Intercept Dream Service

By Carol Van Sturm

Intercept Dream Service – IDS

FAQ:

Why do we need Intercept Dream Service?

Solar maximum flares, combined with widespread military testing of electromagnetic pulse weapons, have significantly disrupted human dream frequencies, particularly in coastal areas. The result is frequent reception of unidentified other people’s dreams, which in some intensely affected locations have caused sleep apnea and other serious sleep deprivation problems.

Who we are: IDS is an automated, free web-based service, funded exclusively by the Pew Foundation and Sole Saver Shoe Co.

Mission: To restore misdirected dreams to their rightful originators

How IDS works: IDS collects and stores in secure files dreams submitted as video or text by anyone who suspects receipt of someone else’s dream. Our exclusive software ceaselessly searches our ever-expanding data base of dreams for internal clues to the originators’ identity, such as cross references to other dreams as well as matching dream frequencies. When a match is suspected, a series of confirmation algorithms are completed before the confirmed originator is contacted. Acceptance of the dream at that point is entirely voluntary.

What happens to unclaimed dreams, or those whose originators are never identified?

By law, the Electronic and Plasma-Generated Copyright Act of 2017 allows commercial use and/or distribution of any dreams not claimed within one year of posting; in other words, such dreams are then legally in the public domain. IDS not only posts unclaimed dreams but continues to make every effort to locate rightful originators within the one year posting period. In cases where a dream or dream series suggests or predicts a hazard or tragic event, IDS software will overwrite security protocols and publish the dreams in an effort to forestall suffering.

The following three dreams from different geographic regions demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-referencing all dreams, and the occasional need to publish them in order to warn their originators of potential tragedy.

DREAM 1:

Recipient: 80-year-old black female, Alabama

Jilly and I grew up in a world of plenty and hardly missed our mother. Not that we didn’t love her. I’m sure we did. She was beautiful, and we loved the smell of her. She sang – or chanted – lovely verses in Swedish or Old Norse, translating them for us as we nodded off to sleep. “Sister, my sister, where have they taken you?” she sang. “We wait together for the day of the sagas.”

I remember that, but other memories are hard to distinguish from her movies, the articles and stories, the zillion photos – do I really remember her looming like a mini-Valkyrie in the doorway, back-lit, her hair a golden halo of filtered light? Or was that a scene in one of her films?

My last memory of her is real, though. We are On Tour, always a tense occasion but also the only time both parents spend with us. Even together we are always on display, playing Happy Family without a clue what a Real Family is. Jilly and I hate being On Tour, but of course we can’t show it. We are on display, remember. For us, the best times always are secret and too brief: a darkened hotel room, a door opening softly with a quick rush of light, Mama’s scent, musky and comforting, a pause, a silence as she watches us feigning sleep, then a murmured phrase, the soft whisper of a kiss in our hair, and she is gone.

That is how she disappears. We are waiting for her at a big table in a posh restaurant, Jilly and I and Father and what we call the groupies: managers and bodyguards and dressers and a nanny and governess and whatever Important People Father is meeting. Mama arrives at last, and Father says something to her about being late. She tries to answer but he turns back to one of the Important People. Mama’s voice fades. She drifts over behind Jilly and me with a new scent added to her own. The new smell is a small white flower growing in a little ceramic pot. She puts it on the table between us, drapes one of her scarves over each of us, then the soft whisper of a kiss in our hair and she is gone. No one sees her go. Father doesn’t notice she’s vanished until the meal is over and the Important People have left.

Father. You probably remember him better than I do. He wins the Senate race that year on what I’m sure is a sympathy vote, the entire country on alert for Mama and the terrorists who stole her. That’s what the TV says happened, what the world says, what Father says. Jilly and I know it isn’t so, but no one asks us. We’re just supposed to look sad and orphaned. We get pretty good at looking sad and orphaned. Father is re-elected four times after that. Our own lives don’t change much, just the secret midnight visits and whispered kisses gone forever.

We don’t lose her completely, though. At the table that horrible day, in the confusion and crowding after they notice Mama is gone, Jilly slips the little flowering plant into the pocket of the silly pinafore we had to wear. We never mention the scarves, either. The plant, we find out later, is a hyacinth, and every spring it blooms, filling whatever room we’re in with its haunting scent. And between us we buy or steal or borrow all Mama’s movies and play them secretly, over and over. Our favorite is “Harpy,” where she plays a sharp-shooting lesbian CIA agent who’s ordered to fill in for Mrs. President during a terror crisis. We laugh at Mama’s disgust at having to wear ball gowns and tiaras and high heels, and meet kings and premiers at White House functions. The scenes of her attempts to act motherly to the two Rent-a-Kids masquerading as the President’s little sons are replayed so often the disk now replays them without being asked. We never get tired of seeing her go through all those changes, our beautiful mama, deadpan, dangerous, funny. We are as proud of her as if she were still with us.

Dream 2:

Recipient: 20-year-old white male prison inmate, Idaho:

Fame, fortune, public adoration, what more could one want? Something real, maybe. Whatever it is, it ain’t mine.

I am beautiful, rich and famous, and I just gave birth to twin owls. They are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. But they are crying for mice. How shall I hunt for them?

I am beautiful, rich, and famous, and I am lost in a shopping mall. Not your main street strip mall, this one only has top drawer stuff. I’m separated from my top drawer husband, my beautiful daughters, their bodyguards and entourage. What a strange experience, being alone in a mob of strangers. I am in a flower shop. A really posh outfit, with snooty clerk and snootier customers. They don’t recognize me, and I enjoy that. Who wants to be recognized by unpleasant people like these. So I go into my penny pinching suburbanite act and pick up a little plant growing in a tiny ceramic bowl, with a single, perfect flower. It’s special, and costs $2.25. I could buy the whole damn shop, but do I have enough for this flower?

I don’t carry money, the manager takes care of all that. I dig in my pocket and find a dollar and a bunch of change. I count the quarters and dimes, and the clerk and the other customers watch hungrily. I know what they want. They want me to fail. These are not pleasant people. One customer nods toward me, whispering loudly to the clerk about shoplifters. They make me very uncomfortable. I find enough change and go to the counter to pay, and the clerk ignores me until I walk right over to her and hand her the money. Oh, she takes that, all right, but when I ask if she has some tissue to wrap it, she sneers – you know what sneering is? It’s pinching off your nose to imply a bad smell. So I walk out, carrying my little plant, feeling humiliated and hurt for the person I’m pretending to be – and the humiliation and pain are real, I don’t know if you can understand that, which somehow makes the little plant all the more precious.

I find our party sitting at a big table in an exclusive restaurant. Watching them from a distance, still feeling the hurt and humiliation of the flower shop, I am struck by how unreal and fake and unfeeling they all are – like my pretend character is suddenly more real than I ever was. It’s a horrible feeling. My handsome, famous husband catches sight of me and demands to know where I’ve been. I try to explain about the little flower and the humiliating experience of being suspected of shoplifting, but as I talk he turns to continue a conversation with some dignitary.

I turn then to where my lovely daughters are sitting and drape over each of them one of my silk scarves. I put the little flowering plant between them on the table — “for the day of the sagas,” I say — and kiss their oblivious heads. Without another word, I drift away from them all forever, with a terrible compulsion but also a mighty fear: I have no idea how to live without all that glitz and glamor and sycophantic followers. I don’t know how to be real. I don’t know how to get money, where I will sleep, how I will find food. I don’t know how to catch mice. I might as well be from another planet.

I am beautiful, rich, and famous, and my children have flown. In a terrible place a wounded owl flutters in a cage. Against the window a second owl beats the glass with its wings, its beak bloody from trying to break the glass. A man looms in the doorway, holding a syringe. My screams wake me.

Dream #3:

Recipient: 39-year-old male, Captain of luxury yacht Ariadne, Aegean Sea:

I’ve lost my sister. On the subway. I race from one car to another, searching, searching. Jump to the platform, onto another train, another line, over and over. No sign of her. Just feet and overcoats and umbrellas and the smell of pizza and sweat. Ghost stations flash by, and I still can’t find her. On the platform at Bleeker a scent of hyacinths and a swirl of silk. The looming hum of an approaching train, crowds, a man rushing at her across the platform, the train in sight, my screams lost in the roar. Sister, my sister, where have they taken you?