An Experiment in Dreaming Ch. 01

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."

He meant this sincerely, but Mona heard it merely as a boastful taunt, meaning: "Of course, I am so brilliant I don't need to revise." It helped her not feel guilty for disliking him so much.

"Of course," she replied, sharply.

Geoffrey was going to offer to revise with her but was shut out so firmly by her response that he didn't dare venture his proposal.

"Okay," he said, "set me up again." He walked to the bed, put on his headpiece and settled again on his back. Mona turned on the scanners, checked they were functioning properly, started a new recording and turned the lights off.

Mona returned to the Professor's office to sit in his comfortable chair and study the previous results.

She read Geoffrey's description of the dream and separated out the various scans, trying to match the brain-patterns to the dream narrative. The order was completely jumbled and some patterns did not match to any details of the report and vice versa; but there were also strong matches, so that Mona thought she could actually see Geoffrey paddling his canoe, dragging it up the beach and, of course, having sex.

Mona took the sexual content of the dreams in her stride. Though she would not blame anyone for the content of his subconscious, it was to her complete surprise that Geoffrey possessed the least perverted mind. The subjects had to report their dreams honestly, of course, and only the subject himself, Professor Whitehill and Mona would ever see the content. It turned out that the scariest sexual episodes were those of the female subject, Claire, who always seemed to end up in tight bondage being whipped, spanked or fucked.

Kindly old Professor Whitehill, on first reading one of Claire's lurid reports, asked Mona to be the controller for all Claire's future sessions, thinking it would be less embarrassing all round. This turned out to be a wise decision when the Professor himself became an actor in one of Claire's unconscious fantasies. He must have been shocked to recognize himself ruthlessly wielding a bullwhip against Claire's tasty small bottom.

Having finished the analysis of Geoffrey's report, Mona glanced at the computer to check what the sensors were detecting and saw that Geoffrey had fallen asleep quickly and begun dreaming. His motor functions were lively: the speech centres and senses of taste and smell were also stimulated. Sexual arousal was prominent.

Geoffrey seemed to be having a good time, Mona thought, unlike her. She had seen her lover, Professor Andrew Cable, only twice in the last four weeks since the experiment began, due to her working at night and revising at most other times. Andrew was separated from his wife, who had left him a year ago, taking their two young children back to her parent's house in a town about fifty miles away. He therefore spent his weekends visiting his wife, children and parents-in-law. Mona trusted Andrew when he said the separation had been due to their incompatibility and was no one's fault. He was due to get a divorce; she would not have believed anyone who said his wife had left because of Andrew's constant infidelities.

Thinking about Andrew reminded Mona that she was feeling the strain of neglect. She longed for his touch, his gentle kisses and caresses and his harder, more urgent touches, when they wildly grabbed at one another, sucking, biting and thrusting. She was getting hot and wet from the thought. Mona abandoned her revision and began playing with herself, rubbing her clitoris slowly.

She felt the warmth rise in her and rubbed more firmly. She pushed one finger into her pussy, then a second, fucking herself while she massaged a breast, squeezing its nipple into a ripe hardness. Her pussy was quite sodden. Her tension rose. Mona breathed in gasps. Then she had a really wicked thought.

If Geoffrey did not annoy Mona with his arrogant air, his ability to pass exams without trying and his easy assumption that women would just fall at his feet, she would never have thought to be so mean to him; but think it she did, and (as was her wont) she acted immediately on the thought.

Mona fingered herself to a wrenching orgasm, throwing her head back and panting as her thighs shook. After calming herself down, Mona slipped off her shoes and snuck on tiptoe into the laboratory to stand by the sleeping Geoffrey. Knowing how powerful the sense of smell is in evoking memories, she held her wet fingers, scented with her vaginal juices, near to his nose for a few seconds. She then tiptoed to the washroom where she cleaned up and returned silently to the Professor's office to check on the experiment.

Geoffrey's signals showed that her interference had boosted his arousal. Mona matched the latest pattern with the final pattern from the earlier dream and guessed that Geoffrey was back on the desert island with the beautiful woman. She looked into the laboratory and saw Geoffrey had turned over and was humping the mattress. Mona had a moment of regret for what she had done. Much as she disliked Geoffrey, it would be a cruel trick to let him embarrass himself too much, so she activated the light to wake him up.

Geoffrey awoke from the best erotic dream of his life, believing he was actually having sex with the island woman. Noticing his undignified position, he got up quickly, stripped off his headpiece and sprinted as best as he could to the washroom, covering his erection with his hands. Mona, meanwhile, discretely kept her back to him, pretending to work on the computer.

In the washroom, Geoffrey masturbated furiously, remembering his encounter with the gorgeous island woman.

He had walked along the beach to the palm trees and seen the woman lying naked on her stomach, asleep in the sun. He knelt down beside her and gently brushed her blonde hair to one side and kissed her neck. She woke and began to turn over to greet him murmuring, "I'm glad you're back, Geoff, I want to feel the touch of your hands on my skin."

"Stay still, Sweet," Geoffrey said, "Allow me."

She settled back down, resting her head on her crossed arms, while Geoffrey leaned lightly over her, kissed her neck again and gently stroked down her spine to her buttocks and back up while she sighed her contentment. As he stroked, he kissed from one shoulder to the other. When he touched his hand to her thighs, she spread her legs and drew her knees forward to push up her bottom, arching her back to emphasise her curves and make the posture that Geoffrey thought was the most erotic possible for a woman.

Geoffrey felt his arousal building, the stiffness in his penis beginning to take command over his mind. Heroically resisting his own needs, Geoffrey lightly rubbed his fingertips over the island woman's clitoris. She moaned encouragement and slowly raised and lowered her pelvis in time with her sighing breaths. He rubbed her pussy more firmly with the whole of his hand. After a minute, she was gasping as she breathed in and moaning as she breathed out. Geoffrey used more pressure, opening and closing his fingers to nip her clitoris in his fingertips. She began to buck vigorously.

As her chest heaved, the lines of the island woman's rib cage showed against her taut bronze skin. This was so powerfully erotic to Geoffrey, he struggled to concentrate on fingering her. Her eyes were tight shut and her mouth wide open as she moaned her pleasure, inspiring Geoffrey to rub her pussy more quickly.

The island woman hunched her back when the first jolt of an orgasm hit her. She hunched again, as if from an electric shock. She was riding her climax now as a third and a fourth jolt shook her. She pushed up onto her elbows, her head thrown back. Twice more she shuddered with involuntary spasms, gasping in a fit of ecstasy as her spine arched, straightened and arched again, her stomach muscles contracting rhythmically, her breaths loud and urgent.

Geoffrey could stand it no longer. He had never met so erotic a woman and had to take her immediately. He moved around behind her, grabbed her hips firmly and thrust his hot aching penis into her damp vagina. He was on his third hard thrust when Mona woke him up and he was surprised to find himself lying flat in the bed.

It did not take Geoffrey long to bring himself off in the washroom, spurting out hot white spunk. He cleaned himself up and meekly returned to the laboratory but Mona had already gone. She left a note by the computer, telling him to make sure the door closed on the lock when he left.

Geoffrey wrote as much of the dream as he could remember and then went back to bed for a few hours' much-needed sleep. He really did dream of Mona this time.

***

'An Experiment in Dreaming' continues in chapter 02.