Free The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook by Paul Pipkin

like regressive
     hypnosis. It struck me that this approach had greater compatibility with a mathematical artifact, which suggested a “weak
     connection” between the branches, than did most recent popular fare on the subject.
    The other commonality was that, again in the majority of cases, the contact was not accomplished by a search for wealth, fame,
     pleasure, and was certainly not the result of any dispassionate search for scientific truth. The motivation was ordinarily
     a matter of something painful: fear, grief, loneliness, outrage—the deepest yearnings of the human heart, base or noble. It
     seemed as though the writers imagined you had to turn up the psychological heat.
    That night had been disturbed by dreams. My proposed manuscript had become a “work-within-thework” in the drama of my own
     life. That life, in turn, was somebody else’s “work.” It was the sort of dream known as “lucid,” wherein one is aware of being
     in a dream, though I didn’t feel it was exactly a dream—simply a different frame of reference. As I fixed up with caffeine
     and nicotine the next morning (
you must have a good breakfast
), I took time to get it down in my journal.
    The scene had been a small yet two-storied brick building on the Left Bank in Paris, to which I’d never been closer than a
     layover at Orly. It had arches and a courtyard, with an open stairway leading up to… a place where I lived? There was a cafe
     with a bit of old neon in the windows on the ground floor, and I started to go in but didn’t want to eat alone. I turned back
     toward the river. All sensory input was present, even to a cool, gentle breeze. I could even hear the wavelets lapping against
     the cement.
    ————————
    O N THE QUAY stood a girl in gaudy peasant dress, like the “Gypsy act” Linda used to perform. Red curls were done up under a bandanna,
     and she wore heavy silver bracelets and chains. I knew that I’d been there many times, never before remembering upon waking—been
     there looking for her. Then I was terrified that this would be like those dreams where you run, and reach, and reach, but
     fail to grasp.
    I fell to my knees, thinking,
Oh God, she must forgive me,
though I’d no idea for what. But then she was holding me, and rocking me, whispering in my ear over and over, “It’s me, it’s
     me…” She was smiling and brushing away my tears. I awoke, clutching the thought that I’d never felt so comforted or known
     anyone as beautiful.
    As per the instructions of J.W. Dunne, I’d been keeping a dream journal for months. I dutifully recorded this one, with no
     clue as to what it might symbolize. I had begun to have the precognitive results he predicted, encountering a sight or hearing
     a snatch of conversation dreamed previously, though nothing like my heavy-duty experiences of postpuberty. One of those had
     been a predictable fantasy of sex with two girls, but quite specific, as to location and the details of the clothing I helped
     them out of. Imagine my happy surprise when that had come true in every detail only a few years later. The emotional impact
     of the one just experienced had been, however, a bogey-bear. As though I’d been lost in a hell of loneliness and the woman
     was a saint come to get me out.
    Were my gnarled feelings for and about my late wife an issue? Without a doubt. I am no “yuppie” to mask my pain with pop-psych
     garbage and persuade myself I had no responsibility. I
must
have been able to do something more! Could I not have been there one more time for Big Richard, the loyal comrade of my youth,
     or been a more reasonable influence earlier? And what of a man I’d loved and admired in college, cut down by an assassin’s
     bullet at the age of twenty-three? Those two other tragedies had ended with discrete events in space and time, the slightest
     mechanical pressure on a trigger at a given moment.
    I was no simple-minded “born-again,” to take solace