Story: Oneiromancy, II

(Part O , I , III)

Dreams are an important part of our lives. We all dream, even if we don't remember them, or our brains suffer as a result. We can learn from our dreams and our dreams can learn from us, that is if we happen to exist in a world connected to the Dreamline.

The Dreamline is simple in concept, in that certain sensitive beings can tap into it and communicate abstractly to other sensitives who are spatially and temporally 'close' enough. How this works we have yet to discover but the number of examples of such sensitives has been waning for more than fifty years. We had thought that the genetics causing the sensitivity had been slowly mutated out of the species, but could such a rapid change be credible?

Finally, as we worried about the last known sensitive in the Western world moving on into the next life, someone invented a new theory as to the slow of withdrawals of sensitives from the population. The hypothesis was that they remained as abundant as ever, diet and pollution not withstanding, and that the problem was a lack of transmissions further up the Timeline. The sensitives had nothing to receive, and without those messages how could they know they had the capacity? There was an interruption in the chain of Dreamers, an Event Horizon that nothing could apparently cross.

The last known Dreamliner in our country, a woman called Dorena Spratt, hadn't received dream conundrums from anywhen but the past or present for more than five years, although she was maintaining a bizarre string of barely intelligible exchanges with someone apparently in Japan who kept trying to convey something about a loaf of bread and the President of the World Bank. Dorena really had no idea what it was all about. That was true until the penultimate day of her life, when she had a dream from someone new, someone who dreamed with new gadgets and bizarrely imbalanced clothes. Long having given up on the Dreamline she was jubilant and passed on contentedly the next evening.

The new dream changed everything. The Event Horizon was finite. There were new dreamers out there in the future. But what was going to happen to almost break the chain? And for those people in the future, what had happened already?

To be continued...