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But this was his house. It had two stories. The upper story was faced with brown shingles, the lower with white stucco. There was a big tree-arched front porch, and he saw that it was the third house from the corner. Then came the Tree Dream. He was in some kind of park. There was a large square mausoleum behind him. On top of it were the marble figures of a man and a woman, the man’s arm curled protectively around the woman’s waist. But he himself was standing before a huge tree, about a hundred feet from the mausoleum. He was a boy, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, and there was a girl with him about the same age. Her face was fuzzy, but he knew that she wasn’t Marcia. She had freckles, and long brown hair falling down to the middle of her back, and she was laughing. He had a knife, and he was cutting initials into the bark of the tree. The bark was tough, and he worked hard, cutting the initials deep. But he could not see what they were….

Chapter 5
    A few days later Sam Goodman phoned him and said they were ready to take him at the Sleep Lab.
    He went there on a Monday night, as instructed, at eleven o’clock.
    Sam Goodman was waiting for him. He was a partly bald, dark-faced young man with a big military mustache and intelligent black eyes. He wore a bright red shirt and brown corduroys. He grinned and said, “Before you get undressed, I’ll give you a short tour of our little dreamland here, courtesy of the house. By the way, we call our sleepers here by number rather than name. Just to make it anonymous and impersonal. And to keep you as a case history statistic. You’re sleeper number seven.”
    He led the way down a corridor, explaining that his staff consisted of five dream researchers. All of them were graduate students working for their doctorates, and they serviced about ten sleepers on any given night.
    Sam showed him into a large room filled with a number of boxlike stainless steel machines, each studded with wires and cables. To each was attached an automatic pen that jiggled across a slowly revolving drum of graph paper. Each unit was also equipped with a tape recorder, the tape set in position and ready to go.
    “This is our EEG room.”
    “EEG?”
    “Electroencephalograph. What they do is record the dreams of our sleepers without waking them up. They’re built with channels for displaying, all on one chart, the sleeper’s respiration rates, body movements, brain waves, and rapid eye movements. Follow?”
    “Yes.”
    “All right. We’ve got ten sleepers in various rooms here. Each has a number. When one of them starts to dream, everything starts to record here. We can tell by the brain waves and rapid eye movements and other data when the dream’s just about finished. Then we ring a bell in this room and wake him up suddenly. We call it the arousal bell. At that moment, in most cases, he’s able to remember everything in the dream he’s just had. He has a microphone in his room, and he passes on the information here. Then we record it on tape.”
    The staff researchers were sitting at small tables before the individual units. They chatted, smoked, and drank coffee out of paper cups. They all seemed a little bored, but their eyes kept flicking to the revolving drums, where the pens continued to draw jagged strokes. Sam Goodman took him over and introduced him to a sandy-haired, blue eyed young man.
    “Charlie, here’s our new subject. Doctor Peter Proud. Charlie Townsend. Charlie, he’ll designate as number seven.”
    Townsend grinned. “Hello, Seven. Welcome to fantasy factory.”
    “Nice meeting you, Charlie.”
    “You won’t think so. Not after I keep waking you up in the middle of the night.” He turned to Goodman. “Shall I prepare him now, Sam?”
    “No. It’s his initiation. I’ll take care of it myself.”
    As they moved toward the door, one of the researchers called out.
    “Number Five coming through.” Goodman motioned to him and they came back toward one of the