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the stories that I'd brought back with me from the afternoon outing. She felt that Lillian had been
especially perceptive and that she might have some ESP ability, but that her performance amounted to
no more than that at the most.
This was an interesting reservation and one with a certain amount of authority. A number of studies
have been conducted with mediums over the years, and in many cases they have been particularly
adept at tuning into the flow of another's subconscious, perceiving thoughts and memories that linger
there, then telling that person what he already knows. In one case, a group of British journalists
fabricated a fictitious individual who had allegedly died and went to a number of mediums seeking to
establish contact with their departed friend. Many of the mediums were remarkably successful in
describing this person who had never existed. That individuals should be able to read another's mind
so chillingly well seems nearly as unlikely and as amazing as the notion of contacting the dead in
person, but it apparently had happened in some cases.
I made a mental note to put a further burden of proof on Lillian and any other mediums I might
contact. It was certainly extraordinary that they were able to discuss in such detail members of my
family who had died, but even that could not be considered completely evidential; one could not rule
out the ESP hypothesis. But if they were capable of informing me about things I knew nothing about,
that would be another story. An even more complex and increasingly implausible theory would be
required to explain it away. I started to feel that perhaps I had been the victim of some very impressive
guessing and a desire to contact Lona; possibly I was giving more credit to Lillian than Lillian was
really due. It was a sobering and reassuring possibility. Perhaps I still had control of my senses.
But I still was having problems with my dreams. People kept creeping into them and performing there,
when they had no right to be on that particular stage. The night after I'd seen Lillian, I dreamed of
Lona again. Once more, it was a lucid dream, a dream in which I was aware of the fact that I wasn't
awake and was able to control the content of the dream to a limited extent. I was in a store and faintly
saw a crowd of ghostlike figures drifting by, shoppers painted in a see-through white, like people
fashioned from fog. They passed by me, oblivious to my presence, and I paid little attention to them.
But then, at the opposite end of the room, I saw my first wife.
Lona was coming toward me, her face and upper body clearly visible. She was no ghost, but a full-
fleshed person, color and dimension distinguishing her from her fellow-shoppers. I saw her eyes and
her mouth as clearly as though she were alive. In fact, I saw them more clearly. The figure had an
intensity, a brightness of color and perfection of detail, that one does not see in real life but only in
paintings or in the supersaturated colors of Kodachrome II.
Lona was wearing a dress with a frilly yoke, and I thought that I had seen it before. I didn't seem
surprised by her presence, but instead responded to the situation automatically, emotionally, doing
what was in my heart rather than what was in my head. I took her in my arms and held her tightly.
"I don't care what you say. I don't care what you think, or how you feel," I told her. "I'm never going to
let go of you again."
I was completely prepared to take that option, to hold Lona in my arms forever if that was the only
way in which I could keep her.
Lona was unmoved by my statement; she seemed oblivious to my presence, in fact. At first, when she
was approaching, no hint of recognition had showed in her eyes, and now, now that I held her to my
heart like a prized photograph of someone I loved, it was as though she didn't realize that I was there.
Before I could decipher why she was ignoring me, she had mysteriously slipped out of my arms and
was now standing behind me. Before I could make a move to grab and stop her, to keep her from
running away once more, she was gone, and a black curtain seemed to drop between the two of us. It
was as though the curtain had fallen at the end of a brief and rather uneventful play. I realized that she
was leaving, but surprisingly was not disturbed by this. It seemed a natural occurrence at the time.
Within the senseless context of sleep, it seemed the right thing to have happen. I turned to watch her
leave, but she was already out of sight. But then, before the dream ended, I heard her voice near my
left ear; it was as though she stood inches away and was whispering to me. "Because you have loved
me so, I love you ... equally," she said.
I was pleased by the compliment. Lona had had very few for me in recent memory, and I was happy to
have her saying such things again. I was also impressed by the voice itself. It was as clear as the peal
of a midnight bell in a sleeping city. Her voice had been a sweet, feminine one, not hard and brusque;
it soothed me with its softness, but sometimes seemed affected. I had not heard it for two years, and
now I had heard it again - not some nameless, faceless sound stirring in my subconscious, but the
voice of the real person that I'd known.
It took a while for me to recover from the events of the past few days. I immersed myself in my other
work, taking pleasure in the matter-of-fact nature of it. I was relieved not to have to labor to
understand what was happening in my life; facts were such a happy companion, something on which I
could always rely. It was a matter of principle with me to want to entertain any semblance of the truth
that wandered into my life, but I found it hard to put out the welcome mat for lies or dissembling or
half-baked ideas. My nature shied away from taking other people's convictions or beliefs for my own
unless they fitted into the scheme of my intellectual lifestyle.
Fortunately I rarely had to delve into matters where such standards became impossible to employ. I
wasn't in the habit of getting involved in stories that could not be understood; it had rarely even
occurred to me that there were such stories. Everything in the universe, it seemed, was explicable; one
had only to wait for the right scientist with the appropriate theory to come along. The answers were
there. It was merely a matter of finding them.
I wasn't inclined to resume my search for Lona's soul, but as usual it really didn't seem to matter. It
was as though she was looking for me. Three nights later, she returned to me again in another dream,
although this time I received a message rather than a visit from her. The dream was long and involved
and consisted of segments, each of which was intriguing, but none of which had the impact of the one
concerning Lona.
In this particular segment, I found myself in a small, dark, cell-like room; it reminded me of a
dungeon, but I had no fears about my being interred or injured. It was just a place to meet, a" context
for what was to follow. I lay down in this stark, sunless hole and drifted off to sleep, and no sooner had
I fallen asleep in my dream than I began to dream again - a dream within a dream. It has occurred to
me since then that this was not unlike a lucid dream; I made no overt decision that this must be a
dream, but to dream a dream within all dream clearly indicated that something out of the ordinary was
going on. Within this second dream, I received a plain white envelope which, when I opened it, proved
to contain a piece of plain white paper. The paper was legal-size, but blank. I wondered whether there
might be some message secreted in its emptiness and held it up to a light to see whether there was a
watermarked message for me. I stared through its surface, but saw nothing.
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