I wake in my old bedroom in my parents' house. I get up and rummage around for clothes. A teenager's peeping through my window! I get mad and rush the window to scold this guy. Guy? No, a short-haired girl in rough clothes.

She responds unembarrassed--"well, you were making all that noise earlier" (true: I was up late playing music with my sisters) "and your bamboo blinds are easy to see through; if you wanted privacy you'd get real curtains!"

She hands me a magazine with a photo spread called "Best Dressed Man: Fantasy". Surprises me. The guy's no model; an ordinary, open face, wearing ordinary stuff, just pleasing color harmonies and textures--an aspect of fashion I never thought of before. But males are hairer, so male clothes need equal texture, or even more; less hairy females can wear smooth fabrics and emphasize color patterns more because their smoother skin won't add a clashing/distracting texture.

Huh! I could look this good, if I just felt secure in my body, felt I'm attractive.

I don't.

Wait--why is she perched on a ledge of a miniature clock tower? There's no tower out my window. Weird...

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Flimsy curtain: my curtain is thin, but do I do anything about it?
• Girl in butch outfit: my friend Nicole found a cast-off Army jacket and now it's her second skin.
• She seemed to be flirting, but I failed to see that in the dream. No surprise--my mom taught me women don't want men--we're all ugly, aggressive and crass. I've spent decades trying to undo that brainwashing.
• Perched on small clocktower: huh? Something to do with time?

On my lunch break at Stanford, I head for the computer center to type up that dream, but on impulse take a different route. It goes by the new clocktower, which I usually ignore. But today, a beautiful girl perches atop one wall, eating lunch.

From afar I fail to recognize her, just think "God, how cute!" But as I near, she yells "Hey Chris!" and I recognize my friend Aurora, who I play music with...

...and despite her eager smile, and my dream prompting that she might like to play more than music with me, I just wave and keep going, because I'm shy with beautiful girls, and of course I'm unattractive, being a guy... so why even try?

36 YEARS LATER

Decades more of therapy eroded my mom's manhating some, but I still assume I'm unattractive and often misread flirting and come-ons as platonic. But a zillion dreams explore self-esteem problems; I posted this one for what else it reveals.

For generations science treated ESP as doubtful but worth researching; however, that's shifted in recent decades to ignoring the evidence and declaring it fraud or superstition. Yet any serious dreamworker will encounter apparent predictive, clairvoyant and shared/telepathic dreams. So as I transcribe my old journals, I'm posting more examples like this--brief but clear flashes, evidence for ESP as a routine sense--not as something dramatic, a response to grand life-crises!

Chance? The common argument runs "So you dreamt of a car crash or the death of a loved one, and then it happened? Cars crash, people die, people dream--of course a few will coincide!" But as the content gets weird, that argument gets strained. Just how often have you dreamt of a girl perched on a clocktower ledge, or a specific pseudonym written in Chinese, or lobsters crawling on land while a goddess is stuck on a wall, or fishing for a miniature sun in a New York loft with a girl who's a big cat? Details matter in science--and despite its bizarre content, dreamwork is a science.

Oh--the flimsy blinds in my dream look different now. Could they mean my permeable boundaries--ESP itself? "If you want more privacy, quit peering around with that third eye!" What did they say, a century ago? "Through the veil"?

Am I really claiming the dream isn't just psychic but aware it is and trying to say so? Yes. Sleep researcher Ann Faraday suggested this as far back as the 1970s (in Dream Power and The Dream Game); she noticed many dreams of telephone messages later seemed to be telepathic or shared dreams. The dream-phones seemed to mark them as external communication, not internal. After hundreds of dreams like this one, I concur--some dreams aren't (as Jung put it) "a private letter to the self". And some dreams notice they aren't. Sometimes... light leaks through.

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