Dreams (19 page)

Law of Unintended Consequences.

Well, back to Miss Olga Smith, aka Madame Olga, the greatest (and only) psychic in Arcata, California.

Olga had got into this esoteric realm because she thought it was colorful and interesting. She didn't believe there was anything to it, at first, and in her seminars she treated the material as she would have taught the religious system of the Incas or the phlogiston theory of combustion. That is, not as something one did or did not adhere to, but purely as a complex and ingenious system of belief.

After a while, though, she found herself becoming increasingly curious and even drawn to some of her subject matter. Most of it was obviously superstition. Finding a four-leaf clover did not mean that you would get the much-coveted promotion you were hoping for or win the lottery or sell your novel—at last—after shopping it around for the past decade or so. But—was there something going on, something, however obscure and hard to figure out, that was hidden behind the mumbo-jumbo and the colorful trappings of these esoteric systems?

On the day in question, Olga Smith shut herself in what she had come to think of as her "trance room." She had no other obligations that day. She dimmed the lights, turned on her favorite Buxtehude composition, and touched a match to a couple of sticks of incense and set them in a brass holder. Now she turned off the lights altogether, set her elbows on the table in front of her, pressed her fingertips to her forehead, and leaned over the crystal ball with the self-illuminating representation of the Primal Atom—some glass artist's concept of the Primal Atom, anyway—and let herself relax, thoroughly and completely.

A couple of hours later Olga's boyfriend, Walter Macintosh, showed up with a six-pack of ice-cold Cerveza Negra Modelo and a bag of sandwiches. Olga's brother, Milton, opened the door for Walter and Walter strolled in.

It was a perfect summer's afternoon in Arcata. The sky was clear and the sun was bright but a pleasant breeze had swept inland from the Pacific, carrying with it a touch of fog and just enough moisture and cool air to make everyone comfortable.

"I thought I'd invite Olga for a little picnic," Walter Macintosh announced. "You could come along, too, Milton."

"Olga's busy," Milton replied.

"Client session?"

"Nope. She's just working on her stuff."

"By stuff, you mean stuff and nonsense, don't you?"

Actually the word Walter used was not "nonsense" but "nonsense" will have to do. Walter was quite a skeptic when it came to psychic phenomena, second sight, UFOs and the like.

"Whatever you want to call it," Milton said.

"How long she been at it?" Walter asked.

Milton looked at his wristwatch. "Wow, didn't realize how late it was getting to be. She's been in there since lunchtime. Four, five hours, easy."

Walter didn't bandy any more words than that. He slammed open the door of Olga's trance room and barged in, turning on the lights as he did so.

Milton followed. He pulled back the draperies—they were made of a fabric with the same astronomical pattern as Olga's gown and turban—and let in the daylight.

Olga sat slumped over her table, the Primal Atom snow globe beside her face. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was slow and steady. Walter laid his hand across her forehead and nodded in relief. He grasped her wrist and took her pulse—he was no medic but he knew how to do that—and told Milton that his sister's heart rate was normal, steady, and strong.

Apparently there was nothing wrong with Olga.

Walter and Milton helped her to sit up. She blinked, a puzzled expression on her face, then smiled and greeted her boyfriend and her brother.

Leaning on their arms to steady herself, she stood up. She looked at her desk and said, "What's this?"

By
this
she referred to a sketch pad and Ticonderoga Number One pencil that lay near the Primal Atom snow globe. On the top sheet of the pad there was a drawing of a jagged landscape. Tall rocks rose into a black sky studded with uncounted stars. In the distance, so small as to be almost indiscernible, stood what seemed to be a city. If city was the right term. The image was tiny. Either the city was very far from the viewpoint of the artist or it was a very, very, very small city. There was no way of telling.

Olga held the sketch pad and gazed at the picture. "I was there," she said.

"Did you draw that?" her boyfriend, Walter, asked.

Olga shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. I don't remember drawing it."

"But you said you were there," her brother Milton put in.

"I was."

Walter said, "You must have fallen asleep. You were sleeping a minute ago. Do you think you could have made the drawing from a dream?"

Olga shook her head. "I wasn't dreaming."

Walter and Milton waited for her to continue.

"At least, I don't think I was dreaming. I mean—it was so real. I was there. The heavens, the sky, it was beautiful. I've never seen so many stars at once. It was as if—as if I was standing in a cluster of stars close to the center of the galaxy."

"If you were there you would have been gobbled up by a black hole," Milton said.

"Well—" Olga shrugged—"well, whatever happened. It was fun. Even if it was just a dream. Even if I drew that picture in my sleep."

She dropped the sketch pad on her desk. She turned to her boyfriend and smiled. "Did you say a picnic? Sandwiches and brew? Sounds great to me."

And that would have been the end of the matter if Olga hadn't made another drawing a few days later. Again, the scene was an alien world. Again, the rocks rose jaggedly to tower overhead. Again, there was a city. This time the city was closer and you could make out the buildings a little bit. They were strange. If you'd studied non-Euclidean geometry you might be able to make heads or tails of them. And there appeared to be figures moving among the buildings.

A few days later, wearing her plain Olga Smith outfit of blue jeans and Humboldt State Lumberjacks sweatshirt, Olga dropped in at the café where she had once waited tables. She ordered a latté and a Danish pastry and she was quietly enjoying her snack when Robyn Marten appeared and asked if she felt like company.

Olga said, "Sure, take a load off."

They exchanged small talk for a while and Olga mentioned her odd dream drawings. Robyn asked if Olga ever participated in the scenes she drew. Did she walk around? Did she pick things up and examine them? Did she ever visit the distant city or talk with its inhabitants?

No to everything. She just saw what she drew. Drew what she saw. Whichever.

But that set Olga to thinking. She had a class on her schedule that night, and when her students arrived she set out a bowl of fresh fruit and served clear herb tea and talked about automatic writing. Everybody from William Shakespeare to Helena Blavatsky to Margaret Mitchell to Mickey Spillane, it seemed, had dictated important works from the Other Side of the Great Divide. Alas, none of these had stood up to the scrutiny of scholars and critics, but maybe there was something to it. Who knew?

Madame Olga—turbaned and be-robed now—gave some hints about placing oneself in a receptive state, opening one's mind to the departed author, and attempting to achieve a creative trance. Oh, and keep a supply or pencils and paper handy.

One student asked if anybody had ever achieved automatic writing on a typewriter or computer keyboard or dictating machine. Madame Olga intoned that all things were possible. Why not give it a try?

After the students had finished their tea and fruit and departed for the evening, Olga decided to give it a try herself. She laid out not merely a pad and pencils but a set of pastels on her desk, drew the curtains of her trance room (even though it was night) and sat staring into the Primal Atom.

When she awakened she tried to sort out the dreams she had had during the night. She drew back the curtains. It was broad daylight. Her mind was filled with a jumble of images. Strange scenes, not merely of the dream world she had previously drawn but of one world after another. Worlds of water. Worlds of swirling gases. Worlds of endlessly cascading rocks. Worlds of glaciers and worlds of endless storms.

Every world she had dreamed of was inhabited.

She dreamed of creatures living on asteroids, tumbling endlessly in their progression around single suns and double stars and complex groups of stars that danced endlessly around one another. She dreamed of creatures of immeasurably fine gas, swirling endlessly and consciously, definitely consciously, in the incredibly thin and cold vacuum between the galaxies. Some of them were suggestive of sea creatures. Some might have been intelligent plants that communicated with complex sequences and blends of pheromones. Or maybe not.

She knew their thoughts, and their thoughts were beautiful. And ineffable.

Did she believe that all this was real? Well, it's about time to reveal the fact that the neatly dressed teen-aged girl who took the negative side in the high school debate in Wheaton, Illinois, was none other than Olga Smith.

Sometimes skeptics snap and become fanatical believers. Or vice versa. That didn't happen with Olga. She just went from total disbelief to a kind of mild agnosticism to—well, how could she deny her own experience?

And she had used the pastels. In a single night she had covered page after page of her sketch pad with colorful drawings of alien scenes and alien cities and, most notably of all, alien beings. They weren't little green men or hairless humanoids with shiny oblong eyes or any of the familiar images of aliens.

They were totally unlike one another and they were totally unlike human beings.

Olga phoned her friend Robyn Marten. Robyn came over to Olga's house and looked at the pictures. They were remarkable, Robyn announced. She was something of a science fiction buff, had a shelf of paperbacks in her apartment, followed several TV series and tried to catch every science fiction film that reached either the big or small screen, no matter how bad it might be. She called it her guilty pleasure.

Robyn looked over Olga's drawings. By now there were enough of them to fill a portfolio. The black-and-white images were the earliest ones, and were mostly landscapes. The more recent ones placed greater emphasis on alien life forms. Robyn was fascinated. She asked Olga if she might make copies of them with her digital camera, some with the artist in the picture as well, wearing her full Madame Olga regalia.

With the images she'd snapped, Robyn wrote up a feature and got in touch with a friend of hers, a CNN stringer, who came out to Olga's house and shot a feature story for the World's Most Trusted News Source. The Arcata
Argus
ran Robyn's story on page one, complete with a particularly intriguing pastel of a creature that seemed to be made of varicolored ice cubes.

The day after the story ran on CNN (and in the Arcata
Argus
) Olga had a phone call from a NASA scientist at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He invited Olga to pack up her drawings and come to visit the NASA installation in Mountain View, a community just south of San Francisco, all expenses paid, of course.

Olga declined the invitation, but told the scientist he was welcome to visit her in Arcata if he wished. He accepted the invitation.

His name was Jaskaran Singh, D.Sc., Ph.D. He drove an all-electric modified Toyota Prius and wore a turban quite different from Olga's and a miniature sword attached to his belt. His English was flawless.

At Dr. Singh's request Olga brought out her portfolio of drawings and permitted her visitor to examine them. He then asked her to describe the experience in which she made the drawings. He nodded understandingly as Olga answered his questions.

Finally, though, Olga had a question for Dr. Singh. She worded it diplomatically but in effect it was,
Why are you interested in my drawings?

Dr. Singh sorted through the drawings until he found the one he was looking for and laid it on the table. They were sitting in the dining room of Olga's house. Her trance room would have been too cramped for their meeting.

"You see this odd rock configuration?" Dr. Singh asked. He was pointing to a very peculiar formation, something like the intriguing plateaus found in northern Arizona.

Olga said, "I was there."

"You mean, in your dream?"

"Perhaps."

"I don't understand. I thought these were dream images."

Olga said, "I thought so, too, at first. But the experiences are so realistic, I think they may be something more than dreams."

Dr. Singh smiled. "I'm not qualified in psychology, Miss Smith, but I know that dreams can be extremely convincing. Most remarkably so. People sometimes awaken and find themselves confused as to where they are, because they have been elsewhere, as it were, in a very realistic dream."

Olga said, "That might be. But what's so special about this drawing?"

"What you have drawn is an actual rock formation on Mars. We have images from our ground rovers. And I don't think you could have imagined that formation."

"Well, maybe I saw it on TV or in a magazine."

"No. We have millions of images of Mars now, and we try to release only those of the greatest scientific value or general interest to the public. I know this image. I have a printout of it in my car, if you'd like to see it."

"But why is it so important?" Olga asked.

Dr. Singh exhaled and nodded. "For two reasons, Miss Smith. First, that is such an odd formation, I don't understand how you could have made your drawing without seeing it, and yet I don't have any idea how you could have seen it. And second, you have put water in your drawing, clouds in the sky, plant life along the shoreline, and a boat on the water with—with—I'm afraid I'll have call him—if it is a him—a Martian in the boat."

Olga managed a nervous laugh. "Then I guess it was a dream. Even I know there are no lakes on Mars, and certainly no plants or—or—Martians."