She was obviously acutely embarrassed by her nakedness, though none of the dream-people standing around her were taking any obvious notice of it. Nora took pity on her and said, pitching her voice to carry over the music: “Talrasia, have you noticed that you’re dreaming?” Then she turned her eyes respectfully away.

Nora and the Nomads

Part 2 of 4

by Trismegistus Shandy

My newest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is now available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.

The next day, there weren’t as many nomads coming in for breakfast, but several came in around lunchtime, beginning with Dalvorius and a couple of others Nora had seen the day before but couldn’t remember the names of. Not the ones he’d eaten breakfast with yesterday, anyway. Dalvorius held a stack of fliers and asked Nora if it was okay to put one or two of them up; Nora asked Ted telepathically, he said yes, and she passed the message on verbally. Dalvorius taped one up by the cash register and another by the door:

PARADE and PAGEANT

Saturday, May 23

Parade begins at 11 a.m. in front of the high school and ends at the nomad market Pageant to follow at 12 Noon

Admission free, free-will offerings gladly accepted in cash, local handicrafts, produce or preserves.

Suitable for the entire Family.

There was a map of the parade route, and a drawing of a marching band in fantastical costumes.

“Did you have another interesting dream last night?” Nora asked him as he was taping up the one by the cash register.

She thought he blushed, but it was a very faint blush. “I dreamed about you,” he said, “only you weren’t in the dream. I was trying to find you and give you an important message, and I kept missing you everywhere I went.”

“I dreamed that I got a letter from you,” she said. “I didn’t have time to read it all before I woke up, but you told me about this parade and pageant, and said you were going to do a magic show as part of the pageant.”

“Oh... I suppose that proves it. We really are sharing dreams.”

Nora was telling Ted and several customers sitting too far away to hear their conversation about this, and soon word would spread all over town. People out of waking telepathic range would hear about it tonight in the dream. Many people had already been sure of it, but here was more confirmation.

“Do you remember where you looked for me?”

“I asked directions to your house, and you weren’t home — it was a big house, three storeys with a tower above that, with wood siding painted light blue.”

He was pretty observant.

“And there was a blue mailbox in front, though I didn’t notice it the first time — only after I came back after going to several other places people said you might be, the church and the library and I don’t remember where else. So I put a note in the mailbox and I woke up soon after that.”

She nodded. “I look forward to seeing your magic show.”

Ted was urging her, “Talk to him about the disruptions! Ask him if he noticed anything or if the other nomads told him about their dreams.” Several others were chipping in their two cents, suggesting questions to ask, sly ways of working around to the issue, or sternly forbidding her from mixing herself up in it. “This is an issue for the City Council,” old Mrs. Swenson insisted from the grocery store down the street.

She ignored most of the contradictory advice, and said: “I hope we can get along as well in the dream as we do in the waking. I heard some rumors about vandalism in some parts of the dream-town, and some people were blaming you — it could be some of our own children, of course, that’s happened before. Their imaginations aren’t very disciplined yet.”

“Oh — I hope we haven’t done any damage. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, if so. Do you want me to talk to people about it?”

“Yes, if you please.”

Dalvorius and his friends ate and left, presumably to put up more of those flyers elsewhere — she saw several in store windows on her way home. Later, in the lull between lunch and supper, the young couple came in again, the man whom she, Ursula and Regina had met in the dream last night and his wife or girlfriend. (They didn’t wear rings, but then she hadn’t seen wedding rings on any of the nomads; a lot of neospecies had abandoned or reinvented some old-style human customs, and she’d heard of people who got matching tattoos, or brands, or started shaving matching patterns in their fur, or etched symbols into their carapaces when they married.)

“Did you find what you were looking for last night?” she asked him, after she brought them their burgers and onion rings.

“Hmm?”

“In the dream... you were looking for the church, and Ursula was going to show you the way, but, ah, we got separated on the way there.”

He frowned in puzzlement, his mouth full of food, and his wife or girlfriend said: “How’d you know what he dreamed about? He’d forgotten it himself until this moment.”

“We shared dreams,” Nora explained. “Didn’t you know?”

“I know they call you North Platte dreamers,” she said, and the man swallowed his mouthful of food and continued, “— isn’t that what you like to be called? I’ve heard you called other things but I’m not sure... some of those other names, well...”

“‘Dreamers’ is good. We share dreams more than most telepathic neospecies, and they’re almost always lucid. And apparently we can share dreams with you, too, though not with the telepaths from Alabama who came to visit a few years ago, or the ones from New York.”

“I see,” he said uneasily. “That’s interesting.”

“Dalvorius and I talked about it this morning... I thought the word would have spread among you by now.”

“We haven’t been in range of Dalvorius since we left the camp this morning — we went out to knock on doors at the farms east of town and tell them about the parade and pageant. We’ve picked up some gossip since we got back, but not that...” He got a distant look for a few moments, probably asking questions of nearby friends, and then said: “Oh. Dalvorius sent you a letter in his dream, and you got it in yours?”

“Pretty much like that.”

“That’s interesting. We share dreams sometimes, but not every night, and we don’t remember shared dreams much more often or clearly than normal dreams.”

“Lucid dreaming’s something you can learn, you know. Some old-style humans used to do it, and maybe we have more of a knack for it than they did, but we didn’t all fall asleep the night after the Divergence already knowing how. A few people in North Platte who knew how taught the neighbors they shared dreams with how to recognize and remember them, and it spread from there when people scattered to the small towns around the change-region.”

North Platte had already been a small town by most standards, with twenty-five thousand people just before the Divergence, but that was too many telepaths to live in close proximity, and within a year, ninety-five percent of the people there had relocated to tiny towns and villages like Carston. It had been confusing enough here in Carston the day of the Divergence, where Nora had lived all her life (all “his” life, people had thought); she didn’t envy the people who’d been living in North Platte at the time, and couldn’t imagine how horrible it must have been for that neighborhood in Brooklyn where the neospecies was telepathic. (Some people said they’d just collapsed into a hive-mind, but Nora discounted that rumor, knowing that people in Omaha and Lincoln thought the same about the North Platte dreamers.)

“Maybe you folks can give us some lessons, then.”

“We’d be glad to.” Hopefully if they were dreaming lucidly, they wouldn’t wreak unconscious changes on the dream-town the way they’d been doing. Of course, they could then try to force deliberate changes... but they seemed like nice people, who wanted to leave a friendly impression in case they wanted to come back and visit someday, or in case other traveling groups of their people came here.

Nora conversed with Regina and several other people in the course of the afternoon, and word about her idea spread: soon a delegation went to the nomad camp and made the offer of free classes in lucid dreaming. Nora found herself volunteered to teach one of the classes, the next evening after she got off work. Even before then, she offered basic tips on lucid dreaming to any nomad customers who were interested; by closing time, word had spread among them and nearly all of them were asking her for a dreaming lesson along with their food and drink.

Not long after little Walter fell asleep, his thoughts quieting down, Nora felt Arnold and Irene starting their foreplay, and resigned herself to a restless night. Even though she tried to focus on her TV show, and when that proved hopeless, on Irene’s sensations rather than Arnold’s, she felt her hateful organ sliding out of its sheath, making her panties uncomfortably tight. And though she avoided the mirror, she knew her glow-ridges were bright green. She went to bed, but didn’t fall asleep until sometime after Arnold and Irene did.

She found herself in the library of her dream-house, which contained copies of all the books she’d read in dreams, and all the books she’d read in the waking often or recently enough to remember them well. It wasn’t a large library compared to Orson’s or Ursula’s; she wasn’t a great reader, not as much as she’d been before the Divergence, when secretly reading stories about people like her was the only indulgence she allowed her real self. Now that she had the dream, she didn’t need those stories the way she used to, though a few she’d read over and over still lingered here in her library. And a new addition to the shelf, there before her, was Dalvorius' letter. She picked it up and found the place she’d left off:

“...I’m not going to tell you how I do my tricks, but I’ll say this: I’ll start with a series of card tricks, and lead up to a Vanishing Lady. You can watch the pageant and see if this letter is just a figment of dream or if we’re really in telepathic contact while we sleep.

“Yours cordially,

“Dalvorius of clan Pelerin.”

She chewed that over for a few moments, and thought about going out and looking for Dalvorius or other nomads. But she wanted something else more urgently. She went to the skybridge and found Orson coming across it toward her; they embraced, and kissed, and he said: “Your place or mine?”

“Why not right here?” She’d just had to listen to Arnold and Irene — and often enough, every other couple within a quarter mile of her house. People had necessarily given up caring about privacy within months after the Divergence, though there’d been a noticeable slump in the number of babies born nine to fifteen months after that day. If the neighbors saw them through the skybridge windows, she didn’t care. It was only in dreams that they could be together as husband and wife; in the waking they met almost every weekend, but the physical manifestation of their love was so awkward and unsatisfying compared to what it was here that they usually didn’t go much beyond kissing until they fell asleep.

After the first time they moved from the skybridge to her bedroom. After the third time she started to feel vaguely guilty about not going to look for Dalvorius or the others she’d talked to and following up on her lucid dreaming lessons; she suggested they get dressed and go out for a walk. Orson was agreeable, and they started out toward downtown. But then, during one of the little discontinuities where people transitioned from one period of REM sleep to the next, and about ninety minutes of dreamless sleep passed in the real world, he vanished; he must have woken up. She sighed. Maybe he’d fall asleep again before morning and rejoin her.

She walked aimlessly for a while, then heard loud music from somewhere off to her left, and took the next side street in that direction. It was mostly dream-people’s houses in this neighborhood; the dreamers tended to cluster on certain streets, mostly near downtown but a few in outlying areas like Nora, Orson, Ursula and Regina. She came to a house with a large front lawn she didn’t remember seeing before, and an open garage with a driveway — an anomaly in a town where there were no cars, where a person could walk as far and fast as they liked without getting tired, or even teleport if they wished. There were people dressed for summer weather standing around the lawn and driveway with drinks and little plates of food, talking animatedly, and a band was set up just inside the garage, playing old-school rock and roll. Most of them were normal-looking people, a few dream-people she recognized and many she didn’t, but there in the middle of the lawn, holding a drink in front of her breasts (only two of them) and a plate of food in front of her crotch, was a pink-haired nomad who looked familiar. Nora came closer and recognized her as Talrasia, one of the customers she’d talked with at the diner.

She was obviously acutely embarrassed by her nakedness, though none of the dream-people standing around her were taking any obvious notice of it. Nora took pity on her and said, pitching her voice to carry over the music: “Talrasia, have you noticed that you’re dreaming?” Then she turned her eyes respectfully away.

Talrasia said, after a pause, “Oh... of course.”

“Try imagining yourself with clothes on,” Nora advised, still not looking directly at her. “Be specific.”

“All right... Wow! This is so cool!”

“Can I look?”

“Be my guest.”

Nora turned and saw Talrasia wearing an ankle-length elaborately sequined blue gown, with puffy short sleeves and matching blue slippers.

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk,” Nora suggested loudly, and Talrasia followed her down the street away from the party.

“I’m dreaming and I know it,” Talrasia said delightedly. “This hasn’t happened since I was a little girl. Before the Divergence.”

“It never happened to me until afterward. You folks need to learn how to notice you’re dreaming by yourselves, without us telling you. I think you might have just created that house there, and even some of the people in it... I’m not quite sure, because I don’t know this neighborhood well, but other nomads have apparently changed things around them without meaning to.”

“It looked a lot like a house where I went to some parties when I was a teenager,” Talrasia said. “What do you mean, you don’t know this neighborhood well? Is this part of your town?”

“Yes — if you haven’t already heard, we share a dream-image of our town. People who live in little apartments in the waking town have big houses of their own here, and people who live out in the country in the waking live closer together, or even right downtown, if they want to. And we try to keep it consistent from night to night, except when we want to change things. But you folks' dreams have been mixing up with ours, and it seems like you’re changing things around unconsciously — the way scenery used to change around randomly in our old separate dreams before the Divergence.”

“I’m sorry,” Talrasia apologized. “I didn’t know.”

“We figure maybe if you learn to dream lucidly, you can avoid —”

But Talrasia vanished; probably she had just woken up. That used to happen a lot to Nora and the others when they were first learning to dream lucidly; it was a hard balance to maintain at first, knowing that you were dreaming and yet continuing to dream.

Nora wandered toward downtown, and conversed here and there with friends and acquaintances, but didn’t meet any more nomads that night.

The next morning, Talrasia was one of the first customers they got after the diner opened; she came in with Sashuwerel and Umusalina.

“I dreamed about you last night!” she exclaimed when Nora came over to take their orders. “Was it real? I mean, were we really meeting or did I just dream about you?”

“I met you in the dream... we were at a party at a house on Red Oak Avenue. I reminded you you were dreaming.” She didn’t think she should mention the fact that Talrasia was naked, though if the nomads‘ telepathy worked like the dreamers’, the others probably already knew.

“That was it! Except I didn’t notice the name of the street we were on. And —” She glanced at the others, and Sashuwerel said:

“Several of us remembered dreams this morning. In nearly all of them, we were somewhere in a strange city, surrounded by people like you — North Platte dreamers. Talrasia has told us about her dream. You think we’ve been unconsciously causing changes to your dream city?”

“It looks that way, from what I’ve heard, but I can’t be sure. I don’t know Red Oak Avenue well enough to say for sure, but I don’t think that house was there before, or at least it didn’t look quite like that. And night before last, Irene and Arnold Roberts' houses got flipped around, and the skybridge between them disappeared. I’ve heard about other things happening, but those are the ones I’ve seen.”

“I don’t know how we can avoid that, if we’re doing it unconsciously, but we’ll try,” Umusalina said. “I’ll have a glass of grapefruit juice and a bowl of oatmeal with raisins, please.”

The others placed their orders then, and as more customers were coming in, both locals and nomads, Nora didn’t have time to talk to them much more. When they paid for their meal, she reminded them about the lucid dreaming classes and encouraged them to come.

“We can’t all come at once,” Sashuwerel said. “But many of us will be there this evening.”

“Including me,” Talrasia said.

“If you have several classes a day, we can all come at different times,” Umusalina added.

“I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be one of the teachers, but I’m not the main one organizing them.”

It was with some trepidation that Nora made her way to the high school after work. She had unpleasant memories of her high school years, years when she had become more and more acutely aware of the wrongness of her body and almost worked up the courage to tell her friends and family she was really a girl, but finally lost her nerve and continuing suffering as an apparent man until the Divergence. But her friends felt her nervousness and sent her their reassurance, and by the time she reached the school, and the classroom she’d been told to use for the lesson, she was feeling a little more confident.

Someone had put up signs for the benefit of the nomads, directing them to the social studies classroom. Nora walked in to find a group of twelve nomads, most of whom she’d seen at the diner, but including several children, the first she’d seen. If she could judge their ages from the cues she’d use for most near-human neospecies, they ranged from seven years up to their mid-teens. The prepubescent children had thin, wispy hair, in pinks and purples so light they were almost white, and all the children sat in the center of the group, with adults surrounding them. Among the adults were Talrasia, Dalvorius, and some older folks Nora hadn’t seen.

“Good evening,” she said. “I’m Nora Sanders, and I’ll be teaching you the basics of lucid dreaming. I’ve already met some of you — but could all of you introduce yourselves, please?”

An older woman with dark purple hair down to her waist, whom Nora hadn’t seen in the diner, began by saying: “I am Renshulina, and we are clan Pelerin of the Kelowna nomads.” The others said only their personal names.

“First, I think, a little history lesson is in order,” Nora began. She told of the diaspora from North Platte to the smaller towns and villages of the change-region, and how the influx of new people had affected Carston.

“We’d figured out that we were sharing dreams, and over surprisingly long distances compare to our waking range, but we only remembered them sporadically after we woke. But some of the newcomers had learned lucid dreaming techniques, either back before the Divergence or just afterward, and they taught us — both in waking lessons like this one, and in our dreams. Talrasia can tell you how I —”

“She’s told us,” Renshulina said.

“Well. We’ll continue to do that, when and as we meet you in the dream. I remember the first time that happened to me, a month after the Divergence, when I met my new friend Regina in a dream, and she pointed out to me that I was dreaming. That helps speed up the process — once you’ve dreamed lucidly once or twice, you’re more likely to do it again. Regina said that back before the divergence, when she first learned about lucid dreaming, it took her months of daily practice in the techniques I’m going to teach you before she had her first lucid dream, and several weeks more before her second. But for us, once we started teaching and learning in our shared dreams, the process went much faster; and I hope it will be the same for you.

“So within a few months after the Divergence, we had all, except the smallest children, learned to be aware of our dreams, to have some degree of conscious control over them, and to remember them consistently. But they were still quite chaotic. Houses would move around, shuffle their rooms, or grow new rooms spontaneously; whole landscapes would shift, weather would change abruptly. People’s dream-selves would change, usually shifting according to their mental image or their memories of how they’d looked and felt when they were younger, or other people’s ideas about them, but sometimes transforming more radically as they experimented with dream control; and our clothes rarely remained the same for more than a few minutes of dream-time.”

In those early days Nora had been female increasingly often in the dreams, though she still had bad nights when her body would revert to male, either something like her physical body with its sheathed penis and glow-ridges, or the gangly, pimply old-style human male body she remembered having before. It had taken more than a year before she got her body to stop fluctuating, to consistently have three breasts just the right size and shape, the middle one a little smaller and more sensitive than the outer ones, and a delicate middle arm with the baby-size fingers that North Platte males found so attractive. Some old folks still dreamed themselves as old-style humans, though generally much younger than their physical selves.

“First we learned to stabilize our own dream-forms, or to deliberately control our transformations. It was a mutual effort — we told our friends and neighbors how we wanted to look, what we were aiming for, and they helped imagine us that way. At first we could only hold onto those ideal forms when we were concentrating on them, and we’d revert to some other form when we got distracted by any strong emotion, but over time it became a habit to keep our bodies the way we wanted them — to keep each other the way we wanted to be.

“Then we started working together on stabilizing the dream landscape, so we could find our way around, and arrange to meet one another at agreed-upon places. Instead of using our lucid dreaming powers to constantly create and rearrange things at a moment’s whim, as we’d done at first, we used them to carefully build things up detail by detail and make them stay that way night after night, imagining things together and putting them back every time someone’s idle thoughts pushed them out of shape or position. We started downtown, and built beautiful dream-versions of the City Hall, the library, and the churches, and then started working out from there on houses and parks and so forth. We’re free to rearrange things inside our own houses when we like, but if we want to change how they look outside, we have to work together with our neighbors.

“I don’t expect to be able to teach you how to reshape your dream-self into an ideal form, or build a dream house whose rooms will all stay in place night after night, in just a few days. But I can get you started learning on your own, so you can continue practicing in your travels as you share dreams with each other. And I hope I can teach you enough in a few days that you can stop accidentally changing our dream-town, even if you can’t yet start building your own.”

She went over basic techniques of lucid dreaming, ways to form habits of routinely checking whether one was awake or dreaming, and methods of testing that, and then suggested exercises to try once they attained lucidity, whether on their own or with the help of a North Platte dreamer. “Start small, with your clothes or the things you carry with you — concentrate on them and change them. Plan it out now, while you’re awake, thinking about what you’re going to do when you dream tonight. Think about it again a couple of times in the course of the evening, and again when you’re lying down to sleep.”

Throughout the lesson, Nora was hearing suggestions from various friends and acquaintances within range about important points to mention or better ways to explain things. It could have been confusing, and it would have been in the first few months after the Divergence, but by now Nora could handle multiple simultaneous conversations as well as anyone, and overall the suggestions were more helpful than distracting; she couldn’t have done so well without them. She answered the nomads' questions, and then walked them through doing some of the exercises together.

“All right, now I want everyone to look at your hands. Study their shape, the blood vessels, the lines, the hairs. Ask yourself if you’re dreaming. If your hands are as sharply defined as you see them now, you’re either awake or you’re a very experienced lucid dreamer. When you look at your hands later and ask yourself again if you’re dreaming, you might see that they’re a little blurry, and that will be a clue that you’re dreaming...”

After a bit less than an hour, Nora dismissed the class, and walked home. As she neared home, she came in range of some people who were talking about the nomads and what to do about them:

“I don’t see what good teaching them lucid dreaming’s going to do,” said old Joseph Anderson, the barber. “By the time they learn enough to do any good, they’ll have moved on.”

“They might stay in our change-region for a while after they leave town,” Arnold Roberts countered. “What they learn here will help the folks down the road in Stapleton or North Platte.” From the overtones of his thoughts she could tell he was sitting down to supper with Irene and Walter; Nora savored the second-hand taste of Irene’s sweet creamed corn.

“They’ll do a lot of damage to the dream-town before they leave, even if a few of them start dreaming lucidly by then,” warned Keith Leeson. “We ought to tell them to leave now, before the damage gets any worse. A couple of nights ago one of them wandered through my house shuffling rooms and furniture around, and it’s going to take me weeks to put it back the way it belongs.”

“I’ll come round tonight and help out,” said Arnold, and several others volunteered to help as well.

“Walter’s looking forward to the parade so much,” Irene said. “Let’s wait until after that before we run them out of town.”

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.