Story: Oneiromancy, O

(Part I)

Oneiromancy: Divination by means of dreams

Can you tell the future from dreams? Some people say you can, that the world of dreams is a medium through which we can escape the linearity of time. And through that medium thoughts and visions can shuttle back and forth and perhaps entire souls can fleet looking for their homes or being sent back to the great sorting house for some karmic justice in their next dwelling. Maybe visions are just information imparted by souls bouncing back along their timelines and touching themselves at earlier points? If that were true, then psychics and seers are truly people who can deliberately access this dreamline and send messages back and forth, investigating what it is they need to know 'after the fact'.

What would happen if this medium, this 'dreamline' were understood and captured by the blue sky researchers toiling away in their self-funded pursuits or operating under the secretive auspices of mysterious benefactors? What would happen to the people who would suddenly become useful when before they merely made ends meet or exploited their own talents mercilessly? And what would happen to the frauds who claim to do it all but really just guess and waffle while looking for the inside line to financial success?

It seems impossible that anyone could control the passing of information through the dreamline, that any of this could be real. It seems unlikely that a message from the future, or the past, or even from a whole other present, could move through the intangible dimension of timeless to touch that one person who needs the information most. In most data passes through the dreamline, in fact in the vast and overwhelming majority of cases, the connection is missed and a lady in New Jersey will sit up straight in the bath and wonder what on Earth to with the bizarrely simple but mundanely incomprehensible Grand Unified Theory in her mind before getting back to washing her hair. Of the remaining connections that are successfully made, the cryptic coding of dreams themselves defeats the purpose. Still, what if that connection were made in one vital case, and a message made it through?

What if it did? Well, then it would be oneiromancy. And we'd have a whole new story to tell, wouldn't we?