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time with Rachel wasn't a "relationship" in the romantic sense. Two hours per week for the past three months, I had sat in a room with her and discussed the most disturbing aspect of my life—my dreams.
    Through her questions and interpretations, she had probably revealed more about herself than she had learned about me, yet much remained hidden.
    She'd come down from New York Presbyterian to accept the faculty position at Duke, where she taught a small cadre of psychiatry residents Jungian analysis, a dying art in the world of modern pharmacological psychiatry. She also saw private patients and carried out psychiatric research. After two years of virtual solitude working on Trinity, I would have found contact with any intelligent woman provocative. But Rachel had far more than intelligence to offer. Sitting in her leather chair, dressed impeccably, her dark hair pulled up in a French braid, she would watch me with unblinking concentration, as though peering into depths of my mind that even I had not plumbed. Sometimes her face—and particularly her eyes—became the whole room for me. They were the environment I occupied, the audience I confided in, the judgment I awaited.
    But those eyes were slow to judge, at least in the beginning. She would question me about certain images, then question the answers I gave. She sometimes offered interpretations of my dreams, but unlike the NSA psychiatrists I had seen, she never spoke with a tone of infallibility. She seemed to be searching for meaning along with me, prodding me to interpret the images myself.
    "David, you don't have to drive around all night," she said. "I'm not going to hold this against you."
    Right, I thought. What's wrong with delusions of a secret government conspiracy? "Be patient," I told her. "It's not much farther."
    She looked at me in the semidark, her eyes skeptical. "What's the monetary award for a Nobel Prize?"
    "About a million U.S. Fielding got a little less than Ravi Nara, because ..."
    I trailed off, realizing that she was only probing again, trying to puncture my "delusion."

    I focused on the road, knowing that in a few minutes she would have to admit that my paranoia was at least partially grounded in fact. What would she think then? Would she open her mind to my interpretation of my dreams, however irrational it might sound?
    From our first session, Rachel had argued that she could not make valid interpretations of my "hallucinations" without knowing intimate details of my past and my work. But I couldn't tell much. Fielding had warned me that the NSA would consider anyone who knew anything about Trinity or its principals to be a potential threat. Beyond this concern, I felt that what I saw during my narcoleptic episodes had nothing to do with my past. The images seemed to be coming from outside my mind. Not in the sense of hearing alien voices, which was a marker for schizophrenia, but in the classical sense of visions.
    Revealed visions, like those described by prophets. For a man who had not believed in God since he was a boy, it was a singularly disturbing state of affairs.
    My dreams had not begun with the first narcoleptic attacks. The first episodes were true blackouts. Holes in my life. Gaps of time, lost forever. I would be working at my office computer, then suddenly become aware of a high-pitched vibration in my body. Generalized at first, it would quickly localize to my teeth. This was a classic onset symptom of narcolepsy. I'd begin to feel drowsy, then suddenly jerk awake in my chair and find that forty minutes had passed. It was like going under anesthesia. No memory at all.
    The dreams began after a week of blackouts. The first one was always the same, a recurring nightmare that frightened me more than the blackouts had. I remember how intrigued Rachel was when I first recounted it, and how uncharacteristically sure she was that she understood the image. I sat in the deeply padded chair opposite her desk, closed my eyes, and