Chapter 1 - The dream scanner
Geoffrey Warner paddled his log-canoe toward the desert island. It was mid-day and the shade provided by its half-dozen palm trees was strongly inviting. Stepping out into shallow water to pull his canoe up the white-sand beach, Geoffrey found that his arrival had been noticed. A woman stepped out of the shade of the palms, waved and walked toward him. Despite the glare from the sand, Geoffrey could see that she was beautiful, with a veritable mane of blonde hair, a golden tan, a tiny waist, gorgeous naked breasts with upturned pink nipples and long shapely legs. A small strip of cloth was tied modestly around her hips.
"I am so glad you're here, Geoff," she said in alluring honeyed tones, "I've been so lonely."
Geoffrey was not at all surprised that this houri should know his name, though he had never seen her before. He finished hauling his canoe ashore and, taking her welcoming hand, accompanied her back to the shade of the palms. There she gave him a drink, holding a coconut shell cup to his lips. When he had drunk, he sat with his back comfortably against a palm tree. She knelt astride his legs, lowered her face to his and kissed him passionately.
Geoffrey threaded his fingers through her hair, loving its silky texture. With his other hand, he stroked her soft skin from her waist to her ribcage and cupped a lovely breast. She smelt of coconut oil and wild grass. They kissed more deeply, their tongues intertwining. Geoffrey broke the kiss to pull her higher up him and take her scrumptious breast in his mouth when he saw that her nipple had gone completely white, followed by the breast itself and then all her skin. Suddenly the entire woman, the palm tress and the sea behind were bright white and Geoffrey was awake.
He groaned.
"How come you know how to wake me just at the best moment, Mona?" Geoffrey asked of his fellow student, Mona Macready. She walked from the light switch to the computer console while Geoffrey sat on the side of the narrow bed, blinking under the room lights.
"Who was it this time?" Mona asked him, having noticed the erection barely concealed by his jogging bottoms.
"You, of course," Geoffrey replied.
"Bullshit!" she scoffed, though not unpleasantly, adding: "I guess that's a keeper, though" as she typed commands into the computer to save the recording of Geoffrey's brain patterns and opened a new file for Geoffrey to work on.
"Start writing it up," she ordered, vacating the desk seat. "Don't go back to sleep."
Geoffrey took off the cloth headpiece that contained the brain-wave sensors and got off the bed. He sat down at the desk to record his dream onto the computer.
"Actually, she looked like Farrah Fawcett," he admitted as he started typing.
Mona smiled. During their laboratory sessions, she had learned the only thing she liked about Geoffrey Warner: that his taste in fantasy women belonged to a man twice his age; someone, in fact, like her philosophy professor, whom Mona was discretely seeing at their university.
"Someday, Mona, you'll appreciate exactly how much I have endured for the sake of this research," Geoffrey said, trying to sit comfortably in his aroused condition. "I suppose you wouldn't take pity on a needy fellow-researcher, would you?"
"You suppose rightly, Geoff."
She was genuinely not interested, though Geoffrey was quite a hit with many girls at the university, who admired his tall athletic body and his breezy manner. Mona was a serious woman, who would have actively resisted falling for Geoffrey even if her affections had not been secured elsewhere.
Mona was tall and slim with long black hair and pale green eyes, a long nose and pale skin. She did not smile often but it was like sunshine after rain when she did. She was also quite lonely because her serious manner and intense intellect were off-putting to most people, especially men, however much they admired her striking looks.
Mona and Geoffrey were the star pupils of Professor Gordon Whitehill, a neuroscientist, whose current research project they were conducting that night in the laboratory. They were recording the brain patterns caused by dreams. Mona was in charge of the experiment for a fortnight while the Professor attended a conference followed by a much-needed holiday. It was nearly the end of term and there were no more lectures for third-year students, who were revising for exams.
There were five subjects for the research: four men and one woman. They took turns to sleep one weekday each on a bed in the laboratory, wearing a cloth headpiece with sensors that detected waves in the different modules of the brain. A bright light woke up the dreamer at a moment chosen by the experiment's controller (Professor Whitehill or Mona), usually between one or two hours from the start of dreaming sleep. Waking up the subjects made it easier for them to remember their dreams.
By matching the images reported by dreamers to the recordings of their brain wave patterns, the Professor hoped to be able to predict the general content of a dream and, maybe one day, influence that content by stimulating some brain-centres while suppressing others.
The experiment and its potential therapeutic benefits seemed so worthwhile to Mona that she agreed to work overnight in the laboratory for two months; and, as participating in the experiment would count toward their degrees, all the students, even the lackadaisical Geoffrey, were keen to make it a success.
Of the two star pupils, Mona was conscientious, hard working and reliable: Geoffrey was unreliable but brilliant, getting excellent grades from minimal work. Needless to say, Mona and Geoffrey were rivals and, in the normal course of affairs, would surely have become lovers. Instead, Mona had loathed Geoffrey for as long as she had known him. This had not previously bothered Geoffrey, who had never lacked for a girlfriend; but since they had been working together, he had come to admire Mona and, curiously, the more Mona disdained him, the more he found himself charmed by her.
It was Mona's bad luck that Geoffrey turned out to be the best at recalling his dreams and that his brain provided the clearest patterns, making it easy for her to know when to wake him up out of the dream. Mona felt she could already read parts of Geoffrey's dreams, though this was only their fourth session.
Geoffrey finished typing up the report of his dream and leant back in the chair, yawning wildly and rubbing his eyes.
"I need to go back to sleep, Mona. Are you sticking around to torture me more or can I sleep peacefully now?"
"We are getting such good data, Geoff, it would be irresponsible not to make the most of every opportunity" she replied.
"'Responsibility' is your middle name, Mona," Geoffrey said, content that, after another tiring night of broken sleep, he would be rewarded with seeing Mona there when he woke up again. "I hope you are revising hard for the exams."
