We’re pleased to welcome Jerry Oltion back to the pages of Analog. In this blog post, find out how his latest story, “In Your Dreams,” from our [November/December issue, on sale now], was inspired not by scientific discovery, but by a brush with death.
Most of my stories are pure fiction. I get ideas from news articles or scientific discoveries or something incompletely overheard in a restaurant, but the stories that arise from those ideas are totally made up. I don’t base my characters on real people, other than the inevitable aspects of myself that enter the story while I’m trying to decide how the characters will react in certain situations, and I don’t often use specific settings, either.
“In Your Dreams” is different. The wreck that opens the story really happened to me. I was a split-second decision away from death, and so was the woman driving the car that hit me. That night and for a couple of nights afterward I had dreamless sleep. The woman who crashed into me did call me up to see how I was doing, and we did talk about the dreamless nights we were both having. It was spooky.
In real life nothing more came of it, but I kept thinking about possible reasons for dreamless sleep after a near-death experience, and it didn’t take long before I hit upon the multiple universe theory. I had already speculated idly about where dreams come from, and leakage from alternate universes was one of the possibilities I’d considered. This accident seemed to provide a fair amount of credibility to that theory. Certainly enough to explore further, anyway.
It took me a long time—several years—to find the story in it. How could we use the knowledge that dreams are just shared experiences from alternate selves? I considered the obvious, like stock market tips and “composing” music I’d heard in dreams (well, that seemed obvious to me, anyway), but I didn’t see anything exciting about those sorts of things. I needed a human interest.
The woman who crashed into me did call me up to see how I was doing, and we did talk about the dreamless nights we were both having. It was spooky.
Enter the dream researcher. For someone actually studying dreams, the discovery would be a career-changing event. A practical use for it would be the least of their concerns. The simple existence of an ability to communicate with alternate universes would be Nobel prize material. And with that realization would come all the complications and consequences of unbridled ambition.
I wanted my two primary characters to be caught up in events that were almost, but not quite, beyond their control. Like the accident that started everything, I wanted them to be swept along in the inevitable sequence of events. Yet I wanted them to ultimately prevail, to wrest control of their lives back from the brink of chaos.
Then I realized I had to write it both ways. This was an alternate universe story, after all. Anything that can happen will happen. So I took them down the most obvious path, which also seemed to be the most dangerous path for a couple of people in happy marriages. And along the way I had a flashback to a Larry Niven story I read when I was a teenager. In “All the Myriad Ways,” Niven’s characters realize that if multiple universes exist, and every decision they make happens both ways, then decisions don’t matter anymore.
I struggled with that for quite a while. Is that really true? On one level, yeah, sure it is. If you consider the entire multiverse, then nothing matters. But on another level, the level of the inhabitants of a single universe, every decision is important. You’re going to be stuck with the consequences of that decision even if other versions of you aren’t. That means once the euphoria of living as if there are no consequences wears off, you’re going to have to pay the piper.
The story might have become a drug addiction allegory, but I know nothing about drugs, drug culture, or the real urges that make people choose that lifestyle (if indeed it’s even a choice). Ultimately I decided to leave the story somewhat ambiguous, giving the reader the opportunity to choose their own meaning. Given the subject, that seemed fitting.
The Astounding Analog Companion 