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the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. Then he crossed out what he had written and tried again. He liked it even less than before. Finally he threw down his pen, slammed shut his reference books and stuffed his notes and clippings into their designated folders.
    Bullshit!
He was already way behind on the project. Worse, at the moment he didn’t give a damn. Once the book had been an exciting project to him, but he had done little or no work on it for the past six months.
    Ever since these dreams, or hallucinations or whatever, had begun, he had noticed a certain loss of energy. At times he was aware of not being with it at all. He simply was unable to concentrate; his mind would wander or go totally blank. Sometimes his eyes would blur, or his physical reflexes would seem to be dulled. He noticed it particularly in the tennis he was playing. And he was unable to summon up much ambition in other areas.
    More than this, he was becoming irritable. He snapped at people, his students or his teaching assistant, for no reason at all. So far Nora hadn’t noticed, or if she had, she gave no sign. He had tried hard not to give her any hint of what was bothering him. But he knew that sooner or later, if this went on, he would have to tell her.
    He admitted that he was frightened. At times he had to steel himself not to panic. At first he had been sure it was a temporary psychic phenomenon. He was sure the hallucinations would go away. But when they not only continued but became more frequent and began to take their toll of him in his day-to-day activities, he really became concerned. He had no idea what was going on in his unconscious. Nobody seemed to know. And if an analyst like Ludwig Staub didn’t know, then it was something to worry about.
    If you were sick and there was no diagnosis, then it had to scare the hell out of you. A patient who knew he had cancer at least had a diagnosis. Even if it was terminal, he somehow learned to live with it. At least if you knew, you could do something,
try
to do something. But all he could do was take it, like a dumb animal. And each night he hated to go to sleep. Sometimes he fought to keep himself from drifting off. Not that the devils possessed him every night. Occasionally they gave him an entire night off.
    What was more, he felt persecuted, singled out. Why
me
? he thought. Billions of people in the world, and this is happening to me. Peter Proud, psycho. But a very special psycho: superpsycho. Unique. Even your psychiatrist can’t tell you. The proof duly recorded in the notebook he kept by his bedside. My dream book, he thought.
A Diary of My Dreams
, by Peter Proud. It would probably go big in one of the occult magazines. Or, he thought sardonically, how about a scholarly paper on the subject? In the gobbledygook of his profession,
A Dissertation on Unusual Dream Phenomena Totally Unrelated to the Conscious Milieu. A Series of Psychic Hallucinations Defying Known Methods of Analysis: A Challenge to Freud, Jung, Stekel, and the Traditionalists
, by Peter Proud, MA, PhD.
    All he wanted was to get rid of these sick hallucinations somehow. Go back to nice, normal, Freudian dreams, like killing his father or raping his mother.
    He had, of course, told Nora that sooner or later he was to be one of the subject-patients at Sam Goodman’s Sleep Laboratory. Of course he had not told her why. He had said merely that Goodman needed volunteers, and he had obliged. He would be sleeping away from home for a week, ten days at the most. Nora had smiled and told him to hurry home. Meanwhile, she said, she would be terribly unhappy in a cold and lonely bed. She had grown to love the pleasure of his company, but of course she would be brave and try to survive.
    He hoped to God that Sam Goodman and his Sleep Lab would come up with something, anything.
    That night he had the House Dream.
    He was standing before a house. It stood in a row of other houses on the street, all somewhat similar in design.