PERCHANCE TO DREAM REDUX

                                        PERCHANCE TO DREAM REDUX
                                               by Norman Spinrad
                                      
                                          from NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE

  I had a truly extraordinary dream last night, extraordinary in part because of its very ordinariness.  In this dream, I was a freight broker.  My job, or rather my business, was to serve as middleman between companies that had freight to ship and shipping companies.

   I sat in a small office in front of a computer and telephone bank taking orders from the manufacturing companies I serviced--what they were shipping to where, the weight, whether they wanted to pay a premium for speed or trade off slowness for low rates--and then making deals with shipping companies to fulfill them.  I made my living by taking a percentage of the shipping bills for setting the deals up.

   That was all.  That was the whole dream.  That was the boring ordinariness of it.

   What made this dream extraordinary was that in the waking world I had never even heard of such an occupation as “freight broker,” let alone what a “freight broker” did, nor had any prior interest in learning anything about how shippers connected with shipping companies.

   This seemed to be what I can only call a “knowledge dream,” a dream in which you learn something you couldn’t have known before in the waking world, indeed even cared about, but which you take back into the waking world with you.

   Knowledge you can verify or not in the waking world, thanks to Google, easily enough.  So just before I wrote this, I did.  I googled “freight broker.”  There were many, many sites that came up, but the top of the list showed that the business I had dreamed existed, that the business model was exactly what I had dreamt it was, and that the occupation was indeed called “freight broker,” and you even had to have a license that called you that to pursue it.

  How was this possible?

   You tell me!

 I’ve had two other somewhat similar dreams before.  In one, I was a major league basketball coach, something I of course knew existed, and the NBA did interest me, but I had never had the slightest fan boy interest in becoming a basketball coach, and knew little about what one did in detail, and have still never done waking world research to find out.

    The first time I experienced a “knowledge dream,” it was like watching a movie, not being the lead character.  D-Day in World War II.  German troops in Normandy were watching an outdoor film about a cobra woman of some kind.
  
  An American glider commando unit came down among them, and though they outnumbered the Americans, they freaked and ran.

   I woke up and something moved me to try an experiment, to try to re-enter the dream in the waking world in front of the typewriter and see what came out.  What came out in this half-in half-out state was detail.

   These German troops were elite commandos led by Otto Skorzeny, who had previously led them in a daring raid to snatch Mussolini from the Allied Forces who held him and set him up as puppet Duce in Northern Italy.
    
   Crack troops.

   But they broke and fled in terror of an inferior force
      
  Because the unit emblem on the gliders was a cobra.

   Well, I  had written THE IRON DREAM, after all, and in my researches had come across Skorzeny’s dare-devil rescue of Mussolini.  But could Skorzeny’s unit been in Normandy on D-Day?  Could they have been watching a film about a cobra woman?  Did such a film even exist at the time?  Was there an American glider unit with a cobra as its ensign?

    Could I verify these details in the waking world or knock them down as dreamtime fantasy?  This being a dim distant era before the advent of googling, I wrote about this dream in a piece called “Perchance to Dream” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,” asking the readership to assist me in my inquiries.

  The results were more letters in a shorter period of time than I had ever experienced before or since.  From my point of view, the results were ambiguous.  Someone knew that there had been an American glider unit involved in the D-Day assault with a cobra ensign.  There was a cobra woman movie.  No one knew where Otto Skorzeny had been at the time.

  But the unexpected result was that I learned that many people had “knowledge dreams” of one kind or another and welcomed the invitation to tell their stories. The magazine got so many interesting letters that they asked me to write a follow-up piece, which I did, and called “Perchance to Dream Revisited.”

   In it, I mused that maybe these kind of dreams were leakages from the dreams of other dreaming people.  After all, consciousness itself, waking or dreaming, is an electromagnetic phenomenon on the deepest level, so there  might be occasion transient broadcasts among consciousnesses in the dream state, actual knowledge drifting about in a kind of collective dreamtime quantum soup.

  Interesting stuff, or mumbo jumbo, that was as far as I could take it.

  Until last night’s knowledge dream of being a freight broker.  This dream had been all detail.  It hadn’t been interesting at all, it had been boring, as if the dream of some freight broker somewhere who had been at the job way too long the day before.  And this was the age of googling, and these details could be verified in a few minutes with foolish ease, which I did.

   A textbook case.

  Proof positive, it seems to me, that knowledge was transmitted into my dreaming consciousness from someone else in the collective quantum subconscious, or whatever it may be.

   I have long believed that there was an essential union between the dream state of consciousness and the creative waking state and probably most writers and artists might agree with that.

    But knowledge?  Unwanted knowledge?  From where?  From whom?  How?

  Any bright ideas out there?  Any similar experiences?

 The mantra, as it were, of my novel HE WALKED AMONG US is “what is, is real.”

 And whatever these knowledge dreams are, they are certainly real phenomena.  I proved it to my satisfaction this morning.