would be needed would be a way to trigger the signal during a state of dreaming. Two weeks later she learned that an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine can sense electrical activity in the brain and that EEG signals with a certain form are associated with the sleep state, called REM sleep, in which dreaming takes place. Though she was only a freshman and knew little about research procedures, she began to experiment immediately.

First, Janet looked for a unique, audible signal that would not wake her up. She made digital recordings of all sorts of sounds and used her computer to play them at random while she was asleep. She lost a lot of sleep for a while but after several months she had quite a few sounds that did not wake her up unless she was sleeping very lightly or set the volume too high. Next, she made a computer program that simultaneously played a sound – the one she selected was a pair on disharmonic tones in rapid succession – while it also displayed the message "I am dreaming" both audibly and as a text image on the screen. Janet drilled herself for many hours with these paired stimuli, repeating the phrase "I am dreaming" out loud each time the computer presented the pair tone and message stimuli. Finally, she acquired a simple biofeedback device designed to detect the occurrence of REM associated brain waves. She connected the output of the biofeedback to her computer and programmed it to present her with a set of paired stimuli whenever it detected a new episode of REM sleep. Then she turned on the system and went to bed.

Janet was window shopping at a mall department store when she heard one of those irritating, P.A. system tone paging signals that some department store chains use to tell floor managers they need to call in. At that moment she realized she was dreaming. At first she wasn’t absolutely sure she was dreaming so she decided that the next person to come out of the dressing room of the lady’s department ought to be a young Marilyn Monroe. She waited. The next two people out of the dressing room were Maureen O’Sullivan (Jane in the Tarzan films of the 1930’s) and Audrey Hepburn. "That’s good enough! She said out loud to herself, "I’m dreaming!"

Janet wasn’t about to just let her dream unfold. She wanted to direct its flow. For a moment she couldn’t decide what to do, but then inspiration struck. She decided to do something totally bizarre and completely out of character. She picked up the skimpiest bikini bathing suit she could find, and one two sizes too small, then went into the dressing room and changed into it. As she emerged she could feel the stares of quite a few customers, many of whom were men, so she upped the ante. She walked up to the nearest clerk and announced in a loud voice, "Do you have this in a larger size, my breasts are much too big for this one?" Most of the customers scattered. Now she decided to act in an even more bizarre manner. She took off the bathing suit top, tossed it to the clerk, and walked out of the store into the mall.

Suddenly, Janet was in the mall parking lot, still wearing only the bottom half of a microscopic bathing suit. She crossed the lot to her car, parked next to a low fence on the far edge of the lot. Beyond the lot fence was a steep slope down to a muddy brook, then a marsh for several hundred yards, and then a dense forest. Twenty or thirty feet beyond the brook there was a parallel row of old, faded signs, one every thirty feet or so. She had never noticed this row of signs before but now they struck her as interesting. She climbed over the fence, slid down the slope, and waded across the brook to get closer. From the far bank of the stream she squinted her eyes to read the faded signs. They all said the same thing. "Stay Out! Quicksand Area!" Still at least partially aware she was dreaming, Janet instantly knew that staying out was the one thing she would not do. She advanced to the line of signs. Then she stepped out of what was left of her bathing suit, left it draped over the sign, and walked rapidly forward, looking for the quicksand.

She soon found it and it was exactly as she had seen it portrayed in the movies, except she saw it before blundering into it. There it was three feet in front of her; twenty-five feet across and at least as wide; a vast expanse of churning, thick, black ooze. Large bubbles rose and popped here and there just as she had seen in films of volcanic mud pots at Yellowstone National Park. Each popping bubble threw a glob of mud straight up, sometimes as high as a couple of feet, only to fall back into the morass of mud with a low-pitched "glop." The whole surface seemed to be moving, very slowly but constantly pulsing up and down and flowing laterally in long, slow swirls. Janet didn’t hesitate a second. She took one rapid step forward and jumped out into the bog, landing heels first as if in a track and field long jump and plunging in thigh deep. Her landing made a loud "plup" and a long, slow wave radiated outward across almost the entire bog. The mud was silky smooth and surprisingly warm. It was also very thick and made moving her legs quite difficult.

Janet loved the feel of the mud against her skin. She began pulling gobs of it up along and between her legs, across her belly, and, eventually, around and between her breasts. For a minute or so she sank no further. Then the mire seemed to soften beneath her and suddenly she dropped like a stone to just above her navel. For the next five minutes she rubbed the mud all over herself, even her hair and face, as she very, very slowly, but continuously continued to sink until she was up to her neck. Now she raised her arms over her head, even though their weight pushed her head downward. At the same time she was forced to gradually tilt her head back further and further to keep her mouth above the surface. Soon her face was framed in a shrinking oval of rising mud that eventually covered her eyes, and then her mouth and nose. As the mire engulfed her completely, Janet felt an almost overpowering conflict of sensations – one a sense of sudden claustrophobic fear, and the other a sense of complete physical pleasure. It was not at all unlike what she had felt the first time she gave in to sexual pressure from a boy friend she had known only very briefly.

Janet opened her eyes and found herself quite safe in her bedroom. "Wow, what a dream" she said out loud. It was only three o’clock in the morning but further sleep was now impossible – she was much too excited. It wasn’t so much the dream that excited her as it was its confirmation of her idea that stimulated dream awareness really was possible. She was halfway through her freshman year but she knew she was on to something that could earn her a PhD in very short order if she could demonstrate it consistently and convincingly. Her dream, of course, did make a substantial contribution to her excitement. She had never had any sort of erotic thoughts involving quicksand, nor had she ever been stimulated by any sort of wet and messy images or ideas, but she knew beyond any doubt that she would not mind if her dream became a recurring one. She would not mind that at all.

Over the next several months Janet repeated her experiment several times each week. About fifty percent of the time she was successful in having at least one cream in which she was aware it was a dream and seemed able to influence the flow of events. Many, though not all, of her "aware dreams" had a substantial degree of eroticism in their content. Often they involved sex, including both throwing herself at a man and being pursued and raped. She was also very surprised to find the next most frequent theme of her aware dreams was quicksand. These she began to increasingly enjoy.

Janet wanted to do more than simply enjoy her newfound ability for dream awareness. She wanted to demonstrate her technique scientifically, but did not yet fully understand how to do this. She did know that her own testimonial statements would convince only the very gullible. Even repeated testimonials from many people would not do, she soon found out in a research methodology class. People often describe experiences they have not had merely because they expected them to occur or because they believed someone else expected them to happen. Volumes of books and stories about space ships crashing in New Mexico and lake monsters in Scotland were ample evidence of this. To really convince any scientists, she soon realized, she would have to do two things. First, she would have to make her technique reliable enough that nearly anyone could experience dream awareness more often when the technique was used than when it was not used, even when the subject was unaware of whether the technique had been used or not. Second, she would have to induce subjects to have aware dreams after which they would consistently report images that could be reasonably associated with stimuli provided during sleep and unknown consciously to the subject.

This was a tall order but Janet was anything but slow witted. She decided to work on the second problem first. The first problem was simple from an experimental point of view and she was quite convinced of the outcome unless she was somehow unique. She began by training herself to become aware of dreaming in response to any of ten different stimuli. Each of these signals she paired with the message "I am dreaming, " just as she had before. But this time she also paired (perhaps tripled is a better term) each signal with a different image. The idea was that some part of an aware dream would incorporate some element of plot that could be related to this image. To avoid any personal bias in her selection of images, she used the first ten stories on the front page of her Sunday newspaper, regardless of their content. She did this every two weeks with a new set of ten news story images. At the same time she altered her sleep monitoring software so that when REM sleep was detected it would select a stimulus, and its associated image) at random. On her vry first attempt, Janet had one of hr most rotic aware dreams.

Janet was driving her pickup along a lonely country road when she spotted a hitchhiker thumbing for a ride. He looked very disheveled and tired, and decidedly dangerous. Normally she would never have stopped for a hitchhiker, but just as she was about to pass by she heard a low rumble of distant thunder that told her she was dreaming. She stopped and offered a ride.

"You look like you could use a little help," she said, rolling down the window. "And you look awfully tired, Why don’t you get in the back and rest." He got in the back, pulled a canvas tarpaulin over himself, and was asleep almost immediately. Janet drove on. After a few minutes she turned on the radio. Almost immediately there was an interruption. A nervous local sheriff was announcing that there had been an incident at the prison and several dangerous inmates had escaped. One of the escaped men was the notorious "Quicksand Sam" who had terrorized a whole country in the northern part of the state for nearly a year before he was caught. He had used a variety of drugs to render a series of young women unconscious, raped them, and left then dazed and lost in the middle of a quicksand invested swamp. There had been ten victims in all, ten that were known about at least.. Four of the victims were actually trapped in quicksand, two of them up to their necks, when they were found. Everyone in the area was being asked to lock their doors and call if anything suspicious was observed. "Above all, do not pick up any hitchhikers," he instructed. He then went on to describe the missing men. The descriptions left no doubt in Janet’s mind that the man asleep in the back of hr truck was Quicksand Sam.

Janet drove for about 30 miles along the same road, then made a right turn onto a dirt road – jeep track would be a more accurate term – that led into a swamp. After about 30 minute of bumping along at 10 miles per hour she stopped and turned the vehicle around. Then she got out a woke up her passenger. He looked perplexed.

"I heard on the radio there was a prison break very near where I picked you up. One of the missing prisoners is a guy that used to use drugs to rape girls and then left them in a quicksand swamp to give himself time to get away and build an alibi," she told him. Then she added, "You’re him aren’t you?"

"No," he protested. "That’s not me."

"Oh, I think I’m right," she countered. "The radio man gave a description – height, weight, brown hair, green eyes. Everything matches."

"Lot’s of people have brown hair and green eyes," he argued, "That doesn’t make me an escaped rapist."

"No, but they also said the escaped man has a small scar on the palm of his left hand and a tatoo of a diamond on his chest. Let’s see your left hand," she said triumphantly.

He suddenly hardened. If it is me their looking for then what’s to stop me from making you my next victim?" he threatened. "I could leave you here and be hundreds of miles away before anyone finds you out here. So, tell me, what is to prevent me from doing that to you?" he continued in an increasingly menacing voice.

"Why, nothing at all" she said, almost mockingly. "Here are the keys to my truck. There’s enough gas to get a couple of hundred miles" Then she pointed to some bushes a few dozen yards away and added, "And the quicksand is right there behind those bushes. If you want to push me into it I’ll make it easy for you."

There was no hesitation in her step as they walked to the edge of the quicksand. He never touched her sexually; either he was not really a rapist or, more likely, only raped victims who were unconscious and could not fight back. He simply put his hands around her waist from behind and pushed. She half fell And half stepped willingly into the quicksand. He watched for only a half minute or so until she was in up to her waist, then turned and left. Janet just giggled and sank deeper. She didn’t even bother to tip her head back as the mire rose above her chin; she just looked straight ahead until the mud covered her eyes.

As she awoke Janet quickly wrote down all the details of her dream she could remember. Even aware dreams had a habit of fading rapidly if nothing was done to reinforce the memory. Then she checked her computer. She was not surprised to find the dream awareness trigger was the sound of trucks rumbling over a bridge, remarkably similar to distant thunder. Then she checked on the matched image and was very disappointed to find it was a news story about a threatened lockout of minor league baseball players. Then, on a hunch, she looked back at images paired in previous weeks with sounds that could be described as deep or rumbling. Sure enough, four weeks back she found a pairing of a low piano note with an article about an escaped prisoner being found up to his armpits in a mud bog just a mile from the prison. The hapless escapee was merely a thief, but he was named Sam.

Janet’s theory was confirmed. Now all she had to do was conduct some studies using other people as subjects. As she was still only a sophomore she knew that would have to wait for a while. It was unlikely she would be allowed to pursue an independent line of potentially invasive research on human subjects until she had at least an undergraduate degree. But that did not mean she couldn’t continue to experiment on herself. She had long realized that the stimuli she used to cue herself that she was dreaming were, in fact, sensory stimuli – usually sounds – that her brain was somehow detecting even though she was asleep. Her sleeping mind was interpreting the stimuli as such a cue only because she had conditioned herself to do so. At the same time she was well aware that other real stimuli could be detected during sleep and could trigger a dream sequence or an element of dream content. One time she had dreamed about someone shooting at her. When she awoke she discovered a shutter had come loose and was banging against the outside of her apartment in the wind. Another time a neighbor’s stuck car horn became a tornado warning in her dream .She began to wonder if the content of a dream could be influenced in a specific direction. Certainly a stimuli such as a simple sound could become part of a dream but the imagery created seemed to be the result of the brain’s interpretation of the limited input it is receiving. Suppose, she reasoned, that the sound contained more information; would that give direction to it’s interpretation within a dream. She decided to experiment with tape recorded messages in her own voice. She tried messages such as, "I am driving my car" in the first person, and "You are driving your car," in the second person. Speaking in the third person seemed unreasonable so she decided not to bother with it for now. She tried speaking in a whisper, in her normal, conversational voice, and with dramatic or even melodramatic expression. She found use of the second person did not seem to work at all and that too loud a voice tended to wake her up. Use of the first person seemed to show some promise, as did speaking in either a whisper or a normal voice. However, what seemed to work best was talking in a soft, but somewhat animated voice and in the first person, as she tended to do when she was talking to herself. It also seemed to help tremendously to include additional sound effects appropriate to the theme she was trying to create, as long as the volume was low enough to not wake her up. Sudden, sharp transitions in sound tended to be incompatible with continued sleep.

Janet had very much enjoyed her dream episodes involving sinking in quicksand so she decided to try to create such a dream. She recorded herself whispering things such as "I wonder if there could be quicksand," and "There could be quicksand anywhere." The strictly avoided statements of accomplished fact that might conflict with the actual course of a dream. To these she added recordings of frogs croaking, wind blowing through brush, and even sounds of mud splattering against a surface.

Janet was completing the third of three vigorous walking laps around the streets of her neighborhood. Normally she walked like this for exercise every afternoon, but this time she was walking at night. All at once, the moon, which had been full and bright, was obscured by heavy clouds rolling in from the west.. At almost the same time, Janet suddenly realized she did not know where she was. She must have walked right past her street into an area she did not know in the dark. The paved street came to an end, but continued as a dirt road. Without knowing why, she continued down the road, even though it rapidly decayed in quality from a dirt road to a path, and then to a barely traceable trail. After what seemed like 50 yards, the was completely lost, picking her way through heavy undergrowth. The ground was trending downward and becoming increasingly wet and muddy. "I wonder if there could be quicksand here," she said to herself. She said those words to herself in a state of growing alarm. The instant she said them, however, the realized she was dreaming. This time, however, the dream was so vivid the realization that she was dreaming tended to fade in and out of her awareness. Soon she was completely lost, deep in what seemed to be a trackless swamp. She waded through pools of mucky, knee deep water, some covered with fallen leaves. Soon these pools became more and more mud and less and less water until she was wading through thick, knee-deep swamp muck. Her emotions alternated back and forth from sensuous, almost sexual pleasure, when she was aware she was dreaming, to fear bordering on screaming panic when her dream awareness faded.

Now th moon reappeared, substantially improving visibility. Directly in her path was the largst, most obvious quicksand bog she had ever seen (or dreamed about or imagined). It was easily 50 feet across and equally as wide. The entire surface was inky black in color and shiny smooth. In four or five places the surface bowed upward slightly, several inches in fact, in a dome or boil eight or ten feet in diameter. Where the moonlight struck at just the right angle, the surface of these domes sparkled, indicating an upward and outward movement of the mud consistent with strong upwelling. The outer edges of the domes were visible as little rivulets of water flowing outward. On the margins, halfway between each pair of domes, was a wetter-looking depressed zone, the exact center line of which was marked by a slight ridge of mud, perhaps an inch high and several wide. It was obvious that here the outward flowing mud from the boils met and descended. Here, also, the mud appeared much thicker than in the upwelling domes. Along the entire edge of the mire was a near-vertical drop of up to six feet. Nowhere was this drop less than three feet, and where it was lowest it also tended to be overhung. Escape from this mud pit without a rope or assistance was out of the question. Not only did the cliff-like margins make climbing out nearly impossible, but anyone caught anywhere in this mire other than its extreme edge would be pulled by the currents into one of the convergence areas between the domes and would never be able to even reach the edges.

Above this vast quicksand mire was a canopy of huge trees. Large vines clung to the high branches and reached all the way down to the ground in some places. Ten feet away there was a vine that hung to within reach right at the edge of the bog. The drop-off at that point was six feet or slightly more. The vine was attached to a branch over the center of the mire about one hundred feet up. Janet saw the vine as a perfect Tarzan swing. At this point the whole scene was so vivid it was very hard to remain aware she was dreaming. She went over to the vine and tested it. It held nicely.

Janet took several steps away from the mire with the vine in her hands. Then, grabbing the vine as high as she could, she sprinted toward the mire. At the edge she jumped and held on to the vine tightly. She swung outward and downward over the quagmire .As she reached the lowest point of her swing her feet were just three feet, or perhaps a little less, from the surface. She swung back up toward the bank on the far side, but ten feet or so short of reaching it. She had no intention of reaching the far side anyway. Now she swung back, then forward again, in a rapidly decaying pendular motion. On the third swing forward she let go of the rope just past the center point and dropped into the waiting, churning quicksand.

Janet landed right in the center of one of the boils and went completely under and several feet down in one quick plunge. All understanding that this was just a dream completely disappeared in a wave of unmitigated panic. There was no light and almost no sound other than her own muffled scream. She was smothering in a sea of mud. She thrashed around in utter helplessness, not even knowing where the surface was, let alone how to reach it. Her mouth opened reflexively as her need for air grew, but it just filled with loose muck.

Suddenly Janet was back at the surface, having been carried up by the current that produced the boil. She half coughed, half retched the muck out of her mouth and gasped for breath. She was able to breathe but only with great difficulty as she had gagged on a small amount of mud after she had nearly inhaled it into her lungs. The current that buoyed her to the surface now carried her sideways. In a few seconds she was trapped at the convergence of the outflow from two boils. Here the mud was much thicker than in the boil, increasing her natural buoyancy, but it also had a downward current that tended to neutralize, or perhaps slightly more than neutralize, that added buoyancy. She was able to move her arms and legs sluggishly and gain, thereby, some buoyancy and mobility, but not much. Her buoyancy point seemed to be very high on her neck and, sometimes, even higher. She could not rest without her mouth tending to slip beneath the surface. There was mud in her eyes and so much clinging to her hands they were useless for clearing the mud from her eyes. Every once in a while she missed a breath and nearly choked because the could hardly tell when her mouth was high enough to breathe. She was gasping so hard she could not scream or cry out, and there was certainly no one to hear her if she had. This went on an on for more than an hour. The current carried her around the mire but never anywhere the edges. Gradually she tired and sank deeper and deeper, until she was floating mostly beneath the surface and using her arms to lunge upward for a breath. She knew that soon she would be unable to do even that. Eventually she missed a breath. Then she missed it again on her next attempt. She knew the next attempt would be her last if she failed. She succeeded, but that would only prolong her agony a little longer. She got a breath on the next attempt but then missed. She never made it to the surface again.

Janet awoke in a cold sweat. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she was out of breath.

"Wow!" was all she could say to herself. In ten minutes Janet was still slightly shaken by her dream but was absolutely elated by what it meant. Without any doubt she had influenced the course of her dream. She had set out to create a dream about sinking in quicksand and she had been overwhelmingly successful in doing so. The dream had been so intense it had overpowered her initial awareness of being in a dream . She now knew she had a potentially very significant line of research that would eventually put most of her professors in a position of inferiority to her. Janet also knew that as terrifying as her last quicksand dream had been, it was an experience she would repeat frequently, probably for the rest of her life.