policeman but by the same small boy, except this time he was naked. He told me that someone had stolen the diseases. At that point I became aware that my pockets were filled with vials. I woke up.
Unsurprisingly, I think, I found this dream quite disturbing. I remember when I awoke from it that I awoke completely – I was immediately fully conscious and alert, and every detail of the dream remained as vivid as reality. I knew that I had had a dream that had left a huge impression on me, but for those first few moments I was not sure why. I lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling, going through it several times, confirming to myself that I remembered everything – that there were no parts of it which had evaded me. It was after dawn – the room was filled with a soft grey light – but the alarm had not woken me, the dream had. I turned to look at the alarm clock, and despite the fact that the radio alarm clock sits at K’s side of the bed and that therefore, by turning my head, I saw K directly for the first time since waking up, I honestly believe that it wasn’t seeing K that made me realise the significance of the dream, but rather the actual physical movement of my head which somehow realigned my thoughts, so that I recognised that what I had just dreamed was, largely speaking, not my dream at all. It belonged to K. The time on the clock was 06:13.
I couldn’t get back to sleep that morning. It didn’t even occur to me to try in fact. I got up, as quietly as I could, and I went into my office and sat at my desk and wrote out, quickly, the details of my dream. I also drew rough sketches of what I had seen, recreating, as faithfully as I could, the boy in the blue pyjamas as he led me towards Dr Harkin; Dr Harkin himself, leaning from the window as he talked to me about my health; the garden, from several different angles, with its paths and flower beds and the small fountain at its centre; and finally the door back into the building, and my way blocked by the boy. All of this I did in a kind of daze, determined that I would record it all before it left my mind, as it inevitably would. Strangely, it never has left my mind. But perhaps the simple act of putting it all down on paper ensured that.
When K finally got up – astonished to find me at my desk so early – I made some coffee, and while we drank it I recounted the dream. As I related each detail in turn I watched K’s face for the signs of recognition, surprise, even shock. But there was no such reaction. There was nothing. Nothing at all but a sleepy shrug. I was dumbfounded.
—Does none of that ring a bell?
—Ring a bell? No. Should it?
—Are you serious? Have you forgotten?
—Forgotten what?
—Just the other day, at this exact time, you sat there, where you’re sitting now, just like that, drinking coffee, in your dressing gown, and you told me the same dream.
K considered me, bewildered.
—I did?
—Yes you did! Jesus! I don’t believe you’ve forgotten.
—I can’t, well … I do remember telling you about a dream … I do remember that. But I don’t … Really? Tell me what you dreamed again.
So I did. I went through the details once more. K was silent, but this time I was sure that there was some recognition, that I was not mad, that something odd had indeed happened.
—God. That’s a bit creepy. I do remember. It seems very like my dream. Yes. The doctor at the window. The little boy. The policeman.
—There was no policeman in mine though.
—No. But still.
We went through the details of K’s dream and the details of mine, and we sought out the similarities and the differences. The differences were all fairly plain, obvious, matters of stark contrast, such as the atmosphere in the hospital at the beginning and, of course, the different endings. But the similarities – or more than that, the identicals – of everything else struck us both as peculiar in the extreme. We stared at each other, baffled, at a loss to explain it. What did it mean? Then I went to my desk and got the sketches I had made. K went through them one by one, examining each for several seconds before commenting.
—No. This isn’t the boy I dreamed of. Mine was a bit chubby. He had curly hair, freckles. Yours is a bit, what, blond and blue-eyed?
—Yes. He was thin too. A bit spectral, I suppose.
—Well. Who’s this? Is this the doctor? Mine had no beard. Mine had glasses and no beard. And you have yours wearing a doctor’s jacket, is it? I can’t remember what mine was wearing. I suppose he would have been. I can’t remember. The window looks about right. The brickwork on the wall looks right. I think I remember ivy though. Or do I? Ivy, or high bushes or something.
—Look at the garden ones.
K looked at them, and immediately frowned.
—No. Mine was completely different. Yours is all neat and tidy. I didn’t have paths, or a fountain. It was just a lawn, with bushes around the edges, maybe some in the middle, not well kept, high grass. I wouldn’t have recognised this at all.
The final sketch was the door back into the building. Again, this was different.
—You have the boy there again. And he’s naked. Well. I was naked in mine, and there was a policeman. And you have the door open, but in mine it was closed, although it looks like the same door, to tell you the truth. Same arched thing, heavy wooden old-fashioned thing like a church door. There was police tape in front of mine. He wouldn’t let me in.
K put down my sketches and smiled at me.
—Also, in my dream I was innocent. In yours you’re guilty. Guilty of theft as well, you notice. Theft of my dream.
—Seems that way.
—Are you freaked out?
—A little.
—Well, I would have been as well if the sketches had matched my dream. But they don’t. So. You didn’t dream what I dreamed. You had my dream in your head and you dreamed about it. And you didn’t know what anything looked like so you made it up. I wouldn’t worry about it. It probably means you’re jealous of my life or something.
K regarded it as a peculiar but really quite explicable coincidence, and I remember that although we did at that stage laugh about it a little bit, and the conversation veered off into mutual teasing, I was still troubled by it, and remained so. But my thoughts were at that stage limited to what had happened to us, nothing more.
Before K left for work that morning, we had moved the conversation on to the original source for the first dream – the news report about the break-in at the laboratory in Italy.
—It just goes to show, said K, that the most infectious thing of all is not anthrax or the plague or whatever, it’s paranoia, and they’ve already released that. It’s in all our conversations, in our private thoughts and our worries and our secret fears and our horror stories. And now it’s in our dreams. It’s contagious.
That final word stayed with me. For the rest of that day I got no work done. Contagious. If it was as easy as it seemed for one person’s dreams to infect another’s, then surely it must have happened to me before? I tried to remember dreams. I found that I could remember very few. One horrible nightmare from my childhood stood out, as did one extremely erotic dream from some months previously. But of my recent dreams I could remember very little. There were a few peculiar,
