"No." Linda finished up with the curls at the end of Lauren's tresses. She patiently explained how the mask, the firing lights and the sensors worked. "If I had that big, grand, glorious dream and none of the sensors were working, what does that mean?"
They were still looking at each other's reflections in the mirror to talk to each other.
Linda watched Lauren get that faraway look in her eyes. For a few moments they sat in silence. Softly, Lauren said, "It means that you weren't dreaming at all."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, you left your body. You went to Heaven."
At first Linda could not speak. "Really?"
Lauren held her gaze in the mirror for a few moments longer, then suddenly burst into a fit of laughter. "Gotcha!"
Linda groaned, quickly reached for a towel, rolled it up and started pelting Lauren on her back and chest with it. Lauren jumped up from her own chair, grabbed for another towel, rolled it up and started pelting Linda back. They chased each other around the bedroom, knocking each other against the bedpost and dresser, creating a commotion. Julie poked her head through the door and said "Jeez! What is this, grade school?"
When things calmed down, Lauren turned to Linda and said "Hey, why don't you come to the party with me and Naomi?"
Even though it meant that she may end up playing nursemaid later, when Lauren had too much to drink, even though parties where people sat around getting stoned or bombed bored her, and even though they were showing The Wizard of Oz at the cafeteria that night, Linda said "Okay."
For the rest of that semester, she slept at the Dream Lab every Tuesday and Thursday nights. At least once a week, she had an occurrence. While she'd hoped to return to the dashing gentleman in the ethereal marble dance hall, many of her trips to lucidity were interesting nonetheless. In one of them, she rode a vehicle on water that changed from a huge speedboat to a pair of rocket skis and then any sense of a vehicle disappeared altogether.
She simply flew high speed over cresting waves of water.
Another dream brought her into a cornfield, which she walked through with her friend Vicki, from high school. "Help me find my contacts!" Vicki said, even though they looked at the leaves on the high stalks instead of on the ground. The cornstalks turned into jungle vines with toucans hanging on them and cawing before Geraldine disrupted things by waking her up for the report.