I'm hiking with friends up a canyon deep and dramatic as Yosemite, but nearly treeless; meadow-floored. The sun's behind a crag, and the shadows streaming down the rock wall show us a man up the crag, looking down through big binoculars.

My first thought is that he's watching the two giant beavers near us. I'm surprised at their size--near as big as humans--but then I've never seen any beaver so close before. I thought giant beavers lived only in the Amazon. Wait, isn't that otters?

By calculating the angles of the shadows, I deduce the man is spying not on the beavers, but us.

A guide leads us in through Hopi cornfields scattered around the valley. Each field has a kiva, an underground ritual chamber. Our guide leads us down a steep bank between two fields; we figure we're entering a kiva. Nope. He's led us into a trap full of prisoners--Hopi and hikers.

Wait... the walls are only wicker. We can break out... but as we discuss where to run afterward, I get secretive; the eldest of the Hopi contingent whispered something to me and the guards are listening in...

I carry a suitcase containing one barrel of what I have been told is "energy" but which I suspect is actually high explosive wired to go off if I open the case.

At last we get out of the castle. Far below us, on a curving up-slope, is The Professor! We run toward him joyfully, reunited at last. The black dot of his robe swoops up to crowflaps, and we meet and embrace.

Then we hear the ping of ricochets.

Our guide and helper has opened fire from behind us--he was our enemy in disguise all along!

I drop my suitcase and dodge and run, keeping the luggage in a straight line (where I can) between me and the killer. He runs down the slope toward us, firing away.

When I've run about 50 yards past the suitcase and he gets within 15, a bullet does what I hoped--hits it firmly. FLASH! I fall in the dirt facedown as a vast explosion engulfs me.

My mind races; time slows. In this world, a "barrel" of "energy" means just the equivalent of 38 pounds of oil, not 42 gallons; barely a tenth as much. I calculate backward from the Hiroshima blast and conclude that everything within 1-200 yards will be burned--that radius is the cube root of the tonnage, since it has to fill a 3-D space...

I keep struggling with the figures, trying to talk myself into surviving; for long seconds, I fail to see that I'm mistaking mere pounds for tons! My suitcase-bomb isn't a few thousandths of a Hiroshima, only a few millionths, so the radius of the deathzone will be just a tenth what I thought. I'll probably survive at 50 yards, it's like being several miles from Hiroshima Town Hall. But 10-15 yards are like standing closer than a mile--maybe just a kilometer--and facing the flash. That's where HE is.

I'm deaf, and scorched, and gravel-scratched. But when I get up at last, and limp back to ground zero, that sniper's dead.

Later, we survivors live in the Watchtower up on the valley rim. It's our custom to celebrate the first thunderstorm of the season. What is the ritual? I get the glasses out, and the observation chair and the stepladder. I'm supposed to mimic the spy in the previous scene.

I'm disturbed that my new housemate Mark plans to spy from up here now, routinely. Considering what happened to the last spy...

Plus, our third housemate is Mick Jagger. He's famous, so I mistrust him--he can't possibly respect nobodies like us. Yet to my surprise he praises my outfit.

A guest tells me "I must find my true love... I must search for her. I MUST FIND HER."

I say "I can't tell you her address, but she lives in Shropshire." That is... I know the address, but if I told him exactly where, our enemy might overhear it, and reach her first. This guy may need her, but I don't have the right to endanger her.

For now, gotta keep quiet and plan with care.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Professor: my dad. A devout rationalist, he was cursed with three spooky, intuitive kids he can't understand.
• Sniper: but my dad can snipe! We're credulous, superstitious, irrational (his favorite word).
• Calculations: despite my initial error, not bad for a sleeping brain. Dream experts from Freud right up to Stephen La Berge claim dreams can't even remember text or simple number sequences, let alone calculate. Wrong! One dream of mine replayed dozens of pages of text read years earlier--word for word. And I'm not alone: cryptomnesia isn't rare. Yes, numbers and writing alter in some dreams. Your inner propmaster may just not care; but some mutations in texts and clocks may be signal, not noise. Since this dream's about my dad's faith in experts, I suspect it goes out of its way to show I can handle numbers while in REM, that The Experts underestimate the dream state--along with other things.
• Explosion: usually these in my dreams mean attacks of illness. So defeating this inner saboteur will be rough! But less deadly than I first calculate...
• My housemates: unsure. Mark does dreamwork too. But does Mick Jagger?
• I know every name & address in Shropshire: now that makes no sense. I've never been, know no one there...

I go to work in Stanford's main library. Among the new purchases is the only book I've ever seen on the English county of Shropshire. The book's a list of probate records from the early to middle 1700s--Shropshire names & addresses, cover to cover!

So in the dream, my mysterious encyclopedic knowledge of Shropshire residents likely means... ESP. Or synchronicity if you like. Or chance, if you're desperate to cling to linear time (but why bother? It's a joke!) However you label it, functionally it's a sixth sense.

Now in retrospect it looks to me like the watchtower image is a prompt inside the dream, that dreaming's high vantage point lets us see further in spacetime than the narrow canyon of daily life. I call this sort of dream self-flagging.

That reading--that Shropshire means ESP, and that my dreaming mind knew that--forces me to interpret the whole dream a bit differently: that same intuition that saw an obscure book the next day could just as easily find me a girlfriend--but the dream also says it's wrong to do that, until I'm sure this inner saboteur is gone! If I snipe at myself or even cause explosions of illness, that's my business... but sabotaging relationships hurts others too.

YEARS LATER

It was a decade before I learned my inner sniper's likely origin. My parents had hidden that my crazy uncle lived with us weeks or months, and they entrusted him to babysit me, and he told me in detail of the massive shock treatments he got in a mental asylum (later shut down for abusing patients).

I forgot this consciously, but I knew, from age two or three, that being judged a weirdo had deadly risks. No wonder I hid ESP for decades! And I think this inner sniper was trying to make me hide it forever. One way or another.

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